thepandemicinterviews

[thepandemicinterviews]

Lily, December 13 2020, Sydney

The Guardian recently asked their readers how they would describe 2020 in one word. The top two words were ‘shit’ and ‘fucked’. I, too, am partial to the simplicity of a swearword, as you’ll see towards the end of this interview with Lily. I noticed as well our constant usage of crazy and insane to describe anything from literature to dreams to the general feeling of this year. Much like shit or fucked: when faced with utter absurdity, it is difficult for our brains to not reach for the most compact yet forceful words to express a sense of awe (in one of my psychology classes this year, we learnt that awe is apparently a combination of fear, joy, surprise, and embarrassment). There is no value judgment here: crazy, in the sense used below, is not good or bad. There are some emotional reactions that resist language – these overused words are a placeholder for silently screaming. Anyway, let’s lean into the madness and await catharsis. It’s okay to surrender every once in a while.

Today I thought of a better word to describe 2020. Tragicomedy. Merriam-Webster defines tragicomedy as ‘a drama or a situation blending tragic and comic elements.’ Tragicomedy goes hand in hand with a sense of alienation from reality. Amidst long stretches of despair and disconnection, there has been no shortage of satirical articles to help us along. Empty laughter is still laughter. And then there are tears, the ultimate symbol of the tragic. To quote myself in the interview, there’s a lot to cry about.

I honestly feel that tragicomedy is the literary genre that most resembles real life. Or perhaps it is a lens through which to narrativise real life, one that allows for the interlacing of misery and humour. Perhaps some of us are more inclined towards drama than others.

Lily and I were Tumblr mutuals for a few months or a few years, I’m not sure, before finally meeting through real life mutual friends. I was immediately drawn to Lily’s intelligence, her love of literature and all that is slightly intangible. Her unpretentious brilliance and interest in the lives of others resounds loudly in our interview. I feel blessed, and I feel warm, to have recorded this conversation.

With the close of our-year-in-chaos, 2020, as our backdrop, Lily and I ponder dreams, crying, pleasure, and the mysterious early months of the coronavirus. For those who make it to the end of the interview: sadly we did not see any shooting stars as we got the day wrong. But that shouldn’t stop us, or you, from wishing and dreaming for a less tragic 2021. 

C: Hi Lily. What’s been on your mind recently?

L: Oh man. A lot of things. Who am I? What am I? And what is this? [Laughs.] I think at the moment I’ve just been very surprised and overwhelmed by being a person. It’s been a very strange year and I’ve been reading a very strange writer in a very strange context for that writer. And I think I’ve just felt sort of strange coming out of that experience now that things are open. And it just feels very strange to be among people again, sort of, and really missing that. But also finding it all very odd. I think when you spend a lot of time, you forget what it is you are. In both a good and bad way. Do you agree Chloe?

C: Well, I’m thinking about how the person you are, or how you conceptualise who you are, when you spend a lot of time with yourself and not with other people – it can change a lot as soon as you start spending a lot of time around other people. Who you are, like what you think you are.

L: I think a lot of what has happened this year is people have spent a lot of time with themselves, and for some that has meant lots of really wonderful things like hobbies and things that they would’ve never taken up if they were living their day to day life with lots of friends and family. Loneliness can always have a very creative effect on people. But I think simultaneously now that we’re all among each other again a bit more, lots of the self-focused things that people were doing during lockdown have made them maybe slightly more intolerant to other people? That’s my experience. At least, both for myself and for others. I don’t know, it’s so strange. I used to never be bothered by other people’s daily things. It used to just not bother me, but suddenly it’s like really irritating.

C: You’re standing too close to me…

L: Exactly, you’re standing too close to me, did you just sneeze. All of these absurd reactions.

C: Literally a year ago today we would have never considered someone coughing on the train concerning.

L: No, exactly. In fact, I used to take pride in not being concerned by anything like that. I was like, the poor person is sick! Good on them for being out and about. That’s really changed. Now it’s like, oh my god, if you get me sick and then I kill someone.

C: There’s so much involved.

L: I actually had a funny experience the other day where – and this is partly why I actually felt like it was sort of fate, Chloe, that you asked to interview me at this point in the year. It’s true, because I think in the early part of the year, I don’t know, I was just – there were a lot of different experiences I was just sort of overwhelmed by. I underwent so many transformations in mood throughout this whole period. And I only think now that I’m sort of coming to a breaking point in my experience of this whole thing.

C: That’s amazing.

L: It is good! And I think yesterday, I just felt really happy. I just felt relieved somehow. I just had this sort of sense of relief in my heart that we’d come to the better side of what all of this is.

C: And the rest of the world is undergoing the worst they’ve ever seen.

L: Undergoing the worst, I know. And that’s so alienating. I think that’s actually probably been my worst and main feeling this year is just feeling sort of alienated from my own experience, from other people. Not really knowing how to talk to people in Melbourne, not really knowing how to talk to my family in the UK and in America. Because I’ve just felt like what was going on for me was just really different. It’s been that combined with I think just, in many ways, it’s just been overwhelming but sort of alienating being inside a lot for a long period of time. Or sort of the opposite of alienating such that you don’t get used to the amount of alienation. Like when you go out in the world and you are different from it, I think there’s a slight sort of alienation but in a really productive way, a way that’s really fun and enjoyable. But this year being inside a lot, you sort of lack all feelings of alienation and completely dwell in your own space, such that you go outside and you’re much more alienated because it’s no longer that nice, sort of productive space anymore. You’re not really a part of that. You feel like you are your house. Space is such a strange thing. When you move through lots of different spaces in the world, you sort of feel more like you’re simply you, in your body, as opposed to an entire space. And I think that’s a nice balance. Being able to envision yourself in different spaces and that’s not too alienating, you just feel part of it, I think. Did that make any sense or was that completely chaotic?

C: It was very chaotic, but I’m thinking about like space at a warehouse party where there’s no space and everyone’s… But there’s enough space that it’s comfortable but you know, you’re surrounded by people and that being allowed.

L: Yeah, it does weird things to people. I think I was originally going to tell a story but then that ended up breaking up into a million different thoughts.

C: Do you know what the story was?

L: Yeah, I do. It has to do with how I sort of came to a breaking point and it’s the significant thing that has happened at the end in terms of Covid this year, in terms of my life this year. Not like in itself as an event, but I felt like a sort of lead up to some event like this. Which was, a couple of days ago I had my first ballet exam. So I did that.

C: First ever?

L: First ever ballet exam. Which was really fun. It was really stressful, but it was fine.

C: Were you with other people?

L: Yeah, I was with two fourteen year olds. So I did that. I hadn’t had any breakfast because I was nervous for the exam. And then I went to the library and I had a talk at 2pm in front of the English faculty and all my Honours cohort. And it was just on something you’d learnt, so of course I hadn’t written it. I just thought, I’ve learnt so many things, I’ll be able to just come together and say something. And I ended up sort of thinking what could I use to reflect on my year. And I found some sort of quote from one of my second year essays. It wasn’t even a particularly good essay, but I was like yeah, I think that quote that I wrote about in that essay really fits this whole theme. And we’re at this talk and the first two speakers at the event were quite funny. Very well curated talks. One girl even said afterwards that she’d recorded herself speaking, which I found fascinating that she’d recorded herself. I was like, wow, these five to seven minutes were…

C: That important to her.

L: They were that important! She was going to make them good. I, on the other hand, wrote my speech in forty minutes when I hadn’t had lunch or breakfast. It was like 1:30pm. Anyway, I loved those two speakers. I still pretty much had faith in myself to speak on the spot and say something, which was maybe cocky. It was so strange when I got up and started speaking, and the first thing I said was, it’s so nice just to be here in this space among humans. I just started going on about how everyone looked so different three-dimensionally. It was so nice to hear voices, I just wanted to hear voices. That was sort of why I wanted to do this [laughs]. I just missed hearing the human voice. And I just started crying! Like, really crying. So much, at one point I was like okay, I’m just going to take a few breaths. I took a few breaths, and as I went back to talk I sort of like – you know when someone sort of cry-coughs in this weird way? And as I sort of cry-coughed trying to speak, a big bit of snot flew out of my nose, onto my hand!

C: How many people are here?

L: Like all of my English professors. The room was full with thirty-five people maybe. People who are my teachers. Everyone was there. When I saw the snot – there were no tissues, because obviously everyone’s like, no one should be sick if they’re going to be out, so we didn’t have tissues around. What they did have was a bloody Covid anti-bacterial cloth [laughs]. I sort of looked at it, went to grab it, and then was like, okay, no. That would be too much.

C: So good. A real Covid story!

L: Yeah. But I genuinely, I just kept crying, it was horrible. I completely lost the thread of what I was saying. I was like, I read Middlemarch in [so-and-so’s] class, and it was really good. And I thought that Dorothy and Will’s love was real – I just said all these ridiculous things. And I told everyone that before Honours, I used to dream about my essays, but I found instead this year it was really boring, which is probably the worst thing that I said!

C: You didn’t have any dreams about your essays?

L: I used to dream about my essays.

C: But not this year?

L: I probably have dreamt about them this year, but I’ve had fewer essays. And they’ve just been research essays, where the sensation of dreaming, it’s more like a nightmare. It’s like, oh my god, did I say that?

C: Do you dream about them after they’re written or are they like dreams that are conjuring up ideas?

L: Okay, I have to admit I still do have dreams in the nice way. But like probably two. Whereas I used to just have dreams, they used to be relaxing, that was the main thing that happened with essays.

C: What did one of the dreams look like?

L: Where you feel like you’re – I’ve always just described the sensation of just like getting deeper into something. You’re just like, yes, I’m going to get the mystery of this whole subject! I can feel the mystery in my fingers. Just this really sort of crazy sensation that makes you not want to wake up because it’s so good.

C: Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had an essay dream. It sounds fantastic. Mine are like quite just not clear.

L: How do you feel in your dreams?

C: I feel like I’m just not really there. I don’t really have thoughts, I’m just… It’s not linked to me.

L: Yeah, they’re not linked to you. They’re not like intense.

C: They’re intense, but they’re not linked to my real life in the way that digging into your already existing essay is.

L: Right. They’re sort of glimpses of worlds. Is that how it feels? Are they like human worlds or are they like colours?

C: Oh yeah. No, I have dreams about things that are happening.

L: Not like directly happening to you.

C: It all feels a bit vague and murky. It’s not like a sharp, like, we’re writing an essay.

L: It’s funny, I mean I wouldn’t describe them as sharp because they’re still vague, but I think it’s more like a degree of intensity. Because you wake up in the morning, you don’t know what – like what can I say except that I was dreaming about the essay. Sometimes I can articulate clear ideas but they’re always just completely nonsensical if you go to say them. They just sound like very weird words. Someone’s always doing something unexpected, something that just doesn’t really fit or even necessarily reveal anything deep and meaningful. There’s this really chaotic element, and then there’s this sort of sharp sensation that it’s linked to something that is going on, maybe, with your life. And maybe that’s what – you have a dream, you don’t necessarily feel like it actually reflects anything in your real life in a clear – yeah, it’s not connected to that. It’s something else. But I think my dreams are vague. I don’t know anyone who has non-vague dreams. Can you imagine?

C: No, my friend has like really detailed and long dreams. And she can write it all out and it’s like a whole page.

L: I can write out my dreams. But they’re just crazy.

C: So you remember them?

L: I do remember them, yeah. If I write them.

C: But I wake up and I can’t remember it to the point of writing it. I can kind of feel it.

L: You feel that you had a dream.

C: I can feel it, and I maybe get little glimmers of a memory, but then it goes.

L: Yeah. I find those little hauntings so strange when you get a glimmer of a memory of a dream. It’s so crazy. I think because I dream a lot, I often have them throughout the day but I can’t remember when I dreamt that dream. But it gives everything an eerie feeling. Like what the hell. It’s like I’m living another life sort of in their dream and it’s affecting me emotionally. But just like, what’s the relationship between that dreaming world and that world that you didn’t consciously produce.

C: And for some people the lines are more blurred.

L: For sure. I think it’s always scared me, I feel for me they’re quite blurred. And I think it’s a scary sensation, you really can’t go too far with that.

C: Yeah.

L: I think honestly the thing that’s blurred the lines for me the most is literature and dreaming. I always find it really surprising that other people don’t realise how crazy literature is. It’s insane. What’s disconcerted me and what particularly disconcerted me on that day at the talk at the English department was I was like, how do people study this stuff? Like what is going on here. All of these people are dressed up like this is their job? This is the craziest thing in the world! Literature is insane! Do you guys know what you’re doing?

C: Let’s stop pretending. Stop wearing those suits.

L: Why are we pretending? I think particularly while I was crying, I was like, if you think this is crazy, have you ever read a book? You guys, you’ve all read books. This is normal, this is fine, this stuff happens. Much worse happens!

C: No, it’s the best place to do that.

L: Yes.

C: Citi did a similar thing in her acting class. She was meant to be doing some kind of role play. And then she just started laughing, and then crying, and she couldn’t stop.

L: No! Yes. Ugh. I hate that, I hate that. I mean, it’s sort of – I love criers, I love people who cry. I think crying can be incited by so many things. Crying, I think, it’s often its best and its worst at times when you’ve experienced some bit of rejection or grief. Like it doesn’t have to be a real rejection, just you perceive rejection. And if one other disappointment just really sort of crushes something of you at that moment, and it needs to be released in tears. And it can feel really good. It’s intense, though.

C: It’s intense in front of other people.

L: Yeah. Why does it feel so embarrassing? It’s all snotty.

C: Imagine if people just cried all the time around each other.

L: Some people can’t cry. My boyfriend’s like, I don’t cry, I can’t cry.

C: That’s fucked.

L: I don’t understand. I definitely cry once a week.

C: Same. There’s a lot to cry about.

L: There’s a lot to cry about. I used to have amazing crying fits before I was in a relationship. Now you can’t really have crying fits unless you’re by yourself.

C: You live with someone.

L: You live with someone and they’re like, what is wrong? And you’re like, I just need to do this.

C: It feels good.

L: Yeah, it’s hard for people to imagine. Some people just completely freak out about crying. When I came home I told my housemate what had happened, and he said, that sounds terrible, I wouldn’t have liked to be in the audience. There are just a lot of people for whom criers are just really embarrassing. And they’re just like, oh my god, I can’t believe you’re expressing emotion, I would never do that.

C: And that’s literature. It’s so tied to expressing emotion in socially not accepted ways.

L: Yes, for sure. All the different ways that people cope. Which is so strange to think. I can’t imagine being a person who doesn’t think about that all the time. How do people cope? What are they doing? There are so many ways of doing it, but you don’t know unless you talk to people or you read books, what’s going on for them. And often people don’t at least talk to each other in that sort of way. It’s more of a thing now amongst the young. But still, even though, lots of people have a lot of trouble. And you can always get better, really. It’s kind of like, I don’t really know entirely what’s going on with me obviously. No one knows for sure. Like we were talking about earlier, sort of with psychology, there’s only so much you get to know yourself without someone else.

[Both deeply sigh.]

C: Just seeing that in writing, like, both sigh deeply [laughs].

L: That was a massive sigh! I think we both needed to take a breath as well.

C: My yoga class today I found that I could breathe in time to [the instructor] a lot easier, a lot more naturally. Like my breathing improved. So that was nice.

L: That’s beautiful. The breathing is so nice, right? I used to hate breathing, but I like it now.

C: It’s a muscle that you have to train.

L: Yeah, it’s true. When it’s properly trained. I think running has really helped train my breath. I love the feeling of deepening your lungs. A sort of internal stretch.

C: Beautiful. Internal stretch. Good band name, perhaps?

L: It’s a bit scary! Chloe! This is hilarious.

* * *

L: I’ve really just missed overhearing conversations actually. That’s the one thing I wanted to tell you was that there’s something particularly beautiful about your blog to me, because the thing that I’ve missed most is not hearing other people have conversations. For almost no point as well, like a conversation that’s purely just about like, who are you, who am I, what’s going on? You know what I mean?

C: Yeah, and people have a lot to say if you ask.

L: Exactly, exactly. If you are just a bit curious.

C: Often in social settings, in a group, you don’t really get to ask about people’s thoughts and feelings.

L: Yeah, it’s true. I think often we just wait for people to come to us to say things that they want to say. There are so many things that people would just never say for that reason because they’re not going to think that you’re interested.

C: It’s amazing what a bit of interest can do to someone. That’s all like counselling. Someone actually cares.

L: Someone cares. Interest makes people interesting, usually, as well. Because they don’t just give you the sort of one word, ordinary answer where it’s just for the sake of it. If you actually seem interested, they might try to give you a real answer.

C: Ask further questions.

L: What’s the most interesting question someone has ever asked you? Or is there any question that someone has asked you and you’ve been like, wow, that was really psychic?

C: I can’t think of anything right now.

L: It’s hard to come up with on the spot.

C: Can you think of anything?

L: No, actually. But I think one thing that I’ve noticed, I used to not answer people’s questions because I thought they weren’t interesting. But then I went through this period of really liking it, and now I think this year almost I haven’t been that interested in people’s questions. Which I think is strange. It’s strange not just really really liking people’s questions. Maybe people haven’t really asked me any questions. Because I haven’t had that experience this year very much of having questions posed to me, and finding that interesting. I was noticing the other day, I was just like, what has happened? Has someone done this to me? Do I not like questions anymore? But I think that’s just, when you’re not at university and you’re not meeting people very often, people you don’t see day to day. People day to day, who live with you day to day often don’t ask you big questions. They’ll ask you little questions and because they observe you every day, they don’t necessarily realise that there might be all kinds of things going on inside of you unless you express that.

* * *

L: Pleasure is a very good thing. I don’t like it as much as I used to though. I don’t know, in some ways I like it more.

C: What kinds of pleasure? Just like pleasure in its purest form?

L: Yeah, enjoying food, sex, music. Very sort of sensory excitement. Genuine pleasure.

C: Those are the three pleasures! Food, sex, music.

L: There are other pleasures, but… Reading novels is a different sensation, it’s not quite as immediate. You have to build a sort of story. And of course, we can feel ourselves as part of stories as well and that can be very pleasurable sometimes. It’s like, I’m this sort of person, I have this sort of trace, these are my people. That stuff can be really meaningful even if not sort of directly pleasurable in the same way. I think that’s the really nice thing about direct pleasure, it takes you away from that more satisfying pleasure, like you’re on the sort of story narrative. People need a break from that, because often people don’t feel like they’re in a very good story.

C: I have just over – I don’t know, maybe it’s not over, like maybe it’s just normal and good – I just always create these narratives for what’s going to happen, what that means, and it never works that way. So I should stop narrativising but, you know, it’s instinctual.

L: It’s so instinctual. But the horrible thing about it I find is that it’s not just sort of narrativising what has happened, it is narrativising what’s going to happen in the future. When it comes to the future, it’s terrible because you just have so little control over it. So basically whatever you imagine is just not going to happen. Unlike with the past where it’s already happened.

C: Exactly. Sometimes I’m like, if I’m imagining this, it won’t happen. The chances are.

L: It’s true.

C: I just had a bit of a rollercoaster and I’ve come to the point where I’m like relationships don’t happen. Like it’s impossible. I’m not going to try to date anymore because it’s just futile.

L: Dating is one of the hardest things to try to plot and plan. Like you can meet people, but I think the worst thing is that a lot of people who are looking to meet people are a little bit – like they’re looking to meet lots of people, or they’re not necessarily looking to have a proper relationship. And if they are, often that doesn’t work out either because two people who are just looking to have a relationship aren’t going to work out.

C: Yeah, it takes away the spontaneity.

L: Yeah, not just the spontaneity but sometimes then you are with someone who you don’t want to be with. So how’s it going to last? Whereas, if you’re sort of compelled to be together…

* * *

L: Wow. I can’t believe we’re coming to the end of this sort of historical event, this year, 2020. Though it’s so weird it was called Covid-19. That always screwed me. It made no sense.

C: It’s because it existed in December 2019.

L: I know.

C: But no one knew. It’s crazy, have you gone back to any old news articles about it? You should.

L: I have something to confess, which is I was obsessed with the news story so early on, when there were like twenty cases.

C: No, me too! Like it all hit one day, when I was reading all these New York Times briefings on the plane. I was like, whoa, it’s spreading. But it was still such low numbers in those days. We had no idea.

L: I was reading about it before they knew that it was contagious. Like far before they knew that. Where they thought people only got it directly from an animal – there was that whole story. And the reason why I was so obsessed with it is because I was convinced that – well, I was very very unwell at that time and I thought I had Covid. In a way that made no sense whatsoever, made everyone think that I was crazy. Actually used all my data while I was travelling on reading about the twenty cases in the entire world! And I was just like, I am dying! The story gets me! We’re all going to die! Sam was just like, this makes no sense. You’re completely insane. It’s so weird. I still find that so strange. I was convinced when it was completely crazy. It’s because I was extremely unwell and probably did have Covid.

