There was a protest to end racism in Naples yesterday. I’m not good with numbers but there were enough people to feel within a sea of people. Enough people to get lost in. There was enough people for my friend to go off and find the loo across the road and not come back for thirty minutes. Perhaps 2,000 people. When I saw the protest publicised on Facebook I was torn. Even though there has been no new cases in Naples for three days, even though the city is open, restaurant, bars, swimming pools are open, we can travel between regions, still, a mass gathering just as the nation is healing felt, on paper, wrong. Social distancing has become part of who I am, it feels. But I have had a lump in my throat for a few months now. Since Covid-19 stopped the frenetic movement of my life I have had time to get bored and upset. I was one of the millions of people who found themselves quarantined alone, and in fact, I succumbed to the virus. The question arose, as I lay sweating in my bed: what is the point of being alive tomorrow? This wasn’t so much the existential crisis of my twenties, but a very practical demand on the moment: what exactly was the reason to fight the shadow creeping across my life? I didn’t feel like the virus would kill me, but I had strange dreams which came with the fever. It wasn’t just ‘what am I going to do?’ or ‘what plan shall I make?’. I am well trained at booking myself into yoga lessons and setting a goal, but this was ‘how am I going to face tomorrow?’ Or more precisely, ‘how am I going to not feel so afraid and helpless tomorrow?’ It simply wasn’t enough to try and plan things, eat things, do things in the flat. I saw that I was missing some essential part of my own life force. A couple of weeks before this question came to me I watched Tiger King. I was a massive fan of the show, telling friends to watch it because it was such a ‘fascinating commentary on destitution, drugs, cruelty and greed’. Fascinating. But when the final episode dropped, which re-packaged the whole documentary as a show with ‘the stars’ being asked what it was like being recognised in Walmart, I felt sick. I felt as if I had done something bad. I felt sad. I think that was the first lump in my throat. The ‘fascinating commentary’ was, we were being led to believe, nothing to worry about, something to consume, the people are famous! Don't worry about them! The drug addicts, the impoverished, the guy who witnessed the accidental suicide, the nanny who was openly sexualised and hired presumably to fulfil the sexual ambitions of her employers, all of that was just a fascinating story. I had watched it all, got to know the people, and then I was given permission to forget about it and turn it off. Or buy a t-shirt which said: Carol Baskin did it. I was the problem. What I was doing was the problem. As this happened, the number of deaths in Italy was rising at a terrifying rate. Britain was in the middle of the herd immunity debate. The word ‘herd’ was associated in my head with words like ‘slaughter’ and ‘animals’. I saw the clips of the trucks of bodies being driven out of the city of Bergamo. My dad is seventy, diabetic, with other underlying health issues. He called to tell me that he and mum would no longer be going out. He told me he had a dream where he wanted to kill Boris Johnson and he had hated it. He said that the negative thoughts were slowing him down. There was his shadow. In Naples the lockdown came into effect overnight. The streets emptied and everything shut. The stories from the north of Italy had sent a shiver of palpable fear across the country. Hearing about the deaths and then succumbing to the virus, I began to feel scared. But I am also used to the the fear the media gives me, I am used to swallowing it, it is just that now I was having to swallow a little harder, like everyone else. And like many of us, I couldn’t run it off, or laugh of off, or cappuccino it off. These are my go to survival activities. These activities suddenly seemed a little selfish or at best, lacking. And the only way I came to that conclusion was by realising that going for a run or drinking a cappuccino doesn’t actually change the things that had started to give me a lump in my throat. I missed these activities because they helped me forget I was upset, needing, missing something. So I was in the flat. When I opened the computer for distraction I found myself in the web of news and media and panic that filled my social media feeds and timelines. I started to listen to audio books. I couldn’t read. I also ate a lot. On the streets when I went out shopping most of the homeless people who lay underneath the outer colonnade of Galleria Principe opposite the famous National Archaeological Museum had gone, but there were still some people on benches, and lying in corners, all of them were people of colour. I watched documentaries on climate change, the financial crash of 2008, on Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I listened to podcasts by thinkers such as Charles Eisenstein (check out his podcast A New and Ancient Story – and his books), I began to find people who spoke about why they are vegan (the Vegan Vanguard podcast/the documentary Earthlings), spirituality and healing (listen to Orland Bishop), a guy who lives in a van and speaks to world thought leaders (a podcast called Tangentially Speaking), indigenous tribes (Bruce Parry – Tribes). I read about Native Americans, the Kogi (watch the documentary Aluna (it’s free)), I thought about the clothes I wear and who pays for them (watch The True Cost). The lump in my throat got bigger and bigger, and then I started to cry. Someone would say something and I would start to cry because I recognised it as true. I cannot explain it. I have been crying. And I have been slow, in these months, the last month especially, I didn’t really know how to get back out there. There is so much about my life that gives me no meaning whatsoever. In so many ways I have been trying not to look at all of these things. Now I want to be part of healing. There are messages and slogans I have heard all my life and now I want to say them again with a new voice. Heal the world. The world is dying. The planet is dying. It is now normal to live with unease, to be in fear and feel helpless. It is has been normal for me to battle these feelings with runs and cappuccinos. But I think I might be more than that. I - we - might have more power than we think. The actions we take don’t have to be big, but they have to be our own, they have to come from the lumps in my throat, and I have to cry. And put bluntly, I don’t want bad shit done in my name because I was too busy to notice. I went to the march yesterday (I understand that elsewhere in the world, Covid is still ravaging communities and many people’s desire to go was overridden by fear for the lives of others). I was able to go and I listened and I heard people speak about what they feel, how they can feel fearful and helpless and I held my fist in the air for eight minutes in silence, with 2,000 other people and I let myself cry for all of us, and I let myself feel a little flame in my heart burning in the middle of those tears because I got to that march, which I would not have been to had it not been for what has happened in the world and to me in the last four months. There are many more tears ahead, but we will have to shed them - there is a pain in healing, but our generation could be the midwives to a new world.
