COVID FRAGILITY

In the last three years, I have experienced multiple friendship shifts and ruptures. I experienced one significant friendship loss and I’ve witnessed several close friends have similar experiences of fractured or dissolved friendships. My peers and I, all women in our fifties, are displaying more social dysfunction that our teenage daughters.

I’ve started to refer to this phenomenon as COVID fragility. The timing works out — all the friendship explosions occurred well into COVID or shortly after the severe crisis time. 

In my little world, COVID fragility is marked by an extreme response to otherwise common social experiences. Disagreements, for example, or disappointments become cataclysmic events, often irreparable. Instead of having an argument and recovering, these various friendship breaches result in extreme friendship termination.

I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, The Hidden Brain, last week. The title of the episode, “Less is More” discussed, among other things, the idea of argument dissolution. Shankar Vedantam was interviewing experts on how to make convincing arguments.

Most of us assume that, if we present more arguments for our case, it strengthens it. For example, if I want to make a case to my partner to visit my extended family, I might think I am most effective to pile on the reasons — it’s been a long time; we visited your family recently; my mother is getting old; I miss them. 

One of psychologists on the podcast argued that our brains actually average the potency of all the arguments, so sharing one or two more potent reasons when trying to convince someone to get something you want is more effective.

In my example, the strongest arguments are: I miss my family and my mother is getting old. The other two arguments might be considered as petty or fluff. They don’t actually strengthen my case. So I would be better off just using two most compelling reasons instead of diluting my case in using all four.

As I listened to that podcast, I thought about how this might be happening in reverse with my friendships. Before COVID people saw each other all the time. Socializing once or twice a week in person was normal. In the old days, people last-minute canceled or changed their plans all the time. When that happened, people were momentarily, as my daughter says, “butt-hurt,” but they moved on. They called another friend and made another plan. A friendship kerfuffle was not a drama waiting to happen.

After two years during COVID, our social resilience atrophied. Returning to a version of pre-COVID socializing was bumpy and awkward. Most of us haven’t gotten back there yet. And as we’ve tried, COVID fragility has made friendships a little harder to manage.

COVID fragility is the idea of argument dissolution in reverse. During COVID, we had minimal contact with our friends and socializing was a BIG deal — lots of planning, organizing, COVID testing. If a social event fell apart after all of that preparation, we were devastated.

When we got back to “normal,” we were fragile. In her book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo writes about white people’s paper-thin skin when being confronted with racist beliefs or attitudes. She argues that white Americans live in a world that protects and shelters them from race-based stress. White people are insulated from the realities or racial injustice that people of color experience every day. 

During COVID, we were isolated from each other, insulted against the struggles and stresses that are a natural part of socializing in the world, of having friends. As we return to pre-COVID socializing, we are fragile. The context is gone. Before COVID isolation, one disappointment or misunderstanding with a friend was an inconvenience, one experience in many. 

After COVID, this same disappointment is one in a handful. The emotional response is amplified, even explosive. Instead of facing the hard negotiations of repairing a friendship, being uncomfortable, maybe a little scared or anguished to face the conflict, we turn back inside, back to the insulated, safe zone we lived in during lock down. We do this because we are fragile.

During the social isolation of COVID, I experienced a great sense of ease and simplicity. My social world became uncomplicated and streamlined — really just my family and an occasional walk with a friend. There were no dinner parties or happy hours. No one was ever excluded because no one was ever included. 

I’ve felt so sad watching my friendships change, even disappear over the last few years, but I understand now why that happened. Many of us have become fragile. We are slowly recovering from those unsocial years. 

We’re in a period of reconstruction now, rebuilding our skills and resilience to be social again, to be in community. Sadly, I don’t know if the friendship destruction that’s already happened in my little world can be repaired, but I’m eternally hopeful. 

Searching for Fertile Ground

I know I am in balance is when I have something to write about. Writing is my clear channel, my touchstone to myself reminding me that I am here and present and accounted for. I have committed to writing at least one essay a week that challenges me to think about who I am in the world.

I share that essay because it makes it true. I hit “publish” and release my truth. I let it go from my interiority because it makes it more real and true. It’s not just inside, but outside too.

Lately I’ve been blocked. I feel like I have nothing in me. It worries me. My weekly writing connection is an important part of my self-care and having nothing there is a red flag, an invitation to pay attention.

When I sit down to my writing practice, I feel dried up, barren, empty. I ask myself questions, “what is here right now?” “Nothing,” I respond. Yesterday I pushed myself, “What do I mean by nothing?” I asked myself.

I see parched earth, plantless soil. I write about that. I imagine a windstorm pulling away all the nourishing earth, seedlings and blossoms a distant memory from another world.

Last night at Passover, one of our hosts asked us to each think about what we are prisoners to in our own life. Immediately, I thought about my job. I spend too much energy on my paid work and that over-focus has rendered me lop-sided and out of balance.

I have always been a creative person. For most of my career, I had an idea, and I followed the sparks until they either ignited or fizzled out. But I always followed them. And that gave me joy. For a while, I followed sparks in my current job. I felt like I was on fertile ground, filled with the possibility of new growth and beauty. But I don’t feel that anymore at work. All I see is dry soil and no matter how hard I try, I cannot seem grow fruitful crops there.

Yesterday as I sat down to write, longing for the grounding, connected feeling that comes when I form my thoughts into words, the image that came to my mind was a dry prairie. It’s what I imagined when I read the Grapes of Wrath. And, like the Joad family, I felt hopeless and desperate.

For weeks I have abandoned my writing notebook, instead turning to my computer and stalking job sites. But I have missed writing, and yesterday I acknowledged to myself that the internal imbalance I was feeling wouldn’t change unless I did something about it.

“Stay here,” I said to myself. I closed my eyes and waited. I imagined a dust storm around me. I stayed there, eyes closed, waiting for rain. I imagined heavy raindrops hitting dry earth. I could almost smell the soil waking up.

In the Grapes of Wrath, the Joads had to leave their dry land and find a place with fertile crops. I feel like I have to leave too. I’m contemplating staying in the land of scorched earth and the dream of moving onto richer soil. I am considering the practicalities of leaving — setting up my team so they have an infrastructure when I go, figuring out insurance for my family, finding another job.

Like the Joads, to leave I have to be brave and migrate away from the parched earth of my job. I have to leave what is familiar and step into the unknown.

To leave is to face the challenges and struggles along the way, and to stay is to find a way to create growth in a place that seems dead. I want to smell the fertile soil again. I want to watch the tiny seedlings grow into maturity. I want to follow sparks towards joy.

Like it always does, my old friend writing helped me find my clear channel of truth. I’m at a crossroads, facing two paths — stay and work hard, till the soil, creatively feed my soul until the rain comes or leave, head towards greener pastures that may or may not be there.

Writing this out has helped me. I understand that, as long as I’m staying in my job, I have to work hard and commit even if it feels like I’m trying to grown beans in dead soil. Having one foot out the door, preparing to go but not actually leaving is what is draining my energy and feeding my imbalance.

I think about the Joads and their long, treacherous journey to California. They probably asked themselves a hundred times, “Should we stay or should we go?” When they left Oklahoma, they had no idea what was ahead of them. If they had, I wonder if they’d have gone.

In the end, things really weren’t much better for them in California than the life they’d left in Oklahoma. I think about the situation I’m in with my job. Should I stay or should I go? When the Joads left Oklahoma, they had no food. Their farm was in foreclosure. They had no choice but to go. I’m not that desperate yet, but I might get there. And when I do, I hope things go better for me than they did for the Joads.