C: Do you think?

L: Yeah, well they know now through the poop samples that people in Italy had it in December as well.

C: Really?

L: I was there all through January, in all the busy museums, and I got this very very strange sickness where I just started with a cough and a fever, and it was a really really awful cough. Like I coughed blood, I was really really unwell. And I’d never been sick in that particular way with a cough and a fever. And like a horrible cough. I felt like I was going to die, like my lungs were going to collapse or something. I was so confused. That’s why I was so obsessed with the story, it just seemed really dramatic.

C: That sounds like you had it!

L: And Sam had the same thing, it was really weird. We had the same identical coughing and fever.

C: Okay, you definitely had Covid then.

L: Yeah, I think it probably was Covid! But it was unthinkable!

C: Yeah, you’re perfect for this interview. This is great content.

L: I’ve definitely told so many people that story this year because it’s just so dramatic. But when I came back in February, people were still like, it’s just a media… Like it’s not here at all.

C: Yeah, respectable people. It was like, it’s anti-China.

L: Which was a reasonable sort of thing to think. You know what I mean.

C: Yeah, because they were blocking international students. Like that was a trigger.

L: Yeah, and of course there’s been a lot of Australia-China stuff for a long time, so it makes sense.

C: And now the fact of anyone coming into the country without being in hotel quarantine is unthinkable.

L: Is unthinkable, yeah.

C: Crazy how we’ve just switched.

L: We’ve just completely adapted. Now like, yep, this is the way it is. Hard to even imagine post-pandemic life. Where we don’t have to wash our hands, or sign in to a restaurant, get a Covid test if we get a cold.

C: I haven’t been tested. I haven’t had a cold.

L: I haven’t been sick basically at all this year, except for last weekend, where I had a day where I sort of sneezed twice. I felt kind of unwell, I had a bit of a fever. Well, I felt I did and a sore throat. But it just sort of cleared away the next day. Sam was really unwell, so I thought I had got his – Sam was like, he’s been coughing and…

C: Did he get tested?

L: He’s been tested like a million times. He’s been sick a lot this year which is hilarious, because I haven’t been sick at all and I always get sick. But for some reason he’s gotten sick heaps this year. It’s sort of completely reversed. But I think actually, he said that in previous years he would never sort of give himself the permission to be sick because he would just keep wanting to go on and do stuff. But now because you can’t do that, because you’re like, well you might kill someone if you…

C: Yeah, it’s so extreme.

L: It’s so extreme. So when he’s felt sick, he’s been like, okay, I’m sick. And I think he’s actually been sick in this sort of – it’s very very odd.

C: Like he’s willed it onto himself.

L: Well, he’s just like, well now it’s okay. I’m going to say I’m sick right now. I’m just going to be sick. Whereas previously he’d almost pretend like he wasn’t, because he would prefer to keep living his life as normal. You can’t just keep living your life as normal if you’re sick anymore.

C: It’s rough.

L: I forgot what the question was.

C: There was no question. I don’t feel like I’ve asked any questions except for the first one. And that’s all we need! It was the perfect opener. Maybe I’ll do one last question. What kind of writing or any kind of art do you think will come out of, or be used in future works…?

L: About this period?

C: How do you think it’ll affect the literary landscape or film landscape?

L: Yeah. It’s a very very good question. I think a lot of things could happen. Because this year has pushed so many people to spend so much time with people they wouldn’t usually spend so much time with. As well as taking them away from other people. And force them to interact in entirely different ways. So I think there’s going to be a lot in terms of the sorts of relationships people have during Covid. I think the whole experience of people starting to date someone at the beginning of Covid, Covid happened, then they basically moved in with each other and got married. That is so weird! I think people are going to be writing about that sort of experience for a long time, because I think that would be so bizarre emotionally.

C: It’s like the first ever universal experience that we, in our generation, have experienced.

L: It really is. And I think that’s why in the beginning I was almost slightly excited. Like I remember looking on people’s Facebooks and being like, wow, I’m bonding with everyone!

C: Yeah, absolutely! But now it’s split off in so many…

L: Yeah! I think what’s so strange is that we had that experience, and for that reason at the beginning of the pandemic I was like, maybe people will become closer to one another, and be more reflective. I don’t know, like they’ll feel closer to each other. But I think actually it’s come out the other end and there’s a lot of alienation. And yeah, I think for that reason, there’s probably going to be lots of weird art about that as well.

C: Covid and conspiracy theories and Trump, all in the same very concentrated time. It’s like they all bounce off each other to create awfulness.

L: Under these sorts of circumstances, you can see why people would believe all sorts of insane things. It’s been an insane year. And I think a lot of the problems that we had before in terms of people being isolated, and they’re in their own sort of groups, whether they be good or completely awful. Just becoming completely radicalised. That has all been pushed to a much greater extreme than we could’ve foreseen. It was something that was happening much more gradually. I’m very very interested, and I kind of hope that we’ve reached a crisis point, and that this year leads to things getting better not worse. Like it hasn’t sort of just pushed the worst along. That’s the thing I hope the most for.

C: Well, definitely looks like some things have happened. Like Trump is no longer going to be president. Huge. Also, other thing that comes to mind is that Medicare-funded psychology sessions is up to 20. So maybe there’ll be more good things.

L: There will, yeah. Lots of things have shifted. Lots of people have gotten things that they wouldn’t have had otherwise this year. And I think myself included, I don’t think I would’ve learnt Italian this year without having a lot of money from the government.

C: And time.

L: And time! And I wouldn’t have felt as bored so as to be compelled to do it.

C: And now you’re going to be studying Italian!

L: Now I’m studying Italian next year! And I love languages! Lots of people have gotten weird good things out of this year. You can’t plan, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes I think – at least there was a point in the year where I really felt this – that Covid was just mixing everything up. Like it was just mixing everyone’s life up. And that mixing could be really good. It has been, for many people, as well as bad. It’s hard to know what to focus on sometimes.

C: And ultimately it is just completely out of your control. Like there’s no personal agency, really. That’s the messaging, but it depends so much on like actually having these laws enforced. Because in America, they don’t. So it’s on them to be really judgey about like mask-wearing, which is good, but it shouldn’t be on the individual.

L: No, it just creates a horrible culture as well amongst people. I think when you perceive other people to be in control, they just start becoming enemies, or you feel this really intense moralising impulse, which you don’t feel when you’re part of a community where it’s organised around being good.

C: Yeah, has leadership.

L: Yeah.

[Both deeply sigh again.]

C: Any last words?

L: Any last words. What are you thinking? You started this by asking me what I’m thinking.

C: I’m thinking how nice it is to be able to talk about it all. People don’t talk about things enough.

L: I agree.

C: 2020’s just been the most insane year, and we’re just like completely desensitised. But like, shit’s fucked. Shit’s fucked in the US. People are crazy. Like 50% of the population is fucked.

L: It’s completely awful.

C: Is that a good note to end on? Probably not.

L: I really don’t believe that that’s a good note to end on! [Laughs]. I don’t know, I was thinking before Covid, I think I was really focused on people suffering actually. But I think since Covid, I’ve just retreated into myself a bit. And I’ve avoided, because I’ve just gotten so tired of hearing about more numbers. I’m just really fatigued and I kind of just want to pretend like it’s not happening. Which doesn’t feel good, it actually feels horrible to be disconnected like that.

C: Just like imagine being the leader of a country that has 300,000 Covid deaths and like not caring at all. Like it’s fucked. Imagine 50% of the population feeling the same way.

L: No, it’s very much a sign that people are just not connected to reality. Not to other people’s emotional realities. People have started just seeming like objects, like they’re playing out in some world. But I think every single human being is unimaginably special, which sounds really – I hope it’s not too kooky of an idea. But yeah, people are just really special, and impossible to describe. It’s so weird but I think that a lot of what has gone on in people minds is that people have just started to seem replaceable or just sort of like shells of themselves, like characters rather than actually a living person who wants things for themselves, and things for others, and has all of this stuff going on.

[Long pause.]

L: There’s no way to end this is there?

C: So… do you have hope for the world?

L: Well, I don’t know, do I? I’m not a pessimist. I just feel very confused now though. I really don’t know. I’ve come out of this year very confused about what’s good and bad. I think this year has raised a lot of questions like that because we’ve had that thing where we’ve had our government be much more controlling, and that’s happened all around the world. Is that good? It has been good? Because we’ve seen what happens when you don’t do that. That’s also a very strange experience, which I have mixed feelings about.

C: We’ve had it really easy in Sydney though.

L: It’s true, we haven’t had to be controlled very much at all.

C: But for a few weeks there it was like, can I sit on this park bench?

L: You couldn’t.

C: It was crazy.

L: I remember that. Or when someone got fined for sitting down to eat their kebab.

C: Yeah, that’s so ridiculous.

L: You couldn’t go out with more than one person from your household.

C: Well, I was still working a little bit, so I still got the train and served people in the shop. So I feel like I didn’t really have a full lockdown experience.

L: It’s so weird that so many shops were open.

C: Yeah, we never had shops shut here. In New Zealand, they did the full like four weeks, no shops, no takeaway, just cook at home, go to the supermarket, that’s all you do. Four weeks.

L: That is crazy to think of. No, things have pretty much carried out as normal here in comparison. It’s just been an atmosphere among people. Like we’ve been allowed to do lots of things but there are places where you can’t sit near people. There’s a lot of cleaning happening.

C: It is pretty chill now compared to a few months ago. It’s all dependent on the contact tracing. You know, how interesting it is to think about all the maths behind it and tracking down this invisible thing that’s been passed around.

L: Yeah, it’s incredible. The sky looks like a sunset almost, it’s so bright.

C: Yeah, it’s strange.

L: On Thursday night, there’s going to be forty shooting stars per hour apparently.

C: When?

L: Thursday night between 2am and sunrise.

C: Oh wow. Are you going to be up for it?

L: I think I will. It’s the day before my thesis is due. So I think I’ll probably be up anyway.

C: Okay. I have work the next day but do you think I could see it from here?

L: Apparently you can see it all over Australia.

C: I don’t know if I can usually see stars from here though. I don’t think I can. Maybe in the backyard, a little bit. I’ll try and remember. We can text each other.

L: I really want to stay up for that. We’ll see some of it. I’ve never seen a shooting star.

[thepandemicinterviews]

Ally, September 30 2020, Sydney

I’m writing this six and a half weeks after my interview with my housemate Ally was conducted. It is a long November afternoon, and my head hurts, partly due to the names, numbers, and stories of lives that clutter my mind, and partly because I slammed my forehead against the edge of the desk at work. I think the only solution is meditation, but I’m waiting to begin a yoga class so I don’t fuck it up. 

The reason for this long gap in time between my last interview and this one is very simple: transcribing takes time and love and focus. I didn’t interview Ally for a while after she was nominated by Issy because I had just started a new job, on top of my other two. I was working long days, five days a week, and trying to squeeze in my other random admin job on the train or on my lunch breaks. Then, in October, I was entangled in a different kind of chaos: a matter of the heart. I felt like I couldn’t catch a break. Now, to sit here in the eleventh month, writing this self-involved introduction at the best time of the day (6:30pm), fuelled by kombucha and tacos, I don’t know what’s next. 

Unlike the earlier months of this pandemic, our understandings of our current reality seem more grounded in our selves, rather than regurgitated from ever-changing news articles and norms within our social groups. The slow burn of the US election results. The lethargy of having lived through this year. 

A week later: I had my yoga class yesterday and at the end we lay down in the dark. It is a useful exercise to simply witness where your mind goes when there is nothing forcing it in any particular direction. I wish I could formulate a few sentences here to fit all the matter in my (and the social) psyche together like a jigsaw puzzle. I want to write about the tankies I encountered at a party, who, poker-faced, said that Biden was just as bad as Trump, if not worse for the “movement”. I want to write about how relieved I am that he’s not, obviously. I want to write about how stuttered conversation can be, how easily a few words can become fragmented from a larger sentiment. How the obvious to the speaker can be so deeply unknowable to the receiver. 

Maybe I will one day. But for today, I’ll let Ally’s insights speak loudly below. I admire Ally a lot, in all of her disparate interests and careful ambition. She reminds us to be grateful for our support systems, our communities, and also for ourselves. To turn inward and investigate what we believe in and why we do, and to take comfort in our self-concept.

C: At the beginning of 2020, how did you think the year would go?

A: At the beginning of 2020, I’d been on a full-time contract for the first time in my life for a couple of months, had a stable job, a stable relationship, a stable house. I don’t think I necessarily had expectations, but I think like every year you kind of expect it to be – things will shift a little bit and you’ll expect that that’s going to be the year that you have a bit more time to get your life together or clarify what you want to be doing, blah blah blah. But I think at the start of 2020 I thought it was going to be quite unremarkable. Like I think I kind of expected maybe some slow internal shifts towards… I don’t know, yeah. It feels like my sense of time’s so warped now, I don’t even know. I can’t imagine myself in space at the beginning of the year because it’s felt like such a non-linear year. I think it’s all just scrambled up in a big knot.

C: What was your full-time job?

A: At the gallery, the commercial gallery selling paintings to rich people. Actually I think it would have been at the beginning of the year that I sold a painting for more than my salary for the year. Like on my own. Just like it was no big deal, but I was like, oh, you’re putting this on your wall but that’s more than I earn in an entire year before tax, so. I think that was maybe a bit of a moment of I’m probably not really going to be valued in this space. Or like I can’t be the person that I need to be to be valued in that space maybe. 

C: Did that make you re-evaluate your place in the art world?

A: Yeah, I mean to be honest I’d only really sort of worked in a very specific part of it. And I knew that there was more out there, but I think prior to that I always thought it was something that I would do for a while and learn a lot from and then move into something that was more me. And I don’t think I ever – I think I always thought that commercial art wasn’t something I’d do forever. 

C: Then you went on JobSeeker?

A: I went on JobSeeker, yep. 

C: And how was that?

A: Well, I had been on Youth Allowance while I was studying so I didn’t have to go and wait in line. But I did spend a few hours on hold with Centrelink for them to hang up, that old chestnut. Like I think it’s been a tough time for a lot of people, but I think in a way I kind of needed that break to recalibrate and it took a lot of pressure off to do other things. The whole world was kind of in disarray so I didn’t have that internal pressure to do this or that.

C: What did you do with your time?

A: I spent a lot of time in the house. Baked a bit of sourdough. But I swear I’d been doing it years earlier as well [laughs]. I started off being like, yeah, exercising! So good! Cooking, woo! And then by maybe two weeks later, I was just watching way too much TV. I did take the time to think about a lot of things. There was a lot of time on my own just in my own head, which is obviously a good and a bad thing. 

C: When it’s imposed on you, I guess you don’t really have a choice.

A: Yeah, and in the end it was a good opportunity to reflect on where I was and where I wanted to be and what was fulfilling me and what wasn’t. What my own values were and how I wanted to express that in what I was doing. I don’t know, it did turn out to be what I needed but under not ideal circumstances, obviously. Like you don’t want your own epiphanies to come at the expense of obviously millions of people suffering. So correlating those things makes it sound really selfish, but in terms of just the time, or my very internal experience of it, it felt like an important time for me to slow down and reflect. And I think I was having a lot of conversations to that point too, with my housemates, and with my boyfriend, and just with people I was talking to. So I guess internally and externally, just working through a lot of ideas that maybe I hadn’t completely put into words, or hadn’t explored fully in my mind. 

C: Do you feel like you’ve acted on those feelings, those ideas?

A: Yeah, I think I actually have, which is unusual for me. But yeah, I was studying a bit, which was difficult, but I learnt a lot in that process. About myself as much as I did about the content that I’m studying. I started volunteering and that was the best thing. And that really reinforced what I do really enjoy and what I feel fulfilled by or engaged with or want to be engaged with. And then I guess too, as a lot of us do, I think I put a lot of pressure on myself so doing that in a volunteer capacity rather than working, it’s a nice way to explore that. I guess I was contributing without letting someone down who was paying me, or having to be this or that. I could just be there, and be present, and really enjoy the experience and get a lot from it, and hopefully contribute a little bit as well. And I think just reconnecting with community as well – that got in the works when we were still a little bit locked down I think. But when I started, we were still pretty restricted but there were a few things going on. So I think after that period of hibernation, it was nice to be involved in a community and work towards something with people. And I think I underrated the importance of community. It’s not something I’ve explicitly sought before. I think I realised it’s more important than I maybe give it credit for.

C: How did you feel with all the restrictions? Did you feel like you missed out on normal life, did you miss seeing people in person?

A: Not really, which is kind of bad [laughs]. No, it’s not good or bad. When it was really restricted, that was a little bit difficult. But as soon as we could have like two people over, I was happy. I was super happy just being at home and then being able to have two people over for dinner. That was fine. I don’t really miss going out that much. I was saying to someone the other day, I can have a good dance once every six months and I’d be happy. I don’t know, it was almost like there was a sense of relief not having social obligations.

C: In terms of making art, were you doing much of that before Covid?

A: I think I gave up my studio a couple months before. Maybe even a month or less. So strange timing, but I had started working full-time, so I didn’t really have time to go to my studio and I was paying rent on it. I had a grand idea to turn my shed into a studio and got as far as painting the walls white and then kind of left it. So, I don’t know, I was kind of slowing down anyway and I think I was quite hard on myself for not using that as an opportunity to make art. 

C: Just from external influences, like people saying…?

A: No, I think myself. I think I was kind of like, if not now, when? And in a sense, being an artist is so much time on your own, isolated in the studio. Your work doesn’t require necessarily many interactions. And then I was seeing all this stuff, like, artists have been practising for a pandemic their whole lives, or whatever. Which is kind of true to an extent, but I just couldn’t get in the headspace. I couldn’t get past that first step. I whipped out one painting for my friend’s birthday, even though I owed her another painting for something else completely. And I made a couple pinch pots but. I was quite disappointed in myself for not making more. 

C: How do you feel about it now?

A: I don’t know, I feel like I have more of an understanding that being completely self-directed isn’t me, like I need a bit of structure. And I think the environment of Covid and isolation, it was kind of the opposite of that. I wasn’t working, I wasn’t seeing people, I wasn’t seeing art. I didn’t even have a daily routine or any sense of days or weeks passing. So trying to fit in any sort of practice or productive activity when my sense of time was so warped and I had no sort of bearings on the day. I think that’s okay. I think now, it’s alright, but at the time I put a lot of pressure on myself and felt a lot of guilt for not utilising the skills and the materials and the education that I had to sort of make it work for me. 

C: Do you think you’ll go back to it?

A: Yeah. Well, I have a weird strange theory that I kind of stand by that I always have a bit of a hibernation period and this period of self-doubt, and I get quite productive in spring. Like I think I’m a bit of a cyclical artist. I don’t know if that’s even a thing. But I’ve just decided it is for me. So I often have a bit of energy at the beginning of the year, and then I have this period of like, what am I doing, self-doubt, not doing much, freaking out, thinking a lot. I feel like in winter, I just think so much but I don’t really do, and then often, I find that in spring, I get kind of a burst of energy and a burst of growth and whip stuff up, so hopefully it’ll be the same. I’m like semi-committed to something, so I just need to hold myself accountable now.

C: It’s in print [laughs]. It will be. We’ll all be holding you accountable.

A: But I feel a lot more inspired than I have in a while and I feel like I have a lot more energy to make things and I have ideas and I have plans.

C: Can you give us an inkling of what these ideas look like or what images come to mind? And is it related to this intense hibernation period?

A: I feel like it probably will be. I haven’t really thought about it like that at this period. Usually my process is to go out and do a bunch of studies. I think a lot of my practice is about me in nature and how I relate to the space that I’m in. So I think that in some way it will probably affect that, not necessarily in an explicit way. I don’t know, it’ll be interesting to see if that’s something that people pick up on, or I even pick up on. But I think at this stage I just want to go to some places with materials and just spend a few days just drawing and painting lots of studies.

C: In nature?

A: Yeah. And maybe then interpret them once I get them back out of that setting, and sit back and see what they mean to me, and make a bit more of a body of work from that. It’ll be interesting to do some self-portraits at the moment too though, which isn’t really my thing. But I think it’s always an interesting exercise every so often. To see how you interpret yourself. It’d be quite an interesting moment in time.

C: Do you think you’ve changed a lot internally throughout the year?

A: I think a bit, yeah. I think I’m fundamentally the same person, but I think I’m a bit more confident about how I feel about certain things. I think I’ve just spent so much time with myself. I really investigate on my own why I think or feel certain ways about certain things. So I think as much as I have maybe more self-doubt in certain areas, I think I’ve kind of changed in that I know…

C: You’re more certain about your self-doubts?

A: Yeah, exactly, and about who I am and who I am not. 

