How to navigate two timelines

a post-pandemic era

Three years after COVID-19 became big news in the United States, the timelines have snapped back together: the timeline where the pandemic happened, and the one that didn’t. This is a feeling I’ve had for a few months, a visceral sensation inside my body, like a piece of elastic with tension pulling and pulling and pulling until it finally snaps back into place.

It’s partly a reference to Brian Greene’s Theory of Everything, which I still remember watching on PBS decades ago, particularly his one about how the Big Bang that created our universe was just one of many big bangs that created many universes — and those universes might smash into each other, causing identifiable radiation in our universe.

It’s not that the pandemic is over, exactly. And I don’t actually think there’s another timeline where the pandemic didn’t happen. Maybe, but I doubt that. It’s more that the sense of suspended animation we’ve experienced will finally end. You have two timelines of what people want to believe happened: pretending it didn’t happen, and never forgetting it did.

Comprehending the pandemic as an immoveable event in our timeline is important to our mental health. I think everyone is at varying degrees of one of those two people, and now we have to learn to articulate what that degree looks like. Those two concepts are rubbing up against each other in our souls, our bodies that carry everything that’s happened to us. Those two universes are smashing into each other. What will be the reverb?

I’m not sure I have the words for every piece of it yet. (Or if I do, it’s all in the book, in a miasma of plot and circumstance and hope.) But I do know the fears and worries I had before the pandemic are totally negligible now. Now, this moment, this day — not before, not after. But right now.

What has replaced them? I want to make grandiose claims about community and connection, but that’s not it exactly. I want to say it’s a commitment to truth, but that seems just as bombastic.

I guess it’s mostly peering into the space between the two timelines. What was already wrong with the mythical land we lived in pre-pandemic? And how is that universe gone forever? What is taking its place, and how can I witness it with clear eyes?

That last question is most important to me. I don’t want be ludicrously bright-sided about the horrible rending of our mental space and time. But nor do I want to be drawn into falsified emotional turmoils based on my own fearful biases. All this, while having compassion for my own human fallibility to do both.

I invite you to do the same. Notice when those two timelines, your two selves, bump up against each other. What truth lives in that rift?