Collective nervous breakdown time?
February is my least favorite month and also I want to not be living in this timeline
Happy Sunday/Valentine’s Day/Presidents’ Day Eve/Mattress Sale Season! This newsletter is not about any of those things. Thanks to Kristine for giving it a read before I sent it out, so you can file all your complaints with her if you hate it. And thanks to all who actually read this. Substack shows me an unusually high number of opens on the last one, which was about me not knowing who counts as rich.
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I’ve been thinking about how there’s not really a socially acceptable way to be burnt out and take a break in our society now if you’re not directly impacted by something, and even then many people do not get the rest that they need and deserve. We are nearing our one year global pandemic anniversary (hope you remembered to buy a gift!). Many of us have spent the last several months semi-functional, smiling awkwardly on Zooms and saying “eh, I’m doing okay” during the requisite small talk when it’s pretty understandable to be not at all okay. I have shrugged and said “I’m alright” when all I could think about is the inescapable white supremacist state we live in and the staggering costs of racism, discussed the bread pudding I made over the holidays as “what I’ve been up to” when if I’m honest the majority of my time was spent scrolling hopelessly through Twitter or lying in bed wondering if I’ll ever experience closure on anything that happened in the last year. I am not here to complain for myself, I know that I have been lucky to have a place to be quarantining, to have friends to contemplate the terrible state of the world with, to have the spare time to have this many existential crises.
This past week in The Atlantic, there was an article titled “Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown,” which explained the idea of a nervous breakdown, an idea we’ve sort of lost. It was a status you could claim temporarily, to remove yourself from your day to day existence. I think the author of the article may be idealizing how acceptable it really was back in the day, but I appreciate his concept.
“Provided you had the means—a rather big proviso—announcing a nervous breakdown gave you license to withdraw, claiming an excess of industry or sensitivity or some other virtue. And crucially, it focused the cause of distress on the outside world and its unmeetable demands. You weren’t crazy; the world was.”
“You weren’t crazy, the world was,” is important here. In our never-ending escalation of individualism, we no longer permit that sort of externally caused breakdown that requires you to extricate yourself from the situation. If something is wrong, you need to take it upon yourself to self help, self care, self optimize, fix yourself if you can’t fix the problem. Ideally do both, also don’t take any time off work while you’re doing it. Perhaps get a diagnosis, get medicated. Health insurance and access to care certainly aren’t issues in our country, ha. No way!
A break from work cannot be discussed without noting the fact that the United States is a country where many literally cannot afford to be sick from work, from physical illness, mental illness, or anything else. People will need the ability to take time off of school or work to grieve loved ones. Luke O’Neil, who writes Welcome to Hell World, collected stories from people on times they went to work while sick and honestly read them all and just sit with it. I don’t understand how anyone can defend tying health insurance to employment or our lack of paid sick leave. I also want to note how our failure to normalize taking breaks when we need them is blatant ableism that keeps chronically ill and disabled folks out of the workforce. It is not beneficial to individuals, or to society, and is almost certainly bad for our economy to force people to work when they are not okay. If the people obsessed with offering to sacrifice themselves and others at the altar of our GDP could just learn that peoples’ wellbeing has economic benefit…
The mindset that you aren’t affected unless you directly know someone affected, which I guess is the sociological manifestation of the identifiable victim effect, also limits our concept of empathy. At the time of writing, over 484,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 (why I always fixate on US deaths over world deaths as though American lives are worth more is its own can of worms). You don’t have to know any of them personally to feel like you want to melt; you don’t have to know of every possible form of suffering personally to believe that people do not deserve to suffer. It makes it easier when you know details, it makes everything more vivid, yes. But people can care about things beyond their own circumstances, we can care about people we’ve never met and will never meet. Dr. Cornel West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” The rare hopeful part of me believes that we have the capability as individuals, as communities, and as a society to love that widely and openly, to enact justice in this ceaselessly unjust world. Several moments during the pandemic have really made me question if I can believe this, but I’m trying!