C: Yes.

A: And that’s kind of nice and comforting. Maybe that’s just the thing about getting older as well. It’s probably both.

C: We’ve all aged a lot this year.

A: I know. I’ve started getting two-day hangovers.

C: Do you have any thoughts about how the pandemic has affected the world in general? Or what 2021 might look like?

A: Well, I mean the debate in the US was on tonight, so the next few weeks could really impact what 2021 looks like. But I feel like it’s scraped off a layer of bullshit and brought a lot of stuff to the surface that needed to be addressed for a really long time. In so many countries and so many areas, like public health and global health and politics and the environment and our relationships with ourselves and each other. I don’t know, I feel like a lot of stuff that’s been simmering for a really long time, and that people have been telling us is really important to address for a really long time – like it feels like we’re at a point where we can’t really be wilfully ignorant anymore, or just refusing to engage doesn’t really seem like an option. I don’t really know how to express it, but it feels like it’s a perfect storm and not really in a good way, but I think we can just only be – I want to be optimistic that the outcomes will move us forward. 

C: I think a lot of that was echoed in what Erol said about the pandemic kind of taking things to a logical extreme of what was already happening in the world. Seeing it all play out and highlighting all the inequalities.

A: It’s funny, when you were talking about that just then – I always feel like I’ve got a visual montage going through my head of all these news clips. I feel like there’s visuals associated with the pandemic because so much of it comes through that visual culture. I’m seeing like protests, and snippets of Trump, and snippets of Scomo, and protests. It feels like there’s a reel just spinning so fast and I’ve got this visual of all this information.

C: Accelerating. What do you think you’ll remember the most when you look back on this year? What are the happy memories so far?

A: No, there’s been lots. I feel like I just had some really interesting genuine conversations with people. I feel like that kind of no bullshit thing has extended a little bit to personal interactions. And just being in the garden, and eating nice food with friends.

C: Focusing on the simple things.

A: Yeah, the simple things. Reading a really good book or watching a movie. I guess they’re the things that can happen any year.

C: But it feels more profound because of the shit that’s going on.

A: Gratitude’s maybe an overused word, but I feel like I’ve had the space to really see how lucky I am and be really grateful for the circumstances that I’ve been able to find myself in. I feel like that’s all come together a lot this year, on a very macro and micro level, which has been humbling and important to remember every so often. 

C: Is that linked to just living in Australia and how it’s played out here compared to everywhere else?

A: Yeah, completely. Even like my mum works in a public hospital and it’s been really full on for her. If she was in Italy or the UK or the States or China or so many other places, she would be having such a tough time, I would be so worried. Just that fear for loved ones and family and friends and the unknown. So yeah, living in Australia with the health systems that we have and the support networks that I’ve got as well. And I think the new job I’ve started doing and the volunteer work I’ve been doing has maybe given me some perspective on how that experience might be if I didn’t have the support that I do, or the stability and safety that I do have. So that’s really humbling as well. 

C: So you want to get into medicine – is that something that was reinforced this year watching the pandemic play out?

A: It was something I thought about in high school, and then I thought, no, it’s just only the ultra-elite. It felt like people like me don’t achieve that. It’s people who thought they were going to do it since they were six and had tutoring and they’ve got all the connections and go to the private schools or whatever. I think I just had an idea in my head about what it would entail. I don’t know, it just didn’t seem achievable. But then I kind of knew some people who were doctors and I was like, oh, they can do it, they’re real people. And then I started reflecting on the fact that actually having real people is really valuable. So the last year, maybe longer, I’ve been thinking about it more seriously, but then keep freaking myself out and being scared of failure. But then when I lost my job, I was like, well, if not now, when? So I was doing lots of studying also when I was locked down. I think there was a sense of like, I wish I had the skills to contribute and the training and the qualifications to be a part of that response. And I did find it a little bit frustrating when I was looking for jobs, looking for volunteer roles in the middle of lockdown and obviously they needed people with certain skillsets. Wanting to help but not quite having the right qualifications to do anything so just having to sit back and wait. 

C: Do you feel quite certain about where you want to be?

A: I don’t know, I’m looking at a few things. Like I’ve also applied for midwifery, thinking about applying for social work as well. So I’m not too rigid about it. I think it would be really interesting. And I think like you said about psychology, doing it for the people that can’t do it. It’s that idea. It’s not an easy thing. And if you do have that opportunity, being that person who is compassionate and hasn’t taken the most conventional path to get there and maybe has a bit more space for people who don’t fit the mould. Having a bit of space and compassion and empathy because you didn’t necessarily think initially that you were the person who could do that and then realising that you can and then actually being that person could be really valuable to a lot of people. 

C: Speaking of space, I guess Covid has, as you said earlier, given a lot of people the space to reflect and recalibrate. Do you think that’s true of a lot of people you know? You said you had good conversations with a lot of people. Do you think you’ve become closer with people as a result?

A: In terms of other people having the space to recalibrate, or consider where they’re at or where they want to be, I think it’s gone both ways. I know a few people who have thought about or decided to start studying again. It seems like people have either had way too much time, lost their jobs, or their circumstances have changed so much that they have a surplus of time, and then there’s the people who’ve just gotten more busy and they haven’t had time to think about things. They’re just going, but more so, and they’ve got less delineation between work and sleep and study. I’ve got friends who’ve been writing a thesis and working from home and sleeping in the same room and haven’t had time to kind of think about anything. It’s just been go-go-go. So I think it’s gone both ways with the people that I know. But I don’t think anyone’s really been entirely the same. I think for very few people it’s just changed nothing. I think a lot of people have kind of been like, fuck capitalism, I’ve been working too hard. Like what’s it all for. I don’t know. 

C: Definitely, fuck capitalism. 

A: I’ve had a lot of those conversations about capitalism, abolish the police, defund them. 

C: The role of the police has become more and more in the mainstream.

A: Yeah, because it’s not something – I’m not necessarily proud of it, but it’s not something that I had thought that much about, or had really needed to think that much about. So it’s something I’ve learnt a lot about recently. But I don’t know, to me it makes a lot of sense to fund holistic support systems that would address those things before they became matters that are being addressed by the police. Anyway, it’s a whole thing. 

C: Yeah, and I think that’s been a thing that’s been particularly highlighted this year.

A: Well, there’s been such a big crossover with Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus and the police response. And the health and justice outcomes are just so disparate, like they’re so different. 

C: But they could all be addressed by the same kind of approach, which is idealistic and difficult to get to. But it feels like it’s all linked. 

A: It seems like we can’t really go back to how things have always been because when has that worked for us? It works for a few people, but it doesn’t work. I keep thinking about the book I just finished reading actually, it seems very relevant.

C: What did you read?

A: Intimations, by Zadie Smith. 

C: What happened in it?

A: Six essays that she wrote in the first six months of this year, from New York and then London. 

C: During the pandemic?

A: Yeah, about the pandemic and racial inequality and politics and stuff. Just really personal. I feel like reading that book felt like it was a lot of this year. Like it really captured a lot of what this year’s been but from a very personal… I mean, she’s a great writer. She’s a beautiful writer too, so that helps. It’s just such a thin book and I feel like I just keep coming back to that and being like, yes, that’s what this year was. 

C: Did it recently get published?

A: Yeah, really recently. It came out in the past month maybe. So it hasn’t had that really long editing process or anything. It’s just like, she wrote it when it was happening and it’s still happening, this is what it is. 

C: I find it so interesting seeing pieces of – any kind of book or media, artefact, that happened this year, and like we’re still going through it. 

A: It’s so interesting reading it now, but I think it will be so interesting reading it in like five or ten years time, reading it anytime in the future, after reading it when it’s happening and seeing how that makes me feel as well. 

C: Just looking back on this whole period with Trump. Like it couldn’t have gone any other way. Just feels like this year was created for the future to look back on, as like a historical textbook.

A: Like, yes, that really happened. 

C: And there was that debate on September 30, which commentators on Twitter described as a shitshow or a circus, and then people who worked in the circus were like, that’s offensive to us [laughs]. Just an absurd year, but do we continue on this train of absurdity, or? 

A: I hope not. 

C: I mean, it depends on how the election goes. 

A: He still has so much power. 

C: It’s fucked that we care so much here in Australia. 

A: It affects everyone which is so wild and ridiculous, but it’s the way it is. 

C: It’s just like this TV show playing out. 

A: I know. And you can be in such a bubble where you feel like so much of the world agrees with you, and then you realise no, not even a little bit. Like we’re just reinforcing our own ideas but it’s not going to change that much necessarily, anytime soon. 

C: Like accepting, understanding how fucked the world is isn’t necessarily going to do anything.

A: Yeah, but there’s not like a clear path to take that will do something. I don’t know. 

C: It feels everyone is becoming more and more segregated and you know, the right are getting more and more into their conspiracy theories.

A: Oh my gosh, until really recently, so QAnon – obviously, big thing. I had just seen the headlines, not really looked into it, kept seeing it in headlines more and more often. Anyway, I totally thought everyone was talking about Qanda! 

C: What’s Qanda? 

A: Like, Q+A? So you know, when people are watching Q+A on the ABC? And they tweet like Qanda, Q and A? 

C: Ohh! 

A: So I totally misread QAnon as Q+A, and thought everyone was getting disgusted at the ABC! I was like, Hamish Macdonald has really got the conversation going. Oh my gosh, and then I finally figured it out, I was like no, QAnon’s been a really big thing for the last like two weeks. Very different. Very misguided. 

C: I got into this Facebook hole of like – only like two people who were really against the ABC. There’s a whole world out there and it’s so exacerbated by Facebook. 

A: Totally, and that feminist episode of Q+A that got taken down. I remember watching that and then I heard the next day that it had been taken down. 

C: I don’t know what happened. Was it controversial, or?

A: Yeah, a bit. But it was great. Lots of fuck the patriarchy, fuck capitalism, abolish the police. So obviously people were like, not on my ABC! But I mean that was good, and they give so much airtime to people who lean towards the right, or have pretty problematic and harmful views. It felt a bit ridiculous that people couldn’t handle that whether they agree or not. 

C: A lot of people can’t handle what they don’t agree with. And that’s like the rhetoric that the right says about the left, but it’s really the other way round. 

A: I think about that sometimes. How much can I accept things that I don’t agree with?

C: I guess the way I see things is just people haven’t had the education to think about things critically. 

A: I think so, but then sometimes I’m like why do I think I’m better, why do I think my education entitles me to be that critical thinker who’s correct. But then you can’t move forward with anything.

C: Like what’s the ideal world. 

A: Tricky. I’m sure there are lots of people with much better answers to that.

C: I feel like this past month I’ve barely thought about Covid. It’s become less and less of a thing in my mind to care about or worry about. And it does feel like surely things won’t get worse from here. How have you been feeling about it recently?

A: I don’t know. I feel like we’ve adjusted and we’ve gone through that period. Like in a broad sense, we’re grieving all those things that we can’t have or we’re adjusting to this huge change and now it’s back to a bit more normal, and it feels like we’ve gone through that acute period. But I feel like it’s really not over. Like in so many countries, it’s ramping up, the death rate and the infection rate are higher. I think some of the milestones in terms of positive cases and deaths and everything are increasing more than they were at the beginning of the pandemic. I think the UK the other day had the most positive cases that they’ve had since it started. But in saying that, I guess it was very hard to get a test early on so those numbers maybe aren’t indicative of who’s actually been affected. I don’t know, it feels like there’s these two coexisting realities of like, it’s moving on and we’re coming out the other side, but then also like, slightly out of sound and out of mind, it’s really not. And that could hit us anytime because at the end of the day, we can put a lot of measures in place but it is a virus and it doesn’t discriminate in terms of who it affects. 

C: And how we feel about it. 

A: Yeah, exactly. If it’s in the community and it gets to a certain point, it is what it is. And it’s kind of bigger than all of us. And it’s not this visible thing that we can wage a war on. It’s kind of just there. So I feel like there’s these two coexisting realities and like, theoretically in all of these places it’s getting worse, and certain numbers are increasing, and certain milestones are being passed, but at the same time, it feels like the opposite’s happening here. And that’s what our day to day experience is. So it’s kind of hard to – what’s the word I’m thinking of?

C: Reconcile?

A: Yeah, reconcile the two things. 

C: Yeah. I think a lot of how I’ve been feeling – maybe people in general here – is because of the big dramatic increase in cases in Melbourne and then quite a dramatic fall, and that kind of reassuring everyone that it’s all okay in Australia, and will be soon. Christmas is coming, you know.

A: Yeah, but then is there going to be another spike after Christmas and New Years, when people are moving around and seeing everyone and in the shops. Wanting to do social things. And for Melbourne to get where it is now – they’ve been in a very serious lockdown for a long time. And there’s no reason why – I mean, obviously aside from restrictions and measures and hotel quarantine and all of those things, but if the virus gets out into the community, there’s no reason why the same couldn’t happen again. From my understanding at least. 

C: Yeah, definitely. 

A: And there’s so much we don’t know too. Like we don’t know how long people will be immune to it for, or how much it’ll mutate, or even what the long-term effects are. So it seems like it’s kind of out of sight and out of mind for now, but it’s also this thing that doesn’t seem entirely real but is kind of an ever-present threat. But then I think, I don’t know, is that just the way our brains work? Like to compartmentalise it or… I don’t know. 

C: There’s no way of accessing the reality. 

A: Yeah, especially if you’re not – if you’re removed from the extent of it. 

C: I think most people in Sydney have been lucky enough to be removed from the real life effects. 

A: Yeah, like we’re not in the health system, we’re not in a hotspot, I don’t think we know anyone who’s died from it. It’s so different in other places. It’s going to be super interesting reflecting on this period. I wonder if I’ll remember how I thought and felt about everything. What is going to be remembered, what’ll stand out. 

C: What do you think you’ve learnt the most from this period?

A: I think it’s kind of self-indulgent, but I think I’ve learnt a lot about myself from spending a lot of time with myself. And I think that’s an important thing to grow and move forward. 

C: What’s the main thing you’ve learnt about myself?

A: I don’t know if that’s something I even have words for. 

C: Maybe an image.

A: I’ve got abstract thoughts but I don’t necessarily have the – I don’t know what words they would make. 

C: What’s the first thing that comes to mind?

A: Like who I am, I don’t know. I think I’ve just sat with myself and I know – I think as a lot of us do, I’ve equated who I am and a lot of my identity with a lot of external things like what I’m doing for work, what I’m making creatively, where I’m living, all of those kind of actions or behaviours. But I think I’ve become more comfortable in my identity independent of what I’m doing. 

C: The inexpressible. The intangible. 

A: Yeah, it’s super internal. Like how I think and feel about certain things. I don’t think it’s like an epiphany or a revelation. Those things have always been there but I think they’ve become more dominant to how I see myself and who I think I am. As opposed to what my job is, or what I’m working towards right now. Like in saying that, those things still obviously matter, but I think there’s been more of a shift from needing that external validation to being a bit more comfortable in how I feel and what I think and who I am and how I comprehend the world. Finding value in that. 

[thepandemicinterviews]

Erol, August 30 2020, Sydney

The only way I can write is to talk to people. As I write this, I’m listening to Italian DJ Freddy K say to his audience in the streets of Berlin, as well as techno fans all over the world, “United we are beautiful.” I don’t know much about techno, but I feel uplifted and inspired seeing this man doing what he loves, doing love, giving a little bit of love to whoever may be listening. Erol introduced me to Freddy K during the course of our interview. From March to June, Freddy K played music live for an hour every day for 100 days, uploading the recordings to SoundCloud for everyone to enjoy. In his interview with Monument, he pronounced, “together we are something … alone you are simply a DJ.” In 1993, at age 21, he began his Virus radio show where he tirelessly played music for four hours every day. 

Everything was a bit more tangible, a bit more believable back then. I am talking in general. Back then, information was absorbed before having already been dissected within a matter of seconds, bounced around the world, lacerated and shoddily put back together by some Twitter commentator. These days, people read Facebook comments before deciding whether to read the article. Algorithms are no longer what you learn in primary school maths. We are post- everything.

I talked to my new friend Erol in my new and improved garage on a long hazy Sunday evening. We spoke for an hour and laughed a lot, at times delightfully interrupted by my housemate Citi. It’s difficult to summarise what we spoke about, but I encourage you to read all of it. The thing that stuck with me the most is Erol saying that everything that is experienced is reality. Categorising, simplifying and disseminating all these divergent and infinite realities: the process of constructing ideology.

A commenter on Freddy K’s 100th radio show said, “Dancing together is the most ancient form of society, it is a human and now also a post-human thing, we cannot avoid it.” I like to think in the distant future, when notions of truth and reality become laughable relics of a previous “humanity,” our deformed bodies will continue dancing forever.

C: What do you think 2021 will look like?

E: That’s a good first question. I think a lot of things will probably go back to how they were in some ways.

C: Do you think we’re already starting to do that?

E: Yeah. My brother works for an airline and he told me that basically from the beginning of next year, countries are just going to open their borders because they just have to for the interests of global capitalism. It will kind of force countries to go back to normal because there’s too much money being lost with closed borders and restrictions that it’s just unsustainable. So from next year, that’s what he thinks. Flights will kind of go back to normal but there’ll be face masks, obviously, and temperature checks and some countries will have mandatory quarantine depending on where you’ve come from or transited through. So that’s like one side of the thing – that’s like the international flow of people, being probably the most drastic thing. One of the most drastic things. Otherwise, I think people are really – assuming that in a lot of places cases don’t go out of control – I guess, people are really good at forgetting things and kind of…

C: Getting used to things.

E: Yeah. Getting used to changes really quickly, and it just becoming normal. Which is kind of what we saw in the past five months or whatever.

C: Especially in the past two months I feel.

E: But even when lockdown first happened, within a couple of weeks it was kind of just like, oh yeah, this is just how it is. And you just kind of accept that. And a couple months later when the restrictions first eased, that just became a thing where you could go to a bar spaced out and hand sanitiser and that was just normal. That’s kind of where we are now. And then I think, assuming there are no crazy outbreaks in Australia again like in Melbourne, then it would kind of be like people would just forget what it was like a year ago.

C: Yeah, going out every weekend.

E: Yeah. I think people just kind of adapt to circumstances really quickly without reflecting, I’ve found. At least personally. I’ve talked to other people and there’s lots of like, just kind of accept the circumstances.

C: What’s the alternative?

E: In what way?

C: Like is there an alternative?

E: An alternative 2021?

C: To accepting the circumstances. Is there a way to take action?

E: I always thought that the pandemic might be an opportunity for, I don’t know, systemic change. Something idealistic like that. But it’s like not.

C: It’s not! I was reading this article about Michael Moore saying that Trump will get re-elected and that everyone needs to wake up. And that terrifies me. That date when we watch it, and it’s just another four years. It just made everything worse rather than better, maybe.

E: I thought that as well. When he first got elected – seems like he could get elected again. I don’t really know enough about US electoral politics.

C: It’s so flawed that he could get re-elected.

E: Is it a flaw? It’s not like rigged, necessarily.

C: It is.

E: Yeah, I guess the electoral college system.

C: Also like Russian interference is real, and him being against the postal service is definitely strategic.

Citi arrives.

Citi: Erol, I have no idea what I’ve walked into, but what is the most obscure meal you ate that you wouldn’t have eaten if it wasn’t for Covid?

Chloe: That’s an amazing question!

Erol: That’s a really good question. Better than your opener. Obscure meal?

Citi: Yeah, just a meal that wouldn’t have taken place if it wasn’t for Covid.

Erol: You mean like the food, or the people?

Citi: Whatever. You can interpret it however you want to interpret it.

Erol: I’m so bad at thinking of things on the spot. Okay, I guess here’s one. Have you guys still not been to the Pantry?

Chloe: No.

Erol: I went and got these frozen pork steaks for like a dollar, or something. They’d been frozen just before they went off, I guess. They’d passed the use-by date frozen in time. I had those and then Tom came over, and he wasn’t going to eat, but I was like, can you help me cook these because I don’t know what to do with them. And then Tom just scored them and seasoned them and put all this random shit on them that I would have never have had otherwise. That I didn’t know you could do to a rough piece of disgusting meat. And then I cooked them and ate them alone and it was quite nice, surprisingly. So he came and saved the meal. Pantry food goes alright. It was an absurd meal though, I have to say.

Citi: That’s a great answer.

Citi leaves.

C: Have you been keeping in contact with people from around the world?

E: Yes I have, which has been cool because I do think of myself as someone who’s bad at keeping in contact with people when I’m not with them in the same city and seeing them. So I’ve just always thought that was who I was and I was okay with that, and I would occasionally message someone who I haven’t spoken to in ages and catch up with them. But surprisingly, because I have lots of friends in Berlin and around Europe and even in Canada, I’ve had catch-ups with them way more than I thought I would have otherwise.

