Identity, Lost and Found

The Unsettling Search for Self in a Global Crisis

I’ve read 15 guides to coping with ‘reentry anxiety’ as the pandemic-related restrictions ease, and not one of them has helped calm my flaring mind. For one, it’s not clear exactly what we are meant to be reentering — a while back we were talking about the New Normal, which I wholeheartedly reject, though that seems to have been taken off the table lately. (Sensible in the circumstances, really).

Secondly, with a fairly fluid notion of identity, reentry is a concept that blows my tiny mind just a little bit too much. I’m not convinced I know who I am right now, let alone where I am, what I’m doing and what I am meant to be going back to. Of course, whatever we are meant to be ‘going back to’ by nature also forces us to ask where exactly are we? In these times, the answer to that question is increasingly horrifying.

Enter Pandemic

Lockdown hasn’t helped, but it would be remiss of me to blame all this anxiety on the Plague. Yes, it has been catastrophic. The loss, death, damage and disruption has been on an unimaginable scale. But every now and then I faintly recall that long before the pandemic came along, I set my career, life and relationships on fire all by myself. Years ago I decided I did not like the conditions up there on the…