A Crying Year...

...is how I described 2020 in an instagram caption earlier this month, and I really meant it.

It feels like no other 10-month period in my life has been as filled with depressive episodes and weeping, as etched by grief (both macro and micro), as gilded with despair as these first 10 months of 2020. I was talking with my friend, K, about the feeling of this particularweek, after so many bad weeks, and she said something like, "things keep happening but I'm learning nothing, I'm not growing." And that was it! (K is a novelist; she has such a way with words.) I feel like no cliché is applicable here: this doesn't feel like it's making me stronger; I resolutely do not see the grand design of it all; I am not necessarily coming out of this with new coping and adaptability skills. It feels like I started the year with the fuel gauge perilously close to 'E' and somewhere around June I began running almost purely on fumes, and now? Now I'm not even doing it by foot, Fred Flintstone-style... I'm just letting gravity take me down the hill. I am utterly spent.

I slept very poorly last night, and the night before that, thinking of what is happening in Nigeria right now. Watching all the way from New York has turned murder on a toll bridge into a grim spectator sport, where we can see both teams and the unique advantage of one side over the other. And even then, the outcome is still shocking. There are many places for you to read up and to send donations — search #EndSARS and look out for the work of Feminist Coalition, and also read as widely as you can! — and I have done this, and continue to do this, but all of this upheaval, this brazen robbing of lives, this confirmation of the contempt that so many in power hold much of the people they govern in... it's making me think about our capacity, as human beings, for pain, and for hope, and for remaking.

In the middle of personal grief, I asked a friend, "How much more can any of us take?" and I realised that honestly? No answer she could give would provide me with real, lasting comfort. Sometimes, the grief gets to be so much that I sit on my sofa and howl. There are some times when I cry in the bath. I'm fearful of what will be left of us in that vague future that we sometimes name "When All Of This Is Over". I think of all of us, now walking wounded, who are trying to remake ourselves into better humans, with maybe new depths, new empathies, more kindness, and almost immediately I think, with a wild glint in my eye, "we won't be allowed!" I think I'm not a very hopeful person, currently.

I would love to go home for a visit. Leave New York for London, for a month, maybe three. To kiss my sister's cheek, and hold my brothers' faces in my hands and really look at them, and hug my mother, and have my dad clasp my fist in his meaty hands. If I leave the US, with my nonimmigrant visa, they will not let me back in, per an order written back in March. It turns out I am in fine company — as well as the UK, people who have been in Iran, China and the Schengen area countries in the preceding 14 days also cannot enter the US — but it feels so personal this year of all years. When all I want to do is be surrounded by my family, doing what this Crying Year requires, which of course is crying, a lot, in the arms of those who love you and who you love in return.