C: Have you been comparing experiences?

E: Yeah. I think there’s definitely that kind of cliché of, oh yeah, everyone’s going through a similar thing which is true to an extent. It’s a very unique experience where everyone is in a similar position because there were lockdowns all over the world. So that was definitely true. And then, I guess in Australia I was always thinking about like – our government’s response was in a lot of ways stricter. There was – still is –enforcement with fines which lots of countries didn’t have. At least in Germany, I know there was a big – like as restrictions started to ease people just went back to normal. I’m thinking mostly about partying and holding raves and stuff. That just happened straight away, and I was kind of jealous of that because it didn’t happen here. Rightfully – it shouldn’t. There have been a couple of outbreaks at raves which would just be terrible if that happened here. When I message my friends I’m like, yeah we still don’t have any parties. We’re still just at people’s houses.

C: It’s going to be that for a while!

E: I’m optimistic that it will change in the summer, maybe.

C: But will that be bad? Will we feel guilty?

E: Yeah, you will feel guilty. But this is the thing that I was kind of saying before, that things will probably just go back to, to a large extent, how they were. Assuming that even if there is no vaccine by early next year, I think – as we’ve kind of seen in New South Wales already, that will just ease a bit more. Governments will make decisions, and they already have, that are more in the economic interests than in the public health interest.

C: It seems like the news recently has been a lot of anti Queensland being so hard on their borders. I’ve seen a few articles about that.

E: And before the Melbourne outbreak happened in late-June/July, it was a lot of pressure – everyone was like, this thing is over, it’s done. And then, when that happened that was kind of like a wakeup call, and there were some outbreaks in Sydney and stuff. But now it’s kind of going back to where it was in the rest of the country.

C: Yeah, like it was a necessary wakeup call. Which is terrible, but probably would have happened later at some point? So hopefully it doesn’t get as bad from here on. But it will depend a lot on the international borders. So if those open up, I guess we have to live with this?

E: So I was planning to go back to Germany in May next year to do an exchange. And it seems like the uni is just assuming it’ll go ahead. Like everyone’s just operating on that assumption. It’s kind of interesting to see how that forward-thinking, like forward-planning – because it kind of just threw everything out of whack in terms of like, any plans ever, forever. Just destroyed in a matter of weeks. It’s kind of crazy to think about. I want to say liberating? Because there’s no – you’re not locked into anything.

C: There’s no free will! This little virus ruined the whole world [laughs]. It didn’t mean to.

E: So we’ll see if that goes ahead. It’s been kind of nice – at least for a while there, I was like, well no one’s really doing anything in the world, at all. No one’s having that much fun anywhere. I’m at home and so is literally everyone else in the world.

C: Have you taken up any new hobbies? Do you have more time now as a result?

E: I haven’t taken up any hobbies. I’ve been busy with Uni and work, which is definitely a good thing. It’s good to keep busy because I definitely would’ve had a very different experience if I wasn’t super occupied. So I even took on an extra subject for Uni, just because I was like, I want to speed up my degree and everything’s at home, online, there are no exams, they’re all take home things. So can’t be that hard. It was pretty hard, turns out [laughs].

C: Yeah, it’s crazy. I remember studying for my exam, 48 hour exam, like what can they do to make it hard? And they did make it hard! It took me a whole night, I pulled an all-nighter.

E: Yeah, same. But it was kind of nice because I was like, well, there’s no point studying heaps because the exam’s going to be on a very particular part of the course. I can just learn that part of the course in the – we had 72 hours. Which was like 72 hours of hell! But I think probably less stressful overall than doing a two-hour exam that you have to cram for.

C: Yeah, I mean it taps into a different kind of learning and memory. Like I think I’ve retained more information from the course as a result, rather than cramming it and just rote learning everything.

E: Interesting. All of my exams are open-book exams normally anyway, which is really good. But the stress is you make a really good set of notes. I was very pro doing the take-home exams and that’s why I took an extra subject. So I found I was just at my desk all the time, which was kind of repetitive, obviously, but not terrible. I moved house at the end of June. My last place was much smaller and my desk was really uncomfortable. The ground was like sloped, so I was always on a slope and I had a bad back, which you don’t want at 22.

C: I have a bad back as well.

E: It’s tough, backs are really important.

C: Just gotta exercise more.

E: Yeah, well, who’s going to do that. My new place is really nice. The thing I rave about – I guess you haven’t been there during the day – it’s north-facing, so that the whole courtyard is fully in the sun during the day. And the back rooms and kitchen are really sunny. The last place was not north-facing, so there wasn’t much sun. And that just made a huge difference to my mood and how I’d go about it. I’d just go and sit in that room at the back, or in the courtyard and do work. That was really nice.

C: I’ve been doing that as well. Have you been working from home?

E: I’m working like three days a week from home, kind of. I had classes and work and online lectures. So it’s been a lot of that. But now I’m on holidays for a couple weeks, so it’s much nicer.

C: Do you have trimesters?

E: Yeah, we have trimesters. So that was Trimester 2. Trimester 1, the lockdown happened halfway through, and that was really interesting to see the rapidly unfolding changing situation. The uni was like, oh, it’s fine, we’re open, and then they were like, no, we’re not open. Everyone go home. In a matter of days.

C: Yeah, I remember being in my French class, and then being in my English class on the Thursday, and them saying, just be mentally prepared if Uni shuts down, if the campus shuts down. We were all kind of like, ahh, surely that’s not going to happen. And then within a matter of days it shuts down.

E: Yeah, wow.

C: It’s a weird feeling. But now we’ve come to a point where we’ve just accepted it. It’s not like surprising.

E: Exactly. I felt kind of guilty about this feeling – I still do – but as it was unfolding in real time, obviously it was a terrible thing happening in the world, but it was really exhilarating to kind of watch the live updates.

C: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure, and now it’s like kind of boring.

E: Yeah. I was on that live feed, checking the live cases. Obviously those are people’s lives, and all the terrible things that happened. But I was like, I feel like I’m in a movie!

C: Yeah, me too.

E: Stuff’s happening, Germany’s closed its borders. It’s like an apocalyptic thing that’s real life.

C: Everyone in the world is living through it. It’s like, we haven’t had this before in our lifetimes.

E: Absolutely not. I read something that even world wars weren’t really world wars, they were mostly European wars. It didn’t affect the whole world. Whereas this literally affected the whole world.

C: Not one country unscathed.

E: Yeah, I thought a lot about the feeling you’re in a movie or something. It’s not real, or whatever. Trying to grasp the reality of the situation. And especially with everyone being in their own houses, in their rooms, absorbing everything through a screen the whole time. Like how is that reality? That’s how you’re processing information, hearing things about the world, processing that, and then existing in that and experiencing it. Like everything is through a screen and through some mediated technology. And it just felt like our whole world before 2020 was kind of leading up to this moment, where people were absorbed with social media. Like everything becoming less and less tangible and understandable and more chaotic, and things are happening and politics is going crazy. And then all of a sudden, a pandemic happens. It just takes it to a logical extreme of where it was heading already. And then it’s like, when that happens, how do people react in that situation? Oh yeah, there’s like a mental health crisis unheard of before.

C: And conspiracy theorists, I think, is linked to that.

E: Oh, definitely. The whole thing about truth. People trying to work out and navigate if something’s truth. Lots of people said with Trump’s election and Brexit and stuff, and all this alt-right scepticism which is also deeply linked to the conspiracy theories, it’s like we’re in a post-truth world or something. Fake news and stuff. These were all massive terms thrown around in 2016 when this stuff happened.

C: We’re seeing it all come to its most extreme form.

E: It just keeps going. It’s like, well where to from here? Can we go back to truth? I wrote an essay about this for international relations. Like what postmodern, post-structural theorists had been kind of thinking about the world, and world-politics generally, and looking at representation and how meaning is constructed. All of this kind of – is it bullshit or what are they even talking about kind of theorising. And then I was like, oh this kind of does make sense in terms of thinking about these past few years, and then everything just becoming more… There’s no fixed points of meaning, like thinking about what is legitimate. It’s completely unmoored, detached.

C: The line between reality and satire has become so blurred. Everything is ridiculous, absurd.

E: Yeah, our humour online is like ironic, or post-ironic. No one even knows.

C: No one knows.

E: And maybe that’s the point, like you’re not supposed to know. So it’s really hard to process this. But it’s like, well, I still do my daily tasks. I still get out of bed, turn on my laptop in the morning, and log into that lecture or whatever. Scroll Instagram in the evening. Maybe TikTok.

C: You go on TikTok?

E: Yeah, I go through phases of downloading it. Scrolling for like three hours straight, be like, that’s terrifying, and delete it straightaway. That happened a couple times. It’s really fascinating. That’s like the next level. Because it’s just people producing content and it just mirrors forever around the world, and they use the sound from one video over and over again on different videos everywhere in the world. Depending on how the algorithm works, you can access some very niche topics. Like random interests. My friend said somehow the algorithm thought she was an amputee. Kept showing her amputee content.

C: That’s crazy.

E: And another friend was saying she keeps ending up on Pakistani TikTok, and just seeing Pakistani content. But she kind of enjoys it and it’s really interesting to look at. It’s now being banned in the US which will probably mean the end of it for a lot of Western countries because a lot of our content consumption is driven by US tastes, I think. It’s a bit scary but true. Yeah, there’s a lot happening. I guess that’s a good way to link back to what does 2021 hold, because where to from here?

C: Do you think we can retain our sense of reality? I think so. I hope so. There’ll always be like a smart minority, maybe. Maybe it’ll become more and more of a minority.

E: I feel like some of the point of that thought is like, well, actually there is no distinction between whatever we were just talking about and reality. They are all what is experienced and what is reality. There never was an objective truth, or something. There never was something that made sense. But it’s just kind of thrown up in our faces more and more that we’re now seeing this. I don’t know, there’s always been lying as the bedrock of politics. Always.

C: Skewing reality.

E: And the media is an essential part of creating that kind of reality and assumptions and common understandings of things like invading Iraq in 2003. It was like, they have weapons of mass destruction and everyone’s like, yes they do, all of a sudden, because President Bush said that. And then, let’s invade Iraq illegally. Is that post-truth? Like why didn’t we think of that like that? But maybe this advancement is just us realising more and more that this is how we experience reality. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

C: That makes a lot of sense. I can’t remember what it’s called but like Althusser – have you read Althusser?

E: Yeah.

C: My course that I did last semester was called Text, Action, and Ideology. So I thought a lot about that. How ideology is created. It’s all manufactured by people in power.

E: Yeah, absolutely. And then the subsequent question is, well, what does that actually mean for how I exist or conduct myself or do things or make decisions. I just think it doesn’t change anything. Thinking about things in this way, whatever that way is.

C: Yeah, we still have to exist practically.

E: I don’t know, it’s kind of jarring. Whenever I think about politics I always get to this pessimistic thing of like, oh well, people are just idiots and there’s nothing you can do about that. I don’t know, there might be a climate catastrophe in the next hundred years. There’s probably not much that we can really change. Maybe there is, but what, I’ll go to rallies, vote for good candidates. Like, cool, let’s have a revolution. How? How are you going to do that? There’s like a military. How are you going to overthrow the military to change the fundamental order of capitalism? Like, nope. And then it’s like, well what do I do then? Yeah, I guess I’ll turn my laptop on and attend this lecture in the morning [laughs].

C: That’s very much how I think as well.

E: I guess everyone thinks like that.

C: Some people think they can make a difference. And I admire that and I respect that. But this is reality. We live in a society.

E: We live in a society [laughs].

C: It’s kind of fucked. But it’s always been fucked. Humans are fallible. And things have been worse in the past.

E: I think about that a lot, like what’s it been like in the past compared to now. Because people always seem to think that the now is the worst.

C: But it’s been worse.

E: But it has been worse, yeah.

C: I don’t think I would be able to exist as comfortably as I do a hundred years ago.

E: Definitely. Yeah, it is kind of a thing of hope, maybe. Hope in quotation marks. The things that we take very for granted now are still very new in the inventions or creations of progression in society. Who knows what is actually possible, even in our lifetimes.

C: What’s it going to be like when we’re old? It’s terrifying.

E: Yeah, it is a bit scary. The thing about forgetfulness, like people just forget what it was like. Personally, I forgot what it was like in December/January, what like 8/9 months ago when we had apocalyptic bushfires. And Sydney was covered in smoke for months, and you couldn’t do anything. And summer was terrible because it was blanketed in smoke. And that was like, whoa, this is real, this is climate change, it’s really happening. But that’s kind of been forgotten, straightaway. Even if there wasn’t a pandemic, probably would be the same. Bushfires have disappeared, the smoke disappeared, back to normal or whatever. It’s a bit disappointing, maybe.

C: What’s been positive in your life because of Covid?

E: I guess I moved out from South Sydney to around here just before lockdown happened. I was able to see friends who live around here really easily. It was kind of necessary. Tom and I just went on heaps of bike rides, absurdly long. I wasn’t really a cyclist at all, never became a cyclist, but we cycled to Mosman, random places, because it was the only thing you could do in April/May. I guess I became closer with a few people which was nice. I think I’ve just been really lucky all around. I have quite a few friends who suffered pretty badly with mental health stuff. Even retaining their jobs and stuff. Just the isolation of it. I think I’m a person who is pretty extraverted and needs some social things happening. But even with that I was still pretty good. I think I’ve gotten through pretty well, which I’m pretty fortunate and thankful for. I just realised how precariously so many people live under our late-stage capitalism.

C: I feel the same because I kept my job of four years throughout. I kept working at least once a week throughout the height of lockdown, so it was a bit of normalcy to ground me.

E: Yeah, fully necessary. My friends in Berlin, lots of them are migrants. Lots from Turkey, who don’t have much job security, or just general security, because your Visa is tied to your job, or tied to study. And with exchange rates, even if their families could help them, it wouldn’t be possible to stay long-term without a job. So that became such a defining thing, whether you kept your job, whether you can kind of retain your life, or if you have to move home. Thankfully most of them were able to get by. That’s something that’s really bad as well in Australia with international students, just complete abandonment.

C: How do you feel about New Zealand’s response compared to Australia?

E: I think a lot of things – just really clear government messaging…

C: Just really like – I mean, it’s because they’re a small country and they all feel kind of linked together. It wouldn’t have worked here.

E: There’s no federal system there. Whereas here, there’s lots of differences of opinion between state and federal governments which is a thing that’s hard to work out. So that’s probably helpful. And yeah, being a small country made it easier. Immediately, they were like, okay, it’s Stage 3.

C: Yeah, I talk to my friends all the time and they are just like – they know exactly what the levels are, and they just uphold that. I feel like they’ve overreacted a little bit. I don’t know, that’s a good thing overall, but it’s like, you’re kind of out of touch with the rest of the world. But that’s good for you, you’re just kind of this isolated little country.

E: Little island. Islands. Yeah, that makes such a huge difference because there’s so many people in a country. There’s millions of people. They all have to get a message and follow a thing. Even in Victoria when they went into really harsh lockdown, how do you get everyone to know the rules and follow the rules. The police response I think has shown that it’s not necessarily effective to just fine people. Because it’s just not how a society functions, to retroactively punish for things rather than having a solid public health campaign. And the reaction a lot of the time, this kind of conspiracy reaction is like, the police are coming and fining you and entering your homes and checking up on you. And it’s this very forceful kind of state action. Whereas in most European countries, there’s no fines for not complying with directions. Whereas we still have fines here in New South Wales. Which are just used at the discretion of the police, which is just such an issue. Like the Sydney Uni protest against fee hikes. And they fined however many people there, and arrested them, whereas the classes were still ongoing – a class with 60 people and there were 50 people at a protest, socially distanced. Again, maybe just something that’s really showing us the realities of how our society functions. Very punitive.

C: Keeping the social order. Police state.

E: Yeah.

C: It’s hard, because how do you balance that.

E: It is a very delicate thing, but the period where Black Lives Matter took off around the world, and there were very few, like 0-2 cases [a day] in New South Wales, and they allowed one protest to go ahead – the huge one, but then the other ones after that they completely clamped down on and arrested and fined people.

C: It’s not about Covid… There’s so much more going on.

E: Oh, yeah. Just kind of throws it into your face. This is exactly what this country is built on. This should’ve been light-hearted! Should’ve talked about raves, I want to go partying…

C: What kind of music have you been listening to?

E: I guess, my electronic music taste is mostly just standard techno. Pretty like, not mainstream, but in terms of people who listen to techno, just standard stuff. Whereas, since coming back to Sydney I’ve, through Tom and others, been broadening into different horizons with electronic music, like more edgy experimental stuff. Which has been really cool. Check out their new compilation [laughs].

C: Josh is on it!

E: Really? Oh true. Do you know what track is his?

C: I don’t know, I haven’t seen the tracklist.

E: Yeah, I have been listening to a lot of different music. Actually, this might be interesting for you. There’s an Italian DJ who lives in Berlin, kind of standard techno stuff. Still really good music. But he kind of is part of a community of people, mostly a queer community. And obviously clubs shut straightaway, and he started, in March, a daily radio show/podcast, where he just plays tracks for an hour and puts it on SoundCloud. Every day. He did it for a hundred days. Which I was like, how the hell could you do – not even skipping one day. And every day, on time, 3pm. It was really kind of uplifting in the moments where you were just sitting at home, and you’d just hear this Italian dude being like, you know, we’re all in this together, don’t worry! Like I’m inside too, or whatever. But let’s listen to some good music.

C: I feel like that’s Italy, like that’s want we want from Italy. They went through the worst of it and have come out like, it’s all okay guys!

E: Yeah, it was really nice. And he just felt super real, because he’d talk about the weather that day. Like, it’s a nice sunny day. Oh, it’s a grey day, it’s okay guys! And then the last episode was like – the hundredth was the last episode, so that’s over three months every day. And restrictions had eased a bit, and he played his show in this setup they have where it’s just a room on the side of the road. It’s a DJ booth and they play a live set just there and people walking by could just watch this person they’ve got playing. They had him there, and a fair few people, socially distanced around, kind of dancing around him on the hundredth episode. And then everyone was crying at the end. I just thought that kind of community thing…

C: I cried about Italy. And when they all started singing on their balconies, I was like, this is beautiful.

E: Did you see the thing in Sydney? There were like two singers, two guys, who sang “I Still Call Australia Home”? Like from their apartment to the other apartment. Somewhere in a rich part of Sydney. But it was still nice. Pretty heart-warming. That’s the thing, when you’re so kind of downtrodden, really simple things can lift you up.

C: Yeah, like baking bread? I haven’t done that.

E: I didn’t do that. I didn’t do any of the standard things.

C: I didn’t either. Too busy.

E: I really didn’t do anything different a lot of the time, having been at home. I read some books. Reading books is nice. I’ve been trying to keep that up, which hasn’t been going too badly actually.

C: Good.

E: Yeah, books are nice. I recommend books [laughs]. I read a book in the park today, it was really nice.

C: Erol endorses books.

E: Like literally anything. Just not right-wing politics books. Most other things are quite nice. Fiction, like reading stories is nice.

C: I like reading non-fiction, like essays.

E: Yeah, essays are cool. I find a non-fiction book, like a whole book about politics –

C: It doesn’t have to be about politics. But I guess everything is about politics.

E: Yeah. Just like a non-fiction whole book, I’m just like, it’s a lot of things.

C: I like the kind of in-between non-fiction and fiction. I think that’s where the good stuff is.

E: Yeah, do you have any recommendations?

C: I’m reading Wayne Koestenbaum. It’s just a bunch of essays where every sentence is just so well-constructed and ridiculously good. He’s inspired by Susan Sontag and that kind of writing, so. He’s a gay man who lived through the 80s, lived through the AIDS epidemic and all of that, Andy Warhol scene, so it’s interesting. And he’s very smart.

E: I’m all about book recommendations. I endorse recommendations.

C: You recommend recommendations [laughs].

E: Yeah, I recommend asking for recommendations. If someone’s read something that’s cool, I also might enjoy it, maybe.

Citi arrives again.

Citi: I’ve come to eavesdrop.

Chloe: We’re endorsing books and recommendations. We recommend recommendations. This is going to be a great interview written down. This is the longest interview [laughs].

Erol: I’m sorry!

Chloe: No, it’s fantastic. It’s been an hour!

Citi: I take recommendations, so I’ll have to pay attention.

Chloe: This is going to be the best interview. Thank you Issy.

Erol: Really?

Chloe: I think so. It’s so meta. I love it. We’ve gone places.

Citi: How does it end? Does it end?

Erol: It never ends. Does anything ever end?

[thepandemicinterviews]

Steven, August 11 2020, Sydney

After editing this interview with Steven (I struggled to edit anything out, so apologies in advance for the length), I put on Side C of Norman Fucking Rockwell and blasted “California” in my room.