Every day or two, I see one of this genre of tweet being described on my feed. It feels like we are all clenched, tense, holding on for dear life, fantasizing about when we’re (mostly) all vaccinated, at herd immunity. In the meantime, the pandemic is damaging your body, whether or not you have COVID. Grief and trauma exist in so many variations. I feel relatively comfortable expressing the general sentiment that the world is in chaos right now and that a lot of bad things are happening. I don’t feel nearly as comfortable indicating that I’m really feeling it, that I am exhausted and sad and I am terrified to expect good things to happen ever again because I don’t think I can handle being disappointed anymore. We’ve done a decent job allowing people (it’s me, I’m people) to acknowledge the crushing feeling of living right now, but we don’t really let people take the time and space to actually feel it.
Some jobs must get done, like our teachers and healthcare workers. I’ve been thinking a lot about differentiating the concept of demoralization from the concept of burnout. Demoralization is when your values come into conflict with what your work is demanding from you (e.g. right now healthcare workers can’t deliver empathetic, personal high-quality care to their patients because of external circumstances of PPE shortages, staff shortages, etc. and teachers can’t educate and support their students adequately when schools open unsafely or support for online learning is insufficient). Burnout is exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, sense of self-inefficacy, and inability to function at work (e.g. HCWs facing mountains of paperwork, more and more performance assessments and measures, etc. that add to chronic workplace stress. Honestly that sentence works for teachers too). On that note, for essential work, we need to give them the supplies and support necessary to make their jobs doable (don’t demoralize them), and also not burden them with administrative paperwork or unnecessary obstacles (don’t burn them out). Obviously there is overlap between the two, but demoralization is a much more systemic/structural issue whereas some aspects of burnout really are about the individuals’s capacity to cope.
It is good to encourage people to self care, to take a break so they can recover from burnout. However, when institutions encourage people to self care without giving them the means to, whether financially or time or energy-wise it is performative and useless. There’s also the internalized stigma we’ve got to get over—as long as it feels like taking a break makes you a slacker, that you may be implicitly or explicitly penalized, many people will continue pushing themselves closer and closer to breaking point. Everyone will be suffering in silence, alone.
I wish we could stop pretending the world is not falling apart. Okay, if I’m just wishing then I wish the world would stop falling apart. That’d be nice. I understand that concentrating on what feels within your control, what is certain and routine, can be a comfort in the midst of all this uncertainty. I know that going about your day can be a way to cope. At the same time, we need to make a whole lot of space for ourselves and for others to process what we’re living through, and we should probably start now. Everyone will go through it in different ways and at different paces. Vacation email responders are out, nervous breakdown email responders should be in vogue now.
I would like to have my nervous breakdown in peace, thank you.
Thanks for making it to the end! I hope you let yourself ~feel the feelings~ of living in February 2021 and help me normalize feeling down about things that aren’t directly affecting you.
If you want to read other complaints I have about how work works, try “Complaining about jobs I don’t have is my passion”
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A few articles I have enjoyed recently:
“The Many Lives of Steven Yeun” by Jay Caspian Kang, a very reflective profile of actor Steven Yeun on Asian-American identity, understanding our immigrant parents, and navigating how to write about minority identity
“Why carers and prison officers should be paid the same” by Katrine Marçal, providing an example from New Zealand of how we should value care in our society
“On Anti-Asian Hate Crimes: Who Is Our Real Enemy?” by Michelle Kim, on the recent spike in Anti-Asian hate crimes and wedge politics
“California is Making Liberals Squirm” by Ezra Klein, on how one of our bluest states often goes all in on performative liberalism while failing to really follow its values when it comes to real policies
“Ultra-fast Fashion Is Eating the World” by Rachel Monroe, on how faster than fast fashion has flourished in the pandemic
“I may not get there with you” by Garrett Bucks, on AOC’s discussion of what really happened to her on January 6th, and what it means to really build a movement that’s about relationship-building and genuine respect
“Love in quarantine” by Hayley Nahman, who in a world full of cringy and cliché love letters, shows us a real one
“The Buzzfeedification of Mental Health” by P.E. Moskowitz, on how capitalism has shredded our identities into confetti and sold it back to us, and applying the social model of disability to mental illness
“Is Divorce the Only Answer to an Unequal Marriage?” by Jessica Valenti, on the unequal division of labor in heterosexual households and how we go about changing men’s regressive views on their wives and the role of women
You should watch Minari, which came out on Feb. 12 and is directed by Lee Isaac Chung. It’s a movie based on his own experience of growing up Korean-American in Arkansas in the 1980s.