Oh, I'll pick you up If you come back to America, just hit me up 'Cause this is crazy love, I'll catch you on the flip side If you come back to California, you should just hit me up We'll do whatever you want, travel wherever how far We'll hit up all the old places We'll have a party, we'll dance 'til dawn I'll pick up all of your Vogues and all of your Rolling Stones Your favorite liquor off the top shelf I'll throw a party all night long

Another great line: I've heard the war was over if you really choose.

I love to hate on America, yet I also understand its allure and fantasy. I can’t help but think about this “war” as Covid, and the insular, ignorant, optimistic American population choosing that it’s over. I can admire their raging belief in the unreal. This is what Hollywood was built on.

Searching America in my notes, I see that in June 2016 I wrote a list of movies I liked. Among them: Heathers, Mulholland Drive, American Beauty, Dazed and Confused, Doom Generation. What do these films have in common? They all, I think, capture a particular American delirium—the how far will you go to experience beauty, never mind how false it is. A note from May 2018 simply reads “America—land of delusion”. In July 2018, when I was in Paris, I jotted down a few things from American writer Jenny Zhang’s talk outside Shakespeare and Company. Notably: “The utter abusiveness of the American dream.”

It’s difficult these days to look at any news stories regarding American politics and coronavirus without wanting to laugh, cry, and vomit all at the same time. But then you think of the 300 or so million people who have to live there, under Trump. Some obviously blinded by misinformation and their sheer lack of critical thinking skills, but the others? I draw a blank—I feel like punching something on their behalf.

Steven moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of this year to pursue a life of excitement and wonder. It was all lined up—it was finally happening. He was meeting celebrities, getting jobs, doing everything that Lana del Rey would have wanted for him. Until Covid hit, and the red carpet was no longer. Fast forward (or slow forward) to the end of March, and he’s in hotel quarantine in Sydney, getting lambasted by Boomers who are complaining about him complaining. Steven is an example of someone whose life has been forcibly upended by this evil virus. Or, to put it more lyrically, his dream was shattered by something so devastatingly real that no amount of cheery American humour could repair it. His is a story of profound rearrangement, but there is a happy ending: safety.

C: Hi Steven. So this isn’t the first time you’ve been interviewed, right, about your experience?

S: No! You heard that I made my way on the news a couple of times?

C: I knew that you had interviewed for, was it Sydney Morning Herald?

S: Yeah, so I work for Channel Nine so I’ve got a few friends at Sydney Morning Herald and around in the Channel Nine world, I guess. I did one for that newspaper, I did one for 9Honey. I was on the news a couple of times. I mean, my whole experience coming home was documented through a few different news stories. And I did a few interviews on radio, 2GB, ABC Radio, Today FM and Kiis FM. So it was a lot. A lot of media. And the Today Show, but that’s my show, that’s what I usually work on, so it was more just like, Steven can you come and do a segment with us? And I was like, let’s do it!

C: Was that in person? Or while you were in quarantine?

S: Yeah, so coming home I was one of the first groups of people to be put in hotels. I got sent to the Ibis hotel, got put in a very small box for two weeks. Went a little crazy. But yeah, the morning after I got there is basically where I did all those interviews from. I’ve never really done remote interviews either, so it was a lot of getting used to for a lot of us.

C: Were you happy to do the interviews?

S: Totally. So, coming home was pretty shit to say the least. For at least those first few days when I was coming home I had something to do. On the plane back home, I had to document stuff for the newsroom.

C: Wow, so they were lined up before…

S: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was in contact with the newsroom all the way, because it was a six hour bus ride from the airport to the hotel, because of just how slow the process had to be. So throughout that entire time, I was talking to the newsroom, and they go, Do you know which hotel you’re going to, we’re sending a reporter there. So as soon as I got off the bus, I found the lovely Tiffiny Genders from Channel Nine, she’s incredible. Ran up to her, and the police were trying to be like, Don’t leave! And I was like, I’m just going here! So we were trying to really make time to meet up for all of these moments in-person if we could, and eventually two weeks later when I got to leave the hotel, we did a follow-up with some more reporters that were there to see me hug my family as I left the hotel. So it was a lot, but it did give me something to do which is what I really needed because once it all calmed down after a few days, that was the beginning of the end for me [laughs]. I started to go a little crazy.

C: Right, so [what was it like] during quarantine?

S: When I didn’t have anything to do, your brain wanders, especially when you’re in a two-metre by two-metre box and your only view of the outside is the same unchanging view of Darling Harbour. Which is beautiful, but I never want to see it again, not for a long time. Eventually when the only thing you have to do are your Animal Crossing chores, you start to go a little crazy. And I did! There was one day where I locked myself in the bathroom of the hotel room I was in, took a bottle of wine from the morning, until like eight hours later. I was very water wasteful that day, unfortunately. But I had an eight hour shower, where I just sat in there, got drunk. I say that I was singing, but it was more that I was screaming the lyrics to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” over and over, and apparently the police who were stationed on every floor of the hotel were banging on the door for a few hours, wondering if I had died. That was probably my craziest day. That’s probably the craziest I’ve ever been in my life.

C: How far into quarantine were you at that point?

S: To be honest, time stopped making sense. It was very strange when it came to time. I believe it was about halfway through, though. But the days bled into each other a lot in that hotel room. Because at some point I just closed the blinds as well, so I was going off my own body clock for a long time. I didn’t have the sun to tell me what time it was, what day it was. That was probably not good either. No, time didn’t exist for a little while.

C: How did you feel when you finally left that room?

S: Oh my god, it was something else! When the date came where they could finally tell us when we were leaving, it felt like this weight had been lifted off me, because I think the reason why I went a little crazy as well was the uncertainty of when exactly are we going to leave. So as soon as they told us, my spirits were already lifting and I was ready to just go. It did take some physical readjusting, I’ll tell you that, because the size of the room – I didn’t have much room to walk around, or use my legs really. So I actually had to get used to walking down the hallway before I left. But to be honest, leaving the hotel was kind of the same as going in, because the media circus kind of happened again. I started doing quite a few more interviews, for Channel Nine and for Channel Ten, did a few more news stories, and as soon as I left, I had a camera in my face and photos being taken by a journo, and just so much was happening. I was like, OK, let’s turn the media face back on, let’s do this. So leaving felt the same way as coming in, but going back home felt like a nice warm hug that I hadn’t had for quite a while. Because the whole process of having to move back home only two months after leaving home on a plan of staying away for twelve months felt pretty shit. It felt like dreams were being crushed [laughs]. So readjusting and going home, actually getting a hug from my family, was wonderful. And that’s what going home felt like as well, for quite a while. Having a nice warm blanket wrapped around me.

C: Lovely. When did you decide that you had to come back to Australia from the US?

S: So it was a bit of a weeklong process, I think, for me to come to that decision. As you’re well aware, it was a long process from when things started to get serious to when borders were being announced to be closed, to when Scomo announced that we’d have to go to hotel quarantine, and all of that. And I was keeping up to date with it the entire time, because I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I wanted to keep an eye on it just in case I maybe did have to come home. But I remember the day I came to that decision, I was having a very depressed bath, with another bottle of wine in the apartment I had moved into in Burbank in Los Angeles. And I just randomly got a call from my mum, and as soon as I picked up, all she said was, I think you have to come home. This doesn’t look like it’ll get any better. And that’s just when the tears started and I was like, yup. So that was the moment that we decided, and it was about one week before I flew out, and it was a little risky as well, because the flight that we did book, one of the only ones that we could’ve booked, was the very last flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. On Virgin Airways as well, which means I think it’s the very last Virgin Airways flight from LA to Sydney in history. And it was a little bittersweet too, because it was probably the greatest flight of my life. It was the most comfortable flight I’ve ever had, because it was very socially distanced, and there was an overabundance of food, and the flight attendants wanted to give us a great experience, so I was very comfortable. But unfortunately the saddest flight, but also the most comfy. But yeah, I do physically just remember sitting in that bath, getting a call from my parents, and just coming to terms with, oh no.

C: It’s bigger than me.

S: Yes! I can’t just ride this out here. Originally, I did think that, you know, maybe I can go home for a couple of months, because my Visa will still be valid if I get to go back a couple of months later. I can stay until January, basically, so hopefully this all blows over in a couple of months and I can just come back to my apartment in Burbank and get those jobs again. Nope. It definitely doesn’t look like I’ll be back for a long time. But I think I’ve come to terms with that now. It sucked; coming to terms with it sucked. I do remember another day when I realised this was going to be a thing though. When I started paying attention –

C: Do you know what time it was? What month?

S: It was mid-March, it was right before – I was going to go to this premiere for Reese Witherspoon’s new Hulu show. I can’t even remember the name of it at this point, but I was super excited for it. I went out the night before to go buy some fancy clothes for the premiere, for red carpet. And as I was leaving the shopping centre that night, that’s when I saw the email that it’d been cancelled. Due to social distancing rules and everything, and that’s when I realised, oh, this is big. Oh no! That was the first moment for me. And then the next moment was Scomo saying forced quarantine.

C: It all happened so quick. Like mid-March to end of March I think were the longest two weeks of my life.

S: Literally! Tell me about it. Those two weeks felt like months! When I think about my time living in Los Angeles, it amounted to about two months in general. It felt so much longer because of that final fortnight. And then also the fortnight in the hotel, where I was kind of in this in between limbo world where I wasn’t away, but I wasn’t at home, and all of that. But those specific two weeks where things were still being decided? Everything was so uncertain? It made me age so much [laughs].

C: Yeah, I feel like everyone was coming to terms with the fact this that is a thing –

S: Yeah, collectively. I’ll be honest, being so in contact with everybody at home at the time, and also being in the Los Angeles community – Australians definitely came to terms with it a lot quicker than Americans did.

C: Because it wasn’t already happening, like we weren’t in the thick of it yet, so we had time to come to terms with it. But what was happening in Los Angeles at the time you were about to leave?

S: A lot of denial. I still remember, on one of the shows I was on, one of the crew members just saying, It’s a damn panic, not a pandemic. Over and over again. And that was very much a lot of the sentiment of a lot of people. There was still a lot of people that were like, yes, we should be wearing masks. Some people thought that wearing masks was a sign of hysteria, and we shouldn’t because of blah blah blah. I did push a lot of these memories away at the time because it was a little stressful. Just because I couldn’t believe that people weren’t taking it seriously. And I did get to the point where I really really did not feel safe. Not in the same way where, when I came home, if I wore a mask and gloves and sanitised and went out when I needed to – you know, there’s a level of not feeling safe with that. Even as much as I could prepare going out in LA, I could never feel safe. Just because of the sentiment I knew that was growing. And then there were a lot of fights over toilet paper right outside of my apartment where there was a small supermarket. And that’s when I was like, ah, Americans are crazy.

C: I think that was happening here as well [laughs].

S: That’s true! I did see the news eventually. That’s when I was like, people aren’t really taking this seriously in the right way. The sentiment was a lot of denial and then a lot of hysteria.

C: There was a lot of talk of people, like yourself, who were in the news about the hotel quarantine, complaining too much.

S: Oh, I could talk about this for ages! So I’ll just start off by saying that I got a couple of death threats.

C: Really?

S: Yeah, just a couple. A lot of very direct messages which were pretty much harassment. And oh, so many Facebook comments on the public posts that Channel Nine put up of the news stories. I felt like I kind of became ground zero for, you know, Zoomers and Millennials complaining about quarantine. Just to defend myself, I didn’t really complain myself, at all. I laughed at how small the hotel room was, and I did say I’d rather be with my family, but if this is what is the safest option then I’m happy to do that. But oh my goodness, do Boomers love to take young people that aren’t completely happy with a situation and blow it up out of proportion. The only people I actually saw complaining myself were older people, which is kind of ironic. I do think there were some elements that were worth, I guess, complaining about. Them being the way it was organised. I didn’t have anything against the forced quarantine itself. I thought that it was actually a very good measure to keep things under control, especially internationally, and I was happy to do it. Except that it wasn’t exactly experts running it or making decisions on a day-to-day – medical experts, I mean. It was whatever police officer was in charge at that hotel on that day. So it was different at every hotel. It was different every day for at least three-quarters of the two weeks I was there. I think by the time I was ending my time there, they had started to formalise rules or something. But you could tell it was extremely rushed, they hadn’t talked to me. And yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of the police officers that were running the joint either. It wasn’t a great time. But the idea of forced quarantine I have nothing against. Nothing against. Other things – I mean, I’m happy to complain about how small that hotel room was, because it’s not made for two-week stays. I mean, they had to use that hotel and I completely understand that, but it’s mainly made for – the Ibis hotel is made for one-night business stays and men cheating on their wives, usually. That’s what it’s built for. And it’s not made for, you know, some twenty-three year old person living in there for two weeks, with no human contact. But once the comments started, they got a little heavy. I laughed at all the ones – there were hundreds as well – on Facebook, on the actual news story itself, because it was all country bogans that were like, the kids don’t know how well they have it, they’re in five-star hotels and they still find time to complain, and blah blah blah. But then there were a few people who tracked down my Instagram and found my Facebook as well. And those messages I didn’t really appreciate. Especially the ones that were just straight up death threats. One of the death threats I was actually a little impressed with because it was very succinct. It was just a GIF of a noose. That was pretty straightforward. But I was told to report – tell the police officers at the hotel that people were sending me death threats. But of course they did not help at all.

C: They didn’t do anything?

S: Of course they didn’t. ACAB [laughs]. But I was told by the newsroom to report that. But I thought the comments were quite funny, in general, because Boomers do love to target young people. Though, my family took it as a personal attack, and started defending me in the comments! Old 2010 keyboard warrior style. It was fun to watch. Kept me entertained for a little while in that hotel room.

C: How were you mentally throughout that? Do you feel like you’ve bounced back from it now?

S: Yeah. At first, especially once I got to leave and start dealing with the emotions of what had happened – not being able to do this really huge thing that I’d planned to do. Moving overseas and starting a new life and pursuing a career overseas was a pretty big thing that I’d had to plan for quite a while. And having that cut short by something that isn’t your fault – it’s a very confusing feeling. For a long time, I was so fucking sad. I spent a long time just lying in my parents’ living room on the makeshift bedroom that they made for me. Just wallowing for a while before considering what the future would look like. Because at the time I wasn’t certain if I could go back in a couple of months, and slowly things looked like that wouldn’t be happening, and I’d be home for the foreseeable future. Coming to terms with that was extremely hard. I’m very lucky because I’ve had access to therapy for years, so once I was able to start seeing my psychologist again, things started getting better mentally for me. But also being home when a time is so quiet as well, when no one is really able to do anything – it can make things worse and better in some ways. The things that did make it better, when it came to coming to terms with what this year would now look like, was being able to see people that I really cared about. Like Nicola, for example. We ended up spending a lot of time together in those first few months of me being home, and that made me feel really grounded. Which she does just in general. And being able to see friends who I didn’t think I’d be able to see for an entire year, eventually when that was possible. It helped me feel really comfortable with being home again. Also the fact that America seems to not be dealing with this well in the slightest, does make me feel very confident in my decision to come home. And all those elements combined, I feel like now, just in the last month or so, I feel like I really have bounced back. Now that I can start thinking about my life and my future again, in not so much certain terms, but not wondering if I’m going to be bouncing between countries again. That was the hardest part. Not knowing if I was going to be back in America. But I’m happy to be in Australia forever at this point. And I’m not so much planning for the future, but I do feel comfortable with whatever that future’s going to be at this point.

C: Seeing America’s response to the pandemic – does that change how you feel about possibly moving there one day?

S: That’s a big question! My relationship with the United States is more about – I’ve loved the idea of it and I’ve always loved living there because of mainly the people. I’ve always meshed well with the locals of whatever city I’ve moved to. I loved living in the Midwest in Chicago, and I loved living in California, in Los Angeles, mainly because of the people and the friends that I met. America is such an eclectic mix of people. I don’t have so much faith in their government when it comes to helping their people, though. I still love the idea of moving there when it comes to a future career and developing that further. And I don’t ever want to strike that down just because of a terrible government’s terrible response to a terrible pandemic. But it definitely has made me feel better about being home right now and not living there at this moment. If I could go back in time a couple of months and tell myself anything, it would be, you’re going to be happier if you move back home. Because I can probably guarantee that to a different version of myself that’s still there, that I’d be extremely depressed and worried. I mean, financially as well, it kind of became a necessity for me to come home. Without being able to work, and with the Australia Dollar just nose-diving, eventually I’d have to come home anyway. I’m not a big fan of their response to this pandemic. It’s been atrocious and terrifying. I’m every day scared for my friends that are still there, and every day the people that I met in the city have slowly moved out of Los Angeles back to their original homes if they had that, or back to wherever their parents live in the suburbs, or to other states. It scares me.

C: There is a real danger just living under a government that doesn’t care about you. Compared to here, I feel like we haven’t reached the point where we feel unsafe because, you know, the lockdown in Melbourne shows that they do care about their people in a way that Trump doesn’t.

S: Yes, exactly. The American federal government especially, and a lot of state governments, are very translucent in how much they really don’t care how many people die. To the fact where getting the disease has become slightly normal? At least with the circles that I fell into and have kept in touch with. A lot of the people that are amongst that have normalised the fact that you just might get the disease. That’s just how it is now. And having that normalised, I think, is very much a reflection of the fact that the government does not give a shit if you die, or if you get this disease or not. They just need the wheels to keep turning. God, I wish people like Jacinda Ardern could just rule the world instead, but unfortunately not. It is extremely, just, terrifying because of how normal it is for the American people to understand that their government really doesn’t care about them.

C: Yeah. And it seems like a lot of people don’t understand how restrictions could have prevented the spread.

S: A hundred percent. No, I completely agree. And in all honesty, I never really had a chance to have that kind of discussion with Americans when I was there because I was in the process of leaving at the time. But I feel like something that’s very similar to that, is the fact that they’ve been taught that things that could be good for them are not good for them. Such as restrictions and social distancing, safe measures. And I actually did get into a discussion when I was there before things starting going into lockdown, during the primary elections. Someone at a bar was just saying, having a government subsidise for university, getting Medicare, no one can do that! And I just put my hand up and was like, yeah, I come from a country where we have those exact things! And it gobsmacked that person for a minute. They were like, wait, really? You’re kidding! And I feel like if I got the chance to have that discussion with Covid restrictions, it would be the same result. But to be fair, it is a country of over 300 million people, so there’s always going to be so many differing viewpoints there, but it is so worrying how many of them are adverse to things that are good for them in the long run.

C: And how political that becomes.

S: Exactly. The fact that it’s all politicised is so strange. Like I’m not a big fan of our governments either, but at the very least, restrictions and safe measures weren’t exactly politicised the way that they are in America, which also terrifies me. These were kind of the wild things in America though, having the discussions with people and realising that a lot of them really just don’t –

C: Understand the context outside their own little – huge country, but…

S: But if they don’t have it, then other people must not, right? I feel like that’s the kind of mindset a majority of the people there must be in. To think that Medicare is this extreme version of socialism, like, I don’t understand. Oh well. America was fun though.

C: Did you have fun there while you were there?

S: I did! I really did. I’ve lived in, and I’ve visited America, many many times. This was my first time living in California, though. And I only got to spend two months there, but my God, it was a wild ride. The LA you live in, as opposed to the LA you visit as a tourist, is extremely different. And especially Hollywood the actual place compared to Hollywood the idea, extremely different. I just had a really fun time. I met a bunch of people, and I didn’t think I would be making friends with so many celebrities too.

C: Really? Who did you meet?

S: So probably the closest friend I made there was Grant Imahara from Mythbusters. He recently passed away which was very very sad. But he was extremely nice to me and was kind of the one who introduced me to so many of the other regular people and celebrities around Hollywood. Got me very involved. He was a very nice man. We met while doing karaoke at a Star Wars themed bar. Hollywood’s wild [laughs].

C: How’s your life been since coming back? Have you enjoyed the quietness of it?

S: At first, the quietness drove me a little crazy. It was definitely what I needed for a while, but eventually I did enjoy it. Like I said before, I spent a lot of that time spending more quality time with people I cared about. I feel like a lot of my close friendships grew a lot closer as well. And I got to do some things that I couldn’t really do before. Like one day, Nicola and I went to Centennial Park while it was empty, and basically had the whole park to ourselves. And I don’t think that’s ever going to be replicated. The quietness definitely grew on me after a while. And I’ve definitely grown with being okay being home in the last few months.

C: And now you’re about to start full-time work?

S: Yeah, that’s true. I’ve never had a full-time job. My last job was a meet-and-greet producer on the Today Show. Super duper fun, but at the moment we can only have five people in the studio at one time. My job revolved around our guests that we had on the show. We don’t physically have any guests on the show, which means for the most part, my role is now defunct for the foreseeable future. However, I’m still on the payroll, so as soon as I can go back, the possibility’s there. But waiting around, on JobSeeker as well, which I’m grateful for, but waiting around for so long was very tiring. It did give me a lot of time to spend time with my friends like I said, but the idea of going into full-time work is kind of nice. Having something to do now. I’ve never had a full-time job before, it’s all been freelance and casual. So having basically 9-5 weekdays for a little while, I feel like is going to be some structure that I’ve needed since even before I left for the States. Because even when I was there, I didn’t exactly have a structure at the time. It was very go go go, let’s find a place to live, let’s find some jobs, let’s meet some people. And coming home was just, let’s do nothing! So now that I get to have a very regular routine, I feel like it’s going to ground me a little bit. Something I’ve needed.

C: I think that was the case for Nicki as well, getting her two jobs. And having a period away from the freelancing lifestyle.

S: Like I said before, being able to spend with people like Nicola helped a lot because we could talk through things like that, like how can we help ourselves feel a little better during this time. What do we need? Seeing Nicola stress over jobs and work and it all kind of paying off has been great too. Hopefully I get a taste of the payoff as well [laughs]. Speaking of, on that note as well, not just about Nicola, but also the way that this has felt kind of comes down to some lyrics from a song that she showed me by the Mountain Goats called “This Year”. The lyrics are, I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me. And those goes through my head all the time. Ever since coming home, and the only time I feel like it’s finally stopped has now been the idea of having this full-time job and having a routine. Because now I feel like I really am going to get through this year.

C: Yeah, just a distraction from what this year represents.

S: Honestly, I’ve never been a huge fan of personifying years and saying, this one was the worst ever! Like, I remember going through 2016 and everyone was like, this year’s the worst, everyone’s dying this year and blah blah blah. I was just never a big fan of the idea of like this year’s bad. Until this year. This year’s bad [laughs].

C: Globally. Historically 2020 will be known as one of the worst years.

S: Exactly. I will happily personify this year. Very bad no good.

C: At least you’re not in America.

S: At least I’m not in America. At the very least, I’m in a country where I feel safer and more comfortable in, around people that care about me. Not new friends, but close, old friends too.

[thepandemicinterviews]

Issy, August 9 2020, Sydney

When a housemate leaves, certain objects, sounds, and interactions disappear from your domestic landscape. Sometimes tears are shed. You say goodbye knowing that you will likely never occupy space together in the same way again.

In my two years of living in this house, I have seen eight people leave (not a reflection on this house or my presence in it, I promise). The most recent loss was Issy. When Issy moved in late January of this year, she immediately baked a cake for my housemate’s birthday. With scissors, she cut all of the overgrown grass in the backyard, then cleared out years worth of junk from the garage. She called for house dinners to become a regular occurrence. Issy, in all of her determination and readiness for life, seemed profoundly unrelatable to me at first. The adjective I used to describe her was “perfect,” meaning good at everything: running, talking, living, kind, intelligent… But the word perfect is too reductive, or cursed with a certain jealousy. It implies a cohesiveness that simply does not exist in the best of people.

Let’s just say then that I love her, and her multiplicity. I’ve loved her presence in this house. At her farewell, I gave her the unedited version of this interview printed on pages stuck to newspaper. Not so much an interview as a chat between two friends drinking red wine with a lot to say. At the risk of sounding too sentimental (no such thing), I’m so glad we got to have this little piece of recorded history together, Issy.

The best part about Issy’s cakes was that they were never too sweet. And she wasn’t either.

The first image included in the interview is an artwork Issy sent me. When I asked her about it, she told me it represented for her an idea of “stagnant motion, connectedness but disconnectedness.” What better captures the feeling of wrestling forward in a year that wants nothing but to hold you back? The artist Nancy Spero, I learnt, was a central figure in the feminist art movement of the mid-20th century. From the MoMA website: Spero described her works as “ephemeral monuments” to the full range of women’s experience: tragic and triumphant, degraded and powerful, victimized and liberated. Multiplicity as the underlying current defining womanhood. Everything is true and simultaneously, wrote Chris Kraus.

Me not being an art scholar, I will rely instead on Spero’s passionately written Wikipedia article: Although her collaged and painted scrolls were Homeric in both scope and depth, the artist shunned the grandiose in content as well as style, relying instead on intimacy and immediacy, while also revealing the continuum of shocking political realities underlying enduring myths. Paying attention to the immediate and the intimate, alongside an understanding of the myths that politics is built upon, seems to me a useful lens through which to study the pandemic today. What is the everyday texture of living through a historically and politically unprecedented time? How do we signal love? What are the myths propelling counterproductive human behaviour? This novel coronavirus laughs in the face of neoliberalism.

I will end this overwrought introduction with this fragment from Spero’s interview with artist Phong Bui:

Spero: You know, being with Leon and having my three beautiful sons, I am really blessed in a lot of ways. Otherwise, by living day-to-day, one realizes the firmness of cruelty, what people do to each other. But then one realizes that it’s always built with double meaning of the conflicted self. Whether it’s through language and gesture and thoughts, and so on…

Bui: That’s true. And that’s why we deal with that intense closeness of that duality through art, instead of hurting ourselves or others which I think is overrated.

However you can, in this dark unending year of 2020, make art instead.

C: This might be a strange question to start with, but what have been some of your favourite memories throughout Covid?

I: That is an interesting one because I definitely think there have been some really beautiful moments. I was looking through my phone camera the other day to see what has happened. I don’t take many photos, but a few things popped out. I definitely remember the night that we all spent together, you know the one that we had that group photo by the table? I think it was when Josh was in the house. It wasn’t my birthday dinner but it was one around that time. The house nights? I feel like we went through a period of having dinners which was super beautiful. Also around my birthday period, I went with Maya – you remember how on my birthday I went and drove to Collaroy? Which is a bit ridiculous. There was a moment when we’d gone to the beach and the sun was almost setting. There were still quite a few people around and Covid hadn’t fully hit the Beaches yet, so there were people around, and I hadn’t been in the ocean in months. And I remember us just finally setting our stuff down on the beach and getting into our swimmers and running into the ocean. And Maya’s very… How to describe her? You can’t. But she’s very beautiful and she was very much like, you know, this is a cleansing moment and experience, and a new year for you, and we need to jump into the ocean and make a wish. Which, when I’m with her, I definitely get on board with. So we jumped into the ocean and it just felt super cleansing and super beautiful and the sun was super warm. So that was a very nice moment. I think also, connecting with her in Australia as opposed to being in France, like last year on my birthday we were in Lyon. And we made a promise that every year, if it’s possible, that we’re going to be in a different country for our birthdays. So that was also hopeful and very nice.

C: So you have the same birthday?

I: No, her birthday’s a couple of months away from mine. But I think we’ll do something for both of them. We’re both birthday people [laughs]. But, yeah, I’m trying to think of other things. I mean, it’s tricky. Because I feel like there’s definitely moments that I’ve forgotten. It feels like it’s been the longest time but also the shortest time, and so much has happened but also nothing has. So I feel like almost just the nothingness has been nice in some moments I suppose.

C: Is that because you don’t feel like you have to be the busy, productive person you are in normal life?

I: I definitely feel like I still have that a little bit [laughs]. It’s funny, because I was kind of wondering what I’ve learnt over Covid. And I think, one thing that I’m still trying to learn is the idea that I need to not value my time and my self based on productivity. Especially when you can’t be that productive. I used to do quite a bit of volunteering, and obviously working a lot, and study and all of the little social events that I’ve been missing. And a lot of that’s been cut out, so it has just been like, trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not be doing things all the time. But it’s also hard because then you’re in your head more. Which is something that I think – I probably subconsciously try to keep busy so that I wasn’t doing that. So that’s been an interesting experience.

C: Can you elaborate on that? Like, how did it change throughout the months? Were there certain time markers for you?

I: Definitely the months have been quite distinct. But they also all merge into one when you think about it. I feel like I’ve had quite fragmented experiences. And I think the time markers are probably a lot to do with the people in my life as opposed to the things that I’ve been doing. Just because I have been doing less. But, I mean obviously having different housemates come into the house, and having different months where different friends are free. Seeing different people has been more of a time marker.

C: And that period when you weren’t working as well…

I: Yeah, I mean it’s tricky because that’s the first time I haven’t worked since I was 14, but at the same time I was so busy with Uni and study that it was probably really positive for my studies. But it did feel very consuming in that as well, in that I felt I had to totally immerse in that. It was fortunate I was doing interesting subjects.

C: What was it like finding out that Uni was online suddenly?

I: It was funny, I found out – I had been at Uni that day, and I went into work that night, and I was talking to some customers about how Covid was just hitting, and how everyone was going. And they were at UNSW, and I was like, Oh, I think UNSW’s shutting down, right? But UTS is probably not going to do that anytime soon. And they were like, Oh, no, UTS has shut down [laughs]. And I was like, what? I was there today! And they were like, Oh, my sister just sent me a screenshot of an email she received tonight. Your uni’s shut down! And so I found out that way, which was funny. But I mean honestly, as a law student, I felt quite lucky and quite privileged that a lot of what I do is totally capable of being online. And I felt really bad for students who are in more practical degrees. I have friends at the National Art School and friends doing med and science and whatnot, which is a lot more lab-based and necessary to be in a studio. Whereas, for law, it’s totally capable of being online. And I quite enjoy independent study. I am lucky to be self-motivated in that sense that I enjoy having my own space and being able to just do my readings. And Zoom has been interesting, watching how people adjust to an online format. And you definitely miss that human connection and having that more organic class discussion, I suppose. But at the same time, it’s very minimal negative compared to what other people are experiencing.

C: I felt like I really enjoyed my English classes on Zoom, and I felt much more willing to participate.

I: Oh really? Why’s that?

C: I think not having the awkward like, not having to signal that I was about to talk – just like, unmuting myself or raising my hand virtually was a lot easier for me than doing it in-person. And I’m always someone who does feel like I’m on the precipice of saying something but I just leave it half a second too long. Being invisible – sometimes I would drink wine, smoke during my classes and I would just be more confident as a result.

I: Yeah, I get that. That makes total sense. I’ve had the inverse experience, because I’m definitely less confident in a virtual setting. I think I’ve had a similar thing where I feel like I miss a second, I miss a beat, and people move on quite quickly in the virtual realm. And so I’ve had that experience this semester. Whereas, usually in class I’m just like, Me! And I just say things and it just flows more naturally for me there I think.

C: Did you have to have video on during your Zoom classes?

I: Yeah.

C: That would’ve changed things for me a lot I think.

I: Did you not?

C: No! No one had video on in either of my classes.

I: Oh, that’s so much nicer. That’s the thing, as soon as you start speaking your face is immediately in front of everybody.

C: Exactly, so I felt really good knowing that no one knew who I was, and I could say shit and no one would attribute it to me. They didn’t know me.

I: That’s interesting though, because you say no one knew who you were, but they knew your name and they knew your voice.

C: Yeah, but this was my last semester, like they would never see me.

I: But do you feel like that’s totally attributable to a visual thing, like to your face? Because, I mean, your name will be something…

C: Partly. I think, also, the class was really well-run, I loved my tutor, and it felt like a space where I could share ideas. And it felt really linked to Covid in a lot of ways, while we were talking about all these big ideas, reading Marx, reading Marcuse, and talking about free speech and universities and all of that. I guess this can lead me onto my next question. Did you feel like any of the things you were learning throughout your semester were linked to what was going on in the world around you? Because you were doing international law and stuff?

I: It’s funny, because that was the thing I was going to say from your comment. I think that’s one thing my studies lacked, was a link. Because it’s crazy we’re all going through this really immediate and collective and present thing in our lives, and then none of the content we were learning was really related to it. And none of the teachers really sought to relate it either. Which I was disappointed with. But also, it was a really tough time for them as well to have to adjust, in terms of entire learning materials, to the present situation. And I think international law always has relevance. Definitely it has become really relevant in the past month or so, with different relations between major players or whatnot. And that’s something I’ve really appreciated and I’ve found a deep interest in that from studying it. But they didn’t relate it to Covid throughout the semester. Maybe they’ll adjust. There’s time. Covid’s still going.

C: Yeah, how do you feel about the ongoingness of this pandemic? Like, we’re in August, we’ve lived through six months of it already. Where does it end?

I: Did you talk about this in your class at all?

C: No. I think we’ve only recently reached the point where we’ve come to terms with it and accepted it as part of daily life. And we don’t know when it’s going to end. But I think, before, everything that happened was so new and shocking and uncomfortable. I feel like we’ve gotten to a place where we’re starting to get comfortable with this new way of life.

I: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s going to be really interesting – I mean, I hope people take this as an opportunity to change a lot of really structural things. But it is going to be interesting how little things that we wouldn’t have considered normal have become normalised, and will just become part of our daily life. I don’t know when this is going to end. I mean, I feel like particularly in Australia, we’re super lucky that it is quite insular. And I mean it’s very easy to look at it at a larger scale and be really overwhelmed with what’s going on in the rest of the world. But in Australia it’s quite easy to feel like nothing has changed, but then obviously everything has. And there’s lots of things that have for a lot of people. If you look at my life, on a personal level, it probably hasn’t massively? But you think about the way that you’ve learnt things over the last few months, and the way that you have perceived things and changed things in your life to accommodate different things. And that’s definitely changed. I think it’s very easy to think that nothing has changed here? Or to minimise that. But it definitely will. And I hope people are aware of that. And I think one of the positive things that’s come out of this is this sense of collective experience. And obviously not everyone’s having the same experience; it might be like a super privileged view to be like, The Collective! But, you know, I think people are probably more willing to empathise in certain situations now.

C: It’s just such a rare event to happen. And it’s so rare for everyone to be affected by it. To be affected by anything singular. So I do think it’s a collective experience that we haven’t had previously, but obviously everyone’s going to have a different experience, but it is still a collective experience to go through.

I: Definitely. And I think in a time where everyone is so virtually connected as well. Like I don’t think the world has experienced a pandemic like this where everyone has been able to have a platform where they can voice their own experiences and feel a sense of community, worldwide even. Which is very interesting. I think the Internet is a slowly rising tide of panic, so it’s hard to… I think another thing that has really emerged in this time for me has been this idea of like – and I think you spoke to Zach a little bit about this – is this idea of like balancing your need or want or desire to be engaged, and then also needing to not feel overwhelmed as well. And it’s hard, because balance is so important, but where do you find that line.

C: But also we wouldn’t have reacted as strongly as we did – Australia – if it weren’t for what we saw play out through the news in Italy, in particular. I think, for me, when it hit that this was this big thing that was happening, was when I was reading about Italy and how terrible it was all of a sudden, late February. Like, this is going to happen here. But because we had that example, you know, we acted quickly and I’m very thankful that we are geographically distant from –

I: Like designed to deal with something like this?

C: Yeah.

I: Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. And I think it’s quite impressive how we reacted quite quickly to that. And I mean, that’s a testament to our society and democracy and whatnot. But I mean, there’s definitely been miniscule crises that have reflected things that have happened in Italy, like the aged care crisis at the moment was also present in Italy and was something that we definitely should have foreshadowed, and been more able to react more quickly to. I mean, I think it’s quite lucky we have a healthcare system that is comparatively, particularly to the US, very well-designed and very accessible. It’s been one of our saving graces also. Like it’s such a crisis in the US. Having my sister in New York has been terrifying and eye-opening.

C: How do you feel about moving back to Gosford and being away from everyone?

I: I don’t know. I think it definitely comes in waves. Ultimately, I think I feel quite positive about it. I think it’s what I need for myself at the moment and for my research. But it’s going to be hard. Like, on a scale of things that are hard, probably not that hard compared to what other people have to do. Yeah, it’s going to be weird being away from the city. But I’m also really excited to be away, and to be in nature a little bit more, and be close to the beach, and just be in a really tranquil environment where I’m not stressed. I don’t know why, but I’ve just been going through a bit of a weird time. And I don’t know if that’s like a Covid effect catching up to me.

C: I think everyone in Sydney is feeling a bit anxious that it’s going to hit here because of what’s happened in Melbourne. And we’re just all in this high alert mode. I think it makes sense to go to somewhere a bit out of the city at the moment.

I: Yeah, I definitely think that’s true. I’m going to miss everyone a lot. But I think, being out of the city will be a positive for me. Everyone’s on such high alert, it’s like a really anxious environment. It’s also hard with work at the moment as well, it’s a pretty stressful space to be in. And I love them, but I feel like I’m working so I can live in the city, but I’m not doing anything here, essentially, other than writing my thesis. So I could take away the work and just write my thesis, which will be productive over the next couple of months at least. But I will be back. I definitely can’t see myself living on the coast long-term. Just having been away last year, spending a bit more time with my mum will be really nice. But I feel like there will definitely be a limit to that.

C: Hopefully it coincides with Covid…

I: Yeah, I’m feeling maybe everything will shut down and it will just make complete sense for me to be at home. I definitely get antsy and I like changing things and I make quite rash decisions sometimes. But ultimately, I think that they make sense. And it’s something that I have thought more about than I would let myself believe. But I think it all makes sense. But I hope Sydney doesn’t go into lockdown again, because I feel like that will affect a lot of people really deeply.

C: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think we will because we have Melbourne as an example and people are being fairly proactive. And it seems like we thought it might have happened already, but it hasn’t.

I: Yeah, I think that’s one of the worst things about this, right, is the anticipation or the waiting for something to change. And like, feeling like you’re in this weird limbo-y period. It just feels like a weird hiatus from how things would normally work. But then it’s like, maybe this is just how things are normally working.

C: It’s like a middle ground between like, you can’t hang out with more than one person, but we’re not in Melbourne lockdown, obviously, we can go out to restaurants, we can go out for drinks, everything’s like normal-ish.

I: It’s such a weird distinction between being capable of going out for drinks and not feeling like you should, and feeling guilty if you do, and that you’re not taking enough precautionary measures. Yeah, definitely heightening anxiety for a lot of people and feelings of guilt. How are you feeling about it?

C: I don’t know. I think we’ll be in this vague uncertainty for a few months. Like at the beginning of everything, I think everyone thought it would be over in six months. Like spring was when it would get back to normal. And I was like, hopefully by the time it’s my birthday, warehouse parties will be back and we can go out after hanging out here. But that’s obviously not the case, so. I’m okay with it, as long as we have what we have now. I don’t think our restrictions will get that much tighter, hopefully. I’m okay with it. It is sad, but it would be much worse to be in the US. Like to have a government that doesn’t care about you.

I: Yeah, I mean I definitely think there’s certain sects of our society that the Australian government doesn’t care about.

C: Absolutely.

I: But the US is definitely… I don’t know if we should be comparing ourselves to the US though, because it’s such a low threshold to be better than them. Like it’s definitely a crisis over there.

C: It’s just wild, because it just seems like they have no understanding of – like they haven’t experienced having the government put restrictions on them in the way that we have, which would just make so much sense, because it’s so much more widespread there. But it’s like, maybe you shouldn’t gather with more than 50 people.

I: I think neo-liberalism is just so much more entrenched in the US. I mean, it’s definitely very present in Australia and has very widespread impacts here. But very very entrenched in the US. I think the population size as well, and the way that the Trump administration has been running for the last – God, it’s like four years now? How insane is that. They were not prepared to deal with something like this. Like, can you imagine? They can’t even get rid of guns.

C: It’s the only country in the world that has had such a political response to, like, mask-wearing. It’s insane.

I: And then you think of countries that are super equipped to deal with it. That have done it very efficiently.

C: Yeah, like South Korea. They were one of the first countries to get it. I remember reading all my emails that were already loaded because I was on a flight back from Melbourne and this was late February. I was just reading all the New York Times daily briefing emails. And I was like, fuck, it’s really taking off in South Korea! This is wild, like it’s all been passed on through this cult. Like, South Korea, Iran, Italy – what random countries to have Covid. Like, this is wild. But then, South Korea quashed it immediately while it went rampant in Italy for a while. Every place that got hit hard immediately, at the beginning, is doing fairly well now. Like New York compared to the rest of the US is doing fairly well.

I: Yeah, that’s true. I feel like it’s just a process of people having to learn how to deal with it. The experience of going through it, I guess, would change people’s perceptions of it and how they’re going to react to it as well. My sister actually did a really – at the start of Covid, in New York – she did quite a beautiful storytelling that her friend back here – her best friend, she’s an illustrator – did an illustration to. I’ll show you sometime.

C: I can link it.

I: It’s a good thing to watch, and I think it kind of represents the start of Covid and people’s feelings at the start of Covid quite beautifully. It’s really tinged with this kind of sadness but also unknowing. This understanding that people are being quite kind to each other in a way that they previously wouldn’t have been, because of the collective experience. I’ll show you.

C: Do you think this has changed the way people interact with each other in a way that will last?

I: Hmm. I don’t know if that’s super relevant for Australia, or if that has affected Australia as much. I don’t think so. I think here it’s become more of an individual protection thing. And because we haven’t been hit as hard, I don’t think the understanding of it has gone as deep.

C: I think in Melbourne, maybe.

I: Maybe in Melbourne. Yeah, I don’t know anyone in Melbourne really at the moment. I haven’t spoken to them.

C: I think they will come out of this feeling like they had a very different experience to the rest of Australia. Like for us, I do feel like people are wearing masks more and more in Sydney. But I don’t think it will ever be mandated. I don’t think we’ll reach that point, hopefully. But they will have had to go through like – not being able to leave your house after 8pm is a very intense thing to have to live through. Which we’ll probably never understand.

I: How do you think that would work in Sydney? Like do you think that if we got to that point, it would change people’s perceptions of Covid and each other?

C: Probably. I think we’ve had a fairly light quarantine lockdown experience compared to a lot of people in the world. Even my New Zealand friends, when they were going through their six-week lockdown, it was a lot more intense than what we went through. I think we never really had it that hard in Sydney, and got through it fairly quickly and easily.

I: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I feel like it was such a minimal scale here. And it’s tricky, because I remember talking to my friend Thomas who works at PIAC. He was doing social housing policy during that time at the start of Covid. And he was like, suddenly, you know, government funding has opened up, and suddenly anything’s possible. We’re housing a lot of homeless people. And he was trying to work on more long-lasting solutions to that. And the quarantine didn’t last long enough for them to implement real change in that sector, I don’t think. And suddenly people were back – they stopped their program, so people were back out on the streets. And that was a noticeable shift, as soon as Covid started lessening, you saw people back out on the streets again, and that was a really harsh reality of government priorities as well. But I feel like in Sydney because it was so light, it almost didn’t allow for that opportunity to implement sustainable change in areas that definitely need it. And that could’ve been a positive that came out of it, but… What would be your positives that have come out of Covid?

C: Like, any positives? I think I’ve had a fairly normal experience throughout Covid in that I still worked my normal job that I’ve had for the past four years, I did Uni, I had a lot of – probably more so than ever – interactions with housemates because of Covid. So I never felt like I had a lot taken away from me. But I think all the fun things we had as a house, especially me, you and Citi, sitting on my bed gossiping, playing Skribblio was really fun. And Josh was here throughout the peak of Covid, which was really fun. It was good to have people around. I didn’t think that I needed it. I thought that I could deal with it all on my own in Woy Woy if I wanted to. But I think at the end of it, I was really like, I’m really glad I had social interaction because so many people haven’t had that opportunity, and it was really nice.

I: Yeah, I think that was definitely a positive. I mean, I’m sure it was more intense for Josh. But like having come just into a house as Covid was hitting and suddenly, that’s your social interaction. I really loved that element of it because it meant that we all got to know each other quite well quite quickly. And I’m sure that was more intense for Josh, having come in literally the week we went into lockdown. But I almost feel like prior to that, living in the house, we obviously all liked each other and got along, but we’d see each other quite fleetingly because we were all so busy doing our own thing, and then suddenly we had freed up this space to spend with each other. I think we all got closer a lot quicker because of that.

C: It is really nice. I don’t think I’ve come to terms with the fact that you’re leaving.

I: Neither have I.

C: It’s like a week away right? I will be very sad.

I: I’m also going to be very sad.

C: I think this is the best house that could’ve happened during lockdown.

I: Yeah, we had such a perfect lockdown dynamic. It’s hard, because you don’t want to say this, like you’re minimising other people’s experiences…

C: Hey, this is exactly what comes up every interview, but you know, it’s all about your subjective experience.

I: Yeah. But I mean, we did have a lot of fun.

C: Yeah, and it’s okay to!

I: Yeah, I think that’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot, is trying not to invalidate your own experiences by thinking about other people’s. It’s very important to be aware of other people’s experiences but ultimately, you’ve gone through your own thing.

[thepandemicinterviews]

Nicki, August 5 2020, Sydney

Reaching August, the end of winter, has made the ongoingness of this pandemic brutally real. Spring is when everything should return, we said – dancing bodies in small outfits, relief, respite. But we cloister in our masks and harbour a new kind of anxiety, different in texture to the anxiety of discovery and disbelief that marked the beginning of autumn. We know what we will read on the news now before clicking. We understand all too well how to use QR codes upon entering restaurants. The anxiety of wearing a mask versus not wearing a mask weighs upon us (in Sydney). It’s here and it’s not (the virus). It doesn’t feel like summer will ever arrive, and I don’t know if I want it to.

Most days I google “NSW new cases”, if I’m not refreshing the Guardian live blog every hour, which I do when I’m at work (shout-out to Amy Remeikis for making me laugh – although these days there’s less and less to laugh about). Nine new cases today! A single digit. Yet, there is no happiness here, because we know more so than ever that there is a new number each day. We wait. We joke about going into lockdown again. We continue living our half-lives, waving our hands under hand sanitiser dispensers.

But there is a levity in having reached this point. We’ve lived through so much already, nothing is that unexpected now, right?

I am writing this a week later on the train, comfortable in the warmth of my thick black mask, surprised at this newfound comfort.

Nicki, my long-time friend, has had a pandemic experience full of stops and starts. She allowed the emptiness of losing work in the film industry to be filled with two new “normal” jobs, with a new house, and with the understanding of what taking a break from reality could offer her. Today she began work on a television show – a return to the expected trajectory in some respects. Sitting in her new backyard, sipping Grand Marnier, we discussed the blank slate that Covid has brought (gifted?) to our lives, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the anxious new normal.

C: Hi Nicki. Thinking about the whole pandemic experience you’ve had as a whole, are there any clear time markers for you?

N: I think it depends how many you want to go with. I think there’s the time that I was aware that it was a thing, but I wasn’t concerned at all. This is before anything in Sydney was shut down or anything. And then being on set while things were shutting down, and every few hours having a meeting and people being like, these are new rules that we have to bring in. It was very chaotic. I mean, I had everything cancelled. I had my upcoming jobs cancelled, I broke up with my at-the-time boyfriend, I had all my social events cancelled in the span of two weeks. And then there was this period where I was just applying for jobs.

C: Regular jobs.

N: Yeah, regular jobs! Not like my fun wild freelance lifestyle before that. I had to revamp my CV that I hadn’t touched since like 2017. Realised that I’d spent a year working towards something that was very difficult to market in any other industry except for the one I was working in. But it’s fine, because I was very lucky and got many job offers, which I feel weird talking about. But I feel like it would be dishonest not to.

C: I also played up the “I have three jobs” thing during the height of the pandemic. I no longer have three jobs but it was fun to say, as a like, what the fuck.

N: No, there definitely is like a fun energy to it, and you feel very accomplished in some ways, I think.

C: How did it feel going from not doing much to working so much all of a sudden?

N: Oh, fantastic. It was exactly what I needed. Especially as I’d had a really quiet start of the year as well. Which is sort of why it pushed me into gear – I spent like a whole week making my CV better and learning how to interview. And then I just applied to a bunch of jobs. It felt very different but it felt very good. It was what I wanted and needed. It’s really shit, the idea that the self-confidence and the self-worth that you get from going to work.

C: Yeah, productivity has been a big thing to think about. What gets deemed productive, what a productive day looks like.

N: Yeah, I don’t know, it’s sort of weird. I feel like everyone’s having to face what I had to face when I decided to go freelance and I had my really down periods and I sort of had to learn how to give myself some structure. And I had times where I was at home for ages without work. I had times where I had to motivate myself to do work, like reaching out to people, stuff like that. I sort of felt understood in a way that I hadn’t really felt. Which, I don’t know, it’s so awful. Like I would prefer there not to be a pandemic, obviously. But very personally, I feel like I’m someone who has gained a lot from it.

C: I think a lot of people have gained a lot from it. And I think we can acknowledge that it’s a terrible thing but still see how it’s helped us. Because I think it does help a lot of people to have that period where they’re no longer just rushing around, doing things to fill their time.

N: Totally. Yeah, that was something that I appreciated so much. Just being like, it’s okay, there’s no film jobs going at the moment, I can get a normal job. I don’t have to feel bad, I don’t have to feel like I’m letting my dream go or something. I can just do this, be normal for a bit, not have to stress. And it was so good, it was such a break. It was great. I am happy to be back now as well though.

C: It kind of feels like it’s come full circle for you, now that you’re back working on film things, and having to stop working at your normal jobs. Is it scary knowing how precarious the film industry can be?

N: It is. I have an upcoming big job that I might get. I feel like accepting it is such a stupid decision – like I have the most reliable job. At least one of my three jobs is like the most reliable job, and to think we could go the way of Victoria. But what I’ve heard is that film productions are continuing, even in Victoria. So hopefully it turns out good. If it does, that’ll be great. If it doesn’t, I mean I think I’m still making the right decision, because it’s one of those things you have to do. I still haven’t quit my other jobs, I’m a bit scared to. Maybe I’ll do it a week out.

C: Thinking back to when it was peak lockdown in Sydney. I feel like for me, it was such a vague period and it kind of stopped quite slowly. Like it didn’t have a very hard end-point, it kind of just was like, okay, people are out again. But thinking back to when it was really quiet on the streets, how did you feel during that period?

N: Honestly, sort of relieved. It was nice, like you were saying before to have the world slow down for a bit. Everything just felt quite, for me, easy for a bit. Because I was already used to having these periods where I didn’t have structure. And it seemed like cases weren’t that bad in NSW as well. I’m sure if it was, like, crazy numbers, it would have maybe felt a bit different. Definitely there’s been a lot of uncertainty and discomfort with that. Which I guess I’m probably not talking about as much because I’m so used to it. I don’t want to say taken for granted, because it’s not a good thing, it’s a bad thing, but I accept it.

C: It being?

N: Just uncertainty. Too much uncertainty. Like nothing feels permanent in any sort of way. And I feel like that’s already something that existed beforehand. Like more so for our generation than any generation before it. Even more so at the moment, like that’s just gone into overdrive.

C: I feel like it went into overdrive for me when all the Black Lives Matter stuff was happening as well. It felt like the world was compounding.

N: It was a lot going on at once. But I think for me at least, this whole period has just been too many things going on. Like I don’t really understand how life is continuing [laughs]. I feel like I need to write it all down because I’m going to forget, it’s too much.

C: Well this will be something to keep.

N: Truly. Yeah, that was just weird in general. Because my mum does a lot with that sort of stuff and it’s something that’s been very present in my family. But then for it to get big attention was good, but then there’s also the danger of the rally, and being scared about things…

C: Yeah. So much of the blaming has been towards those protests, which, you know, is probably misplaced outrage. Do you have any thoughts about it, having been at the protests?

N: Yeah, I mean I’ve got very strong thoughts. It just makes me very angry when people are throwing blame around at that. I was at a much more recent protest at the Domain where everyone was very much distanced. Everyone was wearing masks. The people that weren’t distanced were the cops. And then, this more recent one that was shut down, even though it was going to be in a very large area, face masks would have been available to everyone. Like I truly trust that everyone would’ve been distanced at that. You know, it just makes me so upset thinking that all these people are using – like, why are they getting upset at this when shopping centres are open, sport’s open, like community sport happens. Working in my retail job, like I have people come up in my face and I can feel their breath on my face and I have to step back and ask them to step back. And it’s like, this is all okay? It just upsets me because it feels really transparent.

C: And in any other context they wouldn’t be able to openly criticise protests in that way, but it’s very easy to do at the moment.

N: Well it’s like, where are all these people who usually get upset about your own personal liberties. Why are they upset about this, I wonder. But then part of me is like, am I missing something? Like is there something I’m not understanding, because it feels so obvious. But I think, people just don’t think about it and probably don’t really understand the depths of it. Also, this is something I’d been thinking about recently. Listening to how there’s this whole thing about people saying to Black women, “Oh, you’re so strong.” When they get saddled with a lot of stuff, rather than actually helping them. And I think, for me personally, I sort of just took it for granted for a long time that, you know, Indigenous people in Australia get fucked over. And that’s how it is, and it sucks, but that’s how it is. And it’s like, oh, it doesn’t actually have to be like that, and it’s on us to fix it. I don’t know how effective protests actually are though, anyway.

C: I mean they definitely get people talking, which is like step one of anything.

N: Yeah. I mean, I would hope so. I think the idea of caring about it is being more normalised, which I think is good.

C: In terms of practical change, it’s hard to say.

N: Well there’s been a lot of funding going towards the families, which they can and will use to escalate it in the actual justice system. I think there have been really good strong things that have come out of it. And hopefully it continues. Who knows, though.

C: Going back to Covid, how do you feel about all of the restrictions on your life currently – I mean, not so much right now, but before when it was more limiting?

N: I think I was well-equipped to deal with it. It was probably a lot less jarring for me, because I was used to having this time off, by myself, and having to give structure to my days, and I also had something to do. Like I decided I was going to fix my resume, and I decided I was going to apply for jobs, so that was my goal each day. It was a bit scary for a bit when I thought I wouldn’t be eligible for JobSeeker or JobKeeper or any of that. But it was okay as well, because I was living at home, I didn’t have any expenses. That’s the thing – like I’ve never throughout this entire process been in danger of anything, really. I was definitely one of the people at the start that was like, we should do a hard lockdown like New Zealand, just get rid of it, and then we’ll be fine. And I was really impressed by how it was handled, to be honest. Even though there were obviously major issues. I had a close friend who was one of the first people to be in a quarantine hotel, and that just seemed so badly disorganised, at least at the start. And actively, really harmful for some people. Personally, the idea of not being able to go outside, being in a small room for two weeks, by myself, sounds just so bad. So bad.

C: My cousin’s currently in it. I think she’s well-equipped to deal with it, though. She’s been doing fun makeup looks and curling her hair.

N: I mean she said she was looking forward to it, right? Like I would never have that thought.

C: Apparently they have very good food over in China, though.

N: It’s not that, it’s not going outside, having no physical contact with anyone for two weeks. Like maybe if I had a pet with me, it would be okay.

C: I think I’d be more afraid to be with one other person for two weeks in a room, than by myself.

N: I think I might prefer to be with someone else, and I guess this is where we differ.

C: Who would you have?

N: I don’t know.

C: If you had to choose someone right now.

N: No, I couldn’t do that. Definitely not in a public conversation. I don’t know. Maybe my pet. Maybe Bruno. He’ll never get on my nerves. I don’t know, I think I’m someone who gets less upset with other people, finds people less annoying than…

C: Than me [laughs].

N: What was even the question? Oh, the restrictions! Yeah, I don’t know, I was definitely going for like hour-long walks, or semi-runs every day. I’ll run for a bit, walk for a bit, call someone. You know, went for socially distanced walks which I was like, technically this is fine, but this is also very against – this isn’t the right thing to do, I felt a bit bad about it. I do think though, it’s just my approach in general, but you need to be calculated about how you’re approaching the restrictions. Like, it was very important to me to research early on about how the virus spread and what was risky and what wasn’t, so I could understand that, so I could go, okay, I think a socially distanced walk is fine, really. For what it would do for my mental health and helping me uphold other parts of the lockdown. You know, I’d rather go for a socially distanced walk every few days than go to Woolies every day because I need to get out of the house and I need to see other people because I’m going insane. Which I think were some people’s approaches. I was working at Bunnings at the time, that store was packed.

C: I remember walking down King Street and going to Sydney Park and it was so packed, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

N: Definitely.

C: But there was a period when I went to Broadway one time to get something I thought was quite essential. It was for work. But it was completely empty, and I was like, okay, this is good. I don’t think it’s going to get too bad here. People are staying home. But it seemed like all of a sudden, as soon as things did get better Covid-wise, like case-wise, everyone was back in the shopping centres.

N: I do have hope though. In Sydney, so many people are wearing masks voluntarily now. Me and my housemates were talking about, like, doing dinner, and one of us was like, I don’t think we should really go to pubs at the moment. Like all of us were on the same level with it. I don’t know how across the board it is, whether that’s just my own little bubble that’s like that. But I don’t know, I see a lot of face masks out. I think people are trying to adapt. Unfortunately, we do have Victoria as a…

C: Example?

N: Yeah. I don’t want to presume how New South Wales is going to go. Who knows.

C: I think having that so close by and knowing how quickly it can spread does help us a lot going forward.

N: Yeah. I think there’d be a lot of people who would criticise people for caring about Covid restrictions. I’ve definitely found this time around, customers coming into the store are so much more respectful of distancing, and they’re all wearing masks. So few people wore masks before. So I think people are more accepting of it now, I guess. I would’ve never expected Australians to adopt mask wearing. Even myself, I would’ve never expected myself to, but here we are.

C: I’d say about 60% of people at Woolies were wearing masks today.

N: There you go. This is Newtown though, we’re all self-righteous.

C: How do you feel about it being August now? We’re so far through the year.

N: Oh, it’s insane. It’s crazy. I can’t believe it. I swear this year just started, like what happened? It’s fucked up.

C: What do you miss the most about normal life?

N: Not wearing a mask.

C: True.

N: I think just the constant anxiety. You know, for a while I was like, okay, we’re out of the woods, this is great. But I’m very much someone that likes to plan things and have a set approach. I don’t have to stick to the approach, I can change it. It’s very meta to reference another interview, but Mikki’s interview, like where you were talking about how each decision is contingent on the outcome of everything else. Like, you can’t plan, there’s just a whole web of things. Normally, you can plan a little bit, but at the moment I just feel like you can’t. Maybe I’ll get this TV show and I’ll be on it, and then three weeks in, it’ll be shut down. I would’ve lost my two reliable jobs. I mean, I’ve already decided that that’s the decision I have to make, so hopefully it’s worth it.

C: I think it always is. Flinging yourself into uncertainty.

N: I mean, I need to get better at it. It’s very scary.

C: And we haven’t mentioned you moving out during Covid. How do you feel about that?

N: Great. It was the best decision. I knew it was the right decision, I knew it was the essential decision. I wanted to move out in March, but I just wanted to make sure I was financially stable first. Turns out having two jobs, and working like crazy double shifts because you haven’t got anything else to do, and you’re like, might as well, makes you very financially stable, which is great. It’s good. I think I found a very good house. Like it was a good fit for me.

C: Do you think you could do lockdown with them?

N: I think it would be better than being with my family. I love my family, but it’s a lot. And I feel like, also, you’re just more accepting of annoying things that people you aren’t related to do. I think it could be fun, as well. I’d rather be in lockdown with people my age.

C: I had a very good experience.

N: Yeah, exactly. And it’ll be so much better now, I’m so much closer to a lot of my friends. We could go for walks and I wouldn’t feel guilty because I’d be in practically the same neighbourhood. If we went into lockdown again, it’d be a very different experience for me.

C: Might even be fun.

N: I mean, I just hate to say it. There is a lot of guilt. Like I finessed this lockdown. I finessed it [laughs].

C: I think we all have to find our own ways of finessing the lockdown, worldwide.

N: I don’t know, I just feel like I was very lucky and I’m probably coming off very full of myself. I don’t know about ignorant – unempathetic? People are out here suffering!

C: I don’t think you’ve come off unempathetic. It’s good to have fun in lockdown. We’re only going to have it once in our lives, hopefully! Let’s make the most of it.

[thepandemicinterviews]

Zach, July 26 2020, Sydney

One of my ideas behind this project was to allow each person I interviewed to nominate the next interviewee; to enter a meandering and unknown path within which my subjects could determine the shape of its flow. To my delight, Mikki nominated my housemate Zach, despite the two having never met. I interviewed Zach on a gloomy Sunday afternoon. We chatted on my balcony shielded from curious passers-by by a heavy and incessant rain.

Minutes before the interview, Zach sent me a few pictures that emblematised certain thoughts around the pandemic we would later discuss. This, I learnt, was in the tradition of photo-elicitation, a method of interview where the subject could project their own ideas and feelings onto a particular image. Or perhaps it is the other way round – directionality is not something I generally believe in. Zach noted the comprehensiveness of thought that can come from engaging with images, which I agree with. The totality that images can proffer, the range, the searchingness.

Post the interview, we stumbled upon a familiar talking point – the elision of months in this year… May, June, July, now August?

Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

The above quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was recited, verbatim, by Zach as we continued talking. The blur of days within spatial monotony. Time as a wardrobe in which we hang markers of its passage. The forward jolt of time collapsing without the morning alarm, without the peak-hour commute, without the sense of your self being crushed by it. What replaces it is a drift…

C: Hi Zach. When did you move in here?

Z: That’s a difficult question. Was it like six weeks ago, four weeks ago?

C: Something like that. I feel like in the time I’ve known you, you’ve always exuded a very calm energy. I’m curious – was there a period during the last few months that you were very stressed?

Z: I wouldn’t say stressed. I think I’m always quite calm, almost to a fault I think. Are we talking about, like, in the thick of lockdown?

C: Yeah. I’m just curious how it affected you in terms of stress, and if you felt anxious at any points during it.

Z: Probably not overly, it was more just a sense of being overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, and how many people were suffering. It was more just a sense of dread, I guess, as opposed to being anxious or stressed.

C: More, like, thinking about how it was affecting people on a global scale rather than yourself?

Z: Yeah, definitely. That was one of the pictures I had, the woman juggling these balls. I kind of thought about that as juggling the different emotions, I guess. Because you’re confronted with this fact that there’s so many people out there who are doing it much worse than you are, and you’ve got this overwhelming sense of gratitude and appreciation for my friends and my family and all the support and this crazy beautiful life that I get to live. But also acknowledging that it is bad for me in some ways, there are certain things I don’t get to do. So yeah, it’s trying to juggle all those almost conflicting emotions, and try and bring some kind of harmony to it.

C: Yeah, I guess for a lot of people who are doing okay like you and me – there is that, Can I complain about it when people are having it so much harder. And being so lucky just being in Australia. Yeah, it does really magnify the differences in different societies, different countries, and all the different responses. Are you someone that reads the news a lot?

Z: I was a lot during Covid, I've kind of tailed off a bit less at the moment. But yeah, I was pretty in it. It was quite interesting with the different news providers as well. You look at the ABC, and obviously the problems aren’t as bad relatively speaking, and then you zoom out to maybe BBC, and that becomes quite confronting, and then go to Aljazeera where things are getting pretty wild. It’s almost like knowing when to stop – it’s hard to make that balance.

C: So you sent me a few photos, as part of a fun little photo elicitation…?

Z: Yeah.

C: Can you tell me a little bit about the method? I hadn’t heard of it before.

Z: I don’t know a huge amount about it. But it’s quite common in qualitative research, I think especially in narrative enquiry where people are sort of describing their lived experience over a prolonged period of time. Before the interview, they sit down and search for some images which they think represent their experiences. It’s just a good way to get people thinking about it before the interview, and it’s good to keep coming back to. A picture paints a thousand words, as we know. So it can help to express what you’re feeling and thinking in a comprehensive way, I guess.

C: Yeah, it ties in nicely to what I’m doing. So how does the dog in the box – is that when you were moving house?

Z: No, so that’s just Zara. That’s my friend Georgia’s dog who I was living with during the lockdown. So me and Zara spent a lot of time together this lockdown. Yeah, it’s kind of like what I was saying before – I was in this very beautiful house with this beautiful dog… Her being in the box is kind of emblematic of this loss of control, I guess, and loss of freedom, which is very novel for me, ever since – I imagine you’ve had the same experience – ever since you finish high school and become adults you can pretty much do whatever you want whenever you want and it’s quite a new experience to have that taken away from you. And I think it’s quite a valuable experience because it’s how a lot of people in this world live without the external factors constricting their freedom, I guess.

C: Was there anything you said to yourself that you wanted to do while you were constrained? You know, how everyone talked about baking bread and reading lots of books. Was there anything that you wanted to achieve?

Z: I’m doing my honours, which is taking up a lot of time. Yeah, I had a similar goal, I guess I wanted to read more, cook more. It was really exciting that I got to live with my two really close friends. So sort of exploring those relationships more and see how they might differ living in the same space and spending all that time together.

C: Mm. And the other photo you sent was the rainbow colours. Do you want to talk to me about that?

Z: Yeah. I couldn’t find a better image to express it. It was just like a spectrum. So one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is despair and hope, as emotions. Like what they can do for us in a situation like this, because I feel like despair is something that’s come up quite a lot. I’d be interested to hear how you understand despair, but to me it kind of is this overwhelming feeling you get when a bad scenario is perceived as being unavoidable in a way. Like when people say the world is ending – this kind of fatalistic mentality, and it leads to inaction. And so I guess, hope would be the opposite – it’s when an adverse scenario is perceived as avoidable, and so it leads to action, I guess. And I was wondering how much sense that makes in response to Covid, but also in response to all the shittiness that’s going on in the world, climate change, things like that. Climate despair is quite common these days. But I think it kind of ignores the fact that it’s not really dichotomous in that way. It’s not the world ends, or doesn’t end, it’s like a spectrum of possibility with each increment leading to progressively awful consequences. And I don’t think inaction should ever be justified, but it also feels like despair of a kind is warranted. I get feelings of despair when you read the news, and it is tempting to fall into this mindset of, Well there’s nothing we can do. But I think if you ignore the fact that there isn’t these dichotomous outcomes, and the more we do, the less bad it’s going to be. It’s just something I have to keep reminding myself of, I guess.

C: I was thinking about how in French, the word despair is – at least, I think it’s désespoir, which is written as if it’s the opposite of hope, so hope is espoir. So it’s like the inverse of hope. But I’ve never thought of despair and hope in English as opposites, but obviously that makes sense.

Z: Yeah, I think I read that in an article, so it’s not my thoughts. I was also looking up definitions on Google and they kind of seemed to be opposites. Yeah, it’s just that link – like, hope leads to action and despair leads to inaction which I found interesting.

C: Yeah, it’s interesting thinking about action in terms of Covid. Because there aren’t obvious actions, and I guess, acting in a way that stops the spread is being as inactive as possible, and not doing something. I think, initially that was hard for people to understand and trying to get the message out when usually that would involve meeting, protesting, community, and then having to be together but physically not together, is a very novel concept I think.

Z: I think for a long time it wasn’t really clear what the right thing to do was. And I was feeling pretty useless for a lot of Covid as well. I used to do quite a lot of volunteering pre-Covid and that all got cancelled, so I felt like I wasn’t really doing anything. Yeah, you’re right, it’s not really clear how you can act, I guess, in a useful way.

C: Yeah, and it’s also easier when it’s not this invisible thing that you can’t track. It’s interesting with climate change, because that is also, to a lot of people, an invisible thing. Even though there are such clear reminders if you look for it. How do you feel about the government’s response to Covid in terms of how quickly it became important to deal with the crisis, compared to the climate crisis, how easy it is to look away from that?

Z: Yeah, I think the government’s response was pretty good. I think it’s all relative – like, we’re looking at Trump and Bolsonaro’s response, so Scomo looks pretty good in comparison. In terms of relating it to climate change, it does show that large-scale action is possible if the political will is there, so that’s kind of encouraging. But not sure how likely it is that that will continue.

C: I think one of the clearest things to me is seeing the money, and the capacity for change that the government has in terms of lifting the unemployment benefit, and being able to spend billions of dollars like that, when all of this money could have been spent to help people previously. But suddenly it’s important because the types of people who are out of work are not the usual types of people.

Z: It is getting a bit more concerning recently, especially as the restrictions are easing, and they’re cutting some of the benefits. I find it interesting how there’s all this talk of like a snap back to things the way they were. But I think a lot of people would say that’s not what we want, we kind of want to snap forward and change the way we do things. There was a lot of injustice in the ways things were before.

C: Yeah, I guess the optimistic way of looking at things is, like, surely it can’t get any worse, hopefully next year we’ll grow from this. But it’s unclear at the moment what’s going to happen.

Z: Yeah, growth is an interesting word. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to make good out of it. We’ll see whether that actually happens. It kind of links back to despair, in a way. I almost feel like I’m throwing up my hands, just being like, there’s nothing we can do, it’s all up to the government. I’m really trying to be more mindful that there is always something you can do. Little things, focus on the small wins.

C: In terms of your Honours and work, I imagine it’s affected how things have run a lot. Do you think you’ve learnt anything new from the disruptions?

Z: I think it’s really interesting because work flexibility for a long time has been seen as a women’s issue, I guess. It’s traditionally been seen as something women campaign for – more flexible work allows them to look after children, and all this stuff. But I feel like it’s changed the way I’ve thought about work flexibility. It seems like it’s something that affects all of us. I think there’s lots of instances like that where we can reframe these issues which we thought were affecting small minority groups – we can think of them as affecting all of us as well.

C: Do you mean in terms of working from home?

Z: Yeah, definitely. Also, like, the economic fallout from all this. I don’t know if you saw this article, but it says it has the potential to reverse decades of progress in terms of lifting people out of abject poverty. Which does make you question what we are considering progress, if it’s that precarious and can be reversed so easily.

C: I guess no one expected a global pandemic. Even though scientists did. Yeah, I think it’s interesting in terms of seeing how clearly education affects people’s opinions on this whole situation and how some people just don’t believe in science, and those usually non-mainstream beliefs being highlighted.

Z: Especially in the US.

C: Well yeah, you have a president who doesn’t believe in science. Which is just sad.

Z: Yeah, I find it really frustrating. You, as well?

C: Yeah, it’s just like, science is all we have! Gotta believe in it.

Z: I have quite a few friends like this, some are like anti-vaxxers, which is a bit scary. And we try and have these conversations, try and view them as best you can, but you really feel like you’re not getting anywhere, you’re just banging your head against the wall, which is really discouraging. I don’t know what to do. If you just make a good enough argument, and do it in the right way, then you change people’s minds, but it seems like you need more than that. I was speaking with someone last night, she’s one of the philosophy lecturers at Sydney Uni who also happens to be in our friendship group. And she’s doing work on just this, like promoting institutional change through affect. Like acknowledging the limitations of rational argument, I guess, and trying to take a different approach.

C: That’s super interesting.

Z: Sounds very difficult, though.

C: Yeah.

Z: It comes up quite a lot with climate change I think, we talk about transformed lived experiences, have you heard of that? The idea is, like, creating change through art, you have to make people feel it instead of just believe it. There is probably a sinister side to it, you have to appeal to people’s self-interests to get them motivated.

C: How do you feel about the rest of the year?

Z: Trying not to think too far in advance. Just take it day by day. It seems unproductive to try and make long-term plans at the moment. I’m good, I’ve got my Honours which I’m really enjoying and finding interesting, so I’ll just focus on that.

[thepandemicinterviews]

Mikki, July 11 2020, Melbourne

During the course of my interview with Mikki, I realised eight minutes too late that half of what had been said so far had not recorded. This lost section illustrates for me two things: 1) the fallibility of technology, and 2) the irrecoverable nature of speech. Thinking about the former, I consider phone calls that cut in and out, one friend lagging behind the others. For a short while, whenever Mikki and I called, only one person could be heard at a time, so I had to make sure not to “mm” in response or I’d risk cutting her off. This meant monologuing and not interrupting, something akin to the interview form.

I’ve always been attracted to the interview. I think teenage magazines, which I read religiously (often standing in the supermarket aisle with the magazines and stationery and greeting cards), were the first indicator of this love. A decade later, recently, I reflected on the unique beauty of speech in written form in Rachel Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy, which are written almost entirely through her characters’ monologue-style speech. I then read her interview in the Paris Review, in which she says the following:

I suppose I recognised that certain worlds could be almost prepared for me by other people, that other people had abilities to perceive their experiences in ways that I found really useful. That sounds a bit like I got other people to do the work for me, but I just thought, Actually you can just use that particular narrative gift for narrative form in speech. […] I think what I was looking for in writing these books was almost a sound frequency. I think I’m very aware when these passages of life occur—when people are able to give voice to themselves. One of the things that is said about these books is, People don’t talk like that. But I think they probably do. Maybe not all the time, but I think they do. The people that I tend to have speaking in my books have a momentary emergence, like someone getting out of the sea and standing on a rock for a minute and sort of looking around, and for whatever reason they can see where they are.

Like Cusk, I wish to glean from others’ experiences, to pay attention to them, and in doing so, give rise to that “momentary emergence.” Interviews allow speech to be consecrated. One can give voice to oneself, then see spoken words turned into black text. The transcriber imagines commas and full stops, moulding the chaos of speech into tidy sentences. The speech is exalted.

Perhaps what makes an interview so daunting, and so singular in its form, is its promise of structured spontaneity. More structured than a conversation, less structured than a piece of writing. Inside it, operating within a space of pure question and response, subjective experience can resound and stand alone.

I wanted to begin this project with Mikki because she is, in every way, brilliant, but also because she has had to experience Covid-19 after moving to Melbourne in February, away from family and friends. Basically, very alone (alone being almost synonymous with the experience of the virus). Now, as cases in Melbourne continue to rise again, she’s moved into a new house, and has entered week one of their six-week lockdown. We discuss existential versus tangible stresses, our displaced visual landscapes, and the limitations of empathy within collective – and yet, so individual – suffering.

C: Mikki, you found out that you tested negative for Covid today. How did you feel when you saw that text?

M: I was really sleepy because it came through before six in the morning and so I felt slightly relieved but also just felt very silly for having worried so much. But also felt very justified for having worried. Then just thought about all the possible timelines and the things that could have happened. So it was overwhelming but in a nice way.

C: When you say the possible timelines, what would have happened if you had tested positive?

M: It would have changed the way this month plays out. So I was working out how it would change my housemates’ plans for moving today, and then how it would then affect all the things that need to happen in the next few weeks. It would mean that I would need to isolate here, so I would need to do my assignment here and wouldn’t be able to leave to my new place, and just change the whole future of July 2020 for me personally.

C: I felt that way when it was March and I felt like every decision I made was contingent on every other thing that happened which was often not in my control. Do you feel like this week has been the most intense week during this period in terms of personal stresses?

M: I think so. It’s been the most actively intense week I guess. Like I felt stressed about tangible real things that maybe didn’t necessarily require the level of stress I was experiencing but still were very real and very scary in practical ways. Whereas, the stress and intensity I felt in March and April was much more existential and about my emotions, I guess, for different reasons. Whereas this felt so tied to real, terrifyingly tangible stresses.

C: When you say that it felt existential back in March, can you elaborate on that?

M: I’m never a hundred percent sure if I’m using the word properly [laughs]. But I think I just felt very aware of literally living and existing and how I was experiencing being alive and all the ways that I could feel throughout a day, or a week, or a month. I was just so aware of every tiny experience and so obviously questioned every aspect of my experiences, I guess. Partly because I had all this time to do that and was so intensely alone that I was forced to do that. This time felt really different to that because things don’t feel as abstract.

C: And with all that time alone, other than thinking, how did you pass that time?

M: I watched so many music videos. I discovered that I can just lie down and watch music videos with my headphones on and feel so much. What else did I do… I called people a lot and I went on walks and for brief periods I’d read and watch movies and feel really good about that. Obviously write my essays, but really slowly. And started drinking tea so, so frequently throughout each day. And I guess just made a lot of plans, just solidified ideas – I guess that kind of comes under thinking. But just, I guess, restructured how I think. It felt like I could just intensely feel an emotion and embrace that feeling and work out which other senses I could use to further feel that feeling and ride it out and just experience it fully. And that was like an activity, and a thing that I could be doing in a way that it never has been before.

C: It sounds very therapeutic. A mindfulness guru we have in our midst. Daphne’s volunteering for this mindfulness group at the moment where they just slowly eat raisins. I guess just having the lack of external influence to allow you this space to drink tea and watch your music videos. Do you think that’s something you’ll hold with you when you do get busier – that experience?

M: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the only other time I’d understood that was the one week at the end of January when I smoked weed each night and just enjoyed feeling really good in all these ways. But that was so short-lived and so brief, and I feel like I’ve extended that now, but without needing any kind of substance, just fully enjoying being comfortable…

C: So this new lockdown – six weeks – having that set timeframe. How do you feel about that and is there anything you hope to achieve in the second lockdown?

M: Yeah, it definitely is quite a set time. I was talking about that just earlier today, about how that’s different psychologically to being told that something’s happening indefinitely and that would change how you think about it. I am kind of seeing it as a second chance in a way, like Lockdown: Take 2 [laughs]. Like a time to do all the things that you hoped to do the first time round, but obviously were never going to accomplish. This feels like the chance to do that. So part of me does want to end up becoming a runner by the end of it, or someone who does yoga all the time. But I also just hope that I’m someone who’s a bit more solidly in the real world by the end of it. And feel a bit more able to engage with the external world more comfortably and feel like a real person who exists in a tangible world that’s external to me and my own mind. Because I think at the start of it, so the next few weeks, I definitely will keep being very gentle with myself and move with whatever mood or feeling needs to happen and just try to ride out the next few weeks, I guess. And still try to achieve the things I have to do but without any real world pressures because it doesn’t feel like I’m back in the real world yet. I think I do hope by the end of the six weeks I am a bit more solidly in the world and able to interact with people without feeling like it’s all a bit imaginary. And be ready to be doing uni subjects a bit more seriously, and start looking for a job, and be a bit more down-to-earth, be solidly on the ground kind of vibe.

C: Do you feel like it gives you a bit more time to realise what you want before feeling fully settled? Do you feel like it’s kind of a good thing for where you’re at to have this extra time?

M: Yeah, I think it is. It feels a bit sad to have started to have these nice things, like seeing people occasionally and being able to relax a bit, not feeling that stress. It was nice just feeling like life was picking up in that way. But I think for me, still kind of feeling like I am quite alone, and I do want to take all this learning and growth, becoming different and new in all these ways out of this time I have, where I am forced to be alone. In that sense I think it does feel like a nice bit of extra room to do that comfortably.

C: You mentioned moodboards before, when I think it wasn’t recording. What images come to mind when you think of this year? Not January, of course, because that was a very different time.

M: This is super obvious and has been the case for nearly everyone I love, but the sky at dusk has been a really clear daily chance to really feel something. Something that changes all the time. I think just striking visuals in general have been something I’ve been able to appreciate more. It’s as though colours and images or videos of people in really good or interesting outfits carry so much more weight and power in a way. I feel like I can appreciate them so much more. So those are some of the images that I’ve been much more struck by than usual, I guess. I feel like the things I look at in real life are so limited, you know, like I just look out the same few windows, and walk the same couple of parks, and go to the same shops. But then at the same time, the things I’m looking at online are so much more varied and diverse and I’m giving them so much more attention and time that it feels like they’re all more powerful. Oh, and also just my big blue jumper has become such a staple and all my bed sheets and pillows are different shades of blue, but the jumper just typifies that soft, comfy, homey – soft colours, but also warm soft cosy overall sensation. I think it represents that all in itself.

C: It does. So you’ve learnt a lot about yourself of course, but do you feel like you’ve learnt a lot about other people, people in general, specific people?

M: Hmm. I don’t know if I’ve really learnt about other people. I think I’ve seen more of certain parts of different people I know, because our relationships are obviously really different, and it brings out new dynamics and certain aspects of everyone’s personalities are amplified in different ways.

C: In terms of different opinions towards the whole situation or?

M: In terms of how people think and feel. I guess because I’m in a new place, it’s kind of been a really specific way of highlighting how different people think and act. There’s just been such clear divides between people who are partying recently and out in bars and stuff, and people who are following the rules because they’re the laws but aren’t necessarily super invested in the reality of the health crisis and your responsibilities in your communities and so on. And then the people who are most disadvantaged by this and are just in such a completely different world to the people who are out dancing, happy they can do that. So it’s kind of been really stark seeing those differences play out, and mainly through my phone or laptop as well, like not in person. I guess also seeing people respond to stuff, like with the public housing hard lockdown, seeing people really quickly working out ways to donate stuff and help with various things. I think that kind of brought out people’s opinions especially starkly. In so many ways. Obviously, seeing the government’s responses has also been super informative, and feels like it all lines up with the last essay I did, which was all about incarceration in Victoria and how indigenous women are disproportionately affected. And seeing that conflict between a fairly progressive government in a lot of ways, but then a really harsh, tough crime, law-and-order focused, criminal justice agenda. And that’s come out really clearly again recently.

C: Like you can’t be both.

M: Yeah, well it just kind of feels really extreme how it somehow goes so hand-in-hand in this state.

C: I think at the beginning of everything, just speaking on a very vague global level, I thought everyone is kind of going through the same thing worldwide. You never get to experience that level of – like I could talk to anyone in the world and say, “How’s it affecting you?”, “Same.” But then I think as the months progressed and different countries went different directions. And on a local level, different types of people had different experiences and it reinforced existing hierarchies.

M: Totally. It was such a shift from we’re all in this together to realising that just couldn’t be further from the truth, basically. And how false it was.

C: Yeah, and all the blaming of people and outrage. I think in particular, in Australia and New Zealand, it’s been a big part of the conversation around outbreaks. Blaming people for not being perfect and not having the empathy to understand why someone might be more likely to pass it on due to living conditions or just personal situations.

M: It’s been so extreme seeing that play out. Especially with the recent Victorian spike, I feel like the discourse has become so much more about blaming people who are doing the wrong thing. Even where government policy failures are also a huge part of that story as well. Yeah, it’s so interesting in terms of empathy, actually. It’s kind of helped people develop empathy in some ways, in terms of unemployment for some people and what that’s like, or what poverty is like, or social isolation or being lonely or being anxious or not having access to the same food or resources. But then also seeing how limited that empathy is in other ways. That’s such a strange conflict I think.