If you’re reading this, congratulations. You survived 2020, a historically epically bad and tragic year. Well done.
Now how did you do? And how are you going to handle the next however many months of this pandemic? Because however much people have been wishing a good riddance to 2020 over the last few days, the thing that made 2020 so awful is still here.
The pandemic is raging. In fact, it’s worse than it’s ever been in Denmark (where I live), the UK, the US and many other places. How you handle the next few months is one of the most important choices you are ever going to make in your life.
Sometimes I feel that we forget that we are all living through history. All of these days of our lives, all of these years we live through, one day they will be in the history books. I am of an age now (42, thank you) where I get to see that in full force. The last season of The Crown covered people (Prince Charles and Princess Diana) that I don’t remember NOT knowing and lots of events I remember from the time they happened.
Seeing such events crystallised is a stark reminder how every choice you make will be judged by history eventually. Most of us aren’t as powerful as say, Margaret Thatcher, so our, say, tacit approval of the Apartheid regime in South Africa is not going to be the subject of a prestige TV show. But it will be part of our personal record and our fabric as human beings. Part of what makes us.
What side you fall on issues matters. The actions you take matter. They matter to the world and they matter to your personal integrity.
I have struggled this holiday season. I have struggled with my anger. Indeed, my anger has given way to something that feels more like rage.
Anger, let alone rage do not come easily to me. I always try to come from a standpoint of sympathy and understanding. This is what has driven my desire to live and be a part of many countries and cultures, as well as my studies of philosophy, sociology and anthropology.
When I was a philosophy student at UCL in London back in the beginning of the millenium, I had the good fortune to take one-on-one tutorials with Jonathan Wolff, a philosopher of politics and ethics who is not only a brilliant professor but also – and this was in my experience sadly rare – kind, and a most gifted and engaged teacher.
He said many things that have stuck with me, but what has stuck with me the most is something he said once when I was going through different philosophers’ views on a certain topic and struggling to incorporate them all.
He said that he tended to believe that everyone was a little bit right.
And they really were. I was able to find aspects in every piece I agreed with – as well as aspects I didn’t. I did not have to wholesale reject – or accept – any one text.
What a gift, this insight. It has given me a much more nuanced approach to things, not just in the realm of philosophy, but in general.
I truly believe and have found time and again that much more can be learnt and gained from coming at things with an openness and a curiosity. This has served me well in all the many different places I have lived, all the different people and outlooks I have come across.
And yet. It can be taken too far. You can be too understanding.
For me, I found I ended up taking my understanding too far, to the point where I lost some of my moral compass.
I have always been passionate. Felt deeply. Back in my red-blooded youth, I wrote with a fiery passion, pausing not one minute to pass fiery judgement on anyone I deemed to be immoral and wrong.
I am proud to say that I still stand by a lot of those judgements. I still believe that those against gay marriage and gay couples being parents are deeply wrong and that their arguments are bad. I still believe capitalism is evil and kills. I still believe many of my fellow Danes do not realise how incredibly lucky they are to simply be born in Denmark.
But I also made judgements I shudder to think about now. I considered having babies immoral. I now have a child of my own. I considered almost any luxury frivolous. I now enjoy fine dining and other joyful and pricely activities. I appreciate that we all have our own struggles so much more than I did then. And so on.
Perhaps because of this early fieriness and the fact that it will forever exist in print (although, thankfully, this was practically pre-internet – I sent my text on floppy discs in the post! – and waaaay before social media) I have become much more reticent to share any opinion at all.
Even then I hated it when people brought up my writing with me. And yet I loved to write!
As a result of this, I have barely written my true feelings for the last 20 years.
This is not to say I haven’t written much. Oh, I have blogged entertainingly on many a now-defunct site and for the past ten years or so, I have mainly made my living writing professional copy.
But I have been trying to see both, or all, sides of issues to the extent that I have suppressed my real and true anger even when it is righteous.
Not everything should be accepted. Far from it. But I did. Or I tried. To the point when it was too much.
It will be a surprise to few that it took a good therapist and a lot of reflection and work to get to a place where I was yet again in touch with my anger in a healthy way.
Along the way I had a funny few months where I just really let myself feel the anger and, Hulk-like, was angry all the time. I blew up at people biking on pedestrian paths or flicking burning cigarettes off from balconies. THEY COULD REALLY HURT SOMEONE!
And they could, but this is also a part of life in a city and I have learnt how to handle it. Just like Elsa in Frozen (did I mention I have a kid?) once I ‘let it go’ things got a little extreme for a while. But then I learnt to harness my powers and since then, my life has been better.
Because anger IS a power. It is part of your moral compass. Who you are as a person.
It was once my anger was in control – but not suppressed – that I realised I had to quit my job. I had been unhappy there for a while but I had convinced myself the things I was unhappy with were manageable. I discovered that they were not manageable, that they in fact made me miserable, and I worked really hard to change them. But despite my best and continued efforts, I was unable to. And I felt myself yet again falling into convincing myself that it was okay, that it was manageable.
I saw myself suppress those feelings that were legitimate, and I realised I had a choice. I could stay and grow numb to my own feelings yet again. Or I could let myself feel the unhappiness that was there and was justified, honour it – and quit.
I quit.
And it was scary and I had very little confidence and it took me a long time to find a new job. But eventually I did, and a much better one that I am truly happy with. And yes, I was incredibly lucky that I had a steady situation and unemployment insurance and the support needed to do that. I know that.
Another benefit of being back in touch with my anger is that I have stuff to write about again. Stuff that is, I think, interesting to read. Because it has a point of view. A heart. It comes from somewhere.
And so here we are. Because I have a lot of feelings about how people here, my Danish compatriots, are handling this second wave. This, the deadliest phase yet of the pandemic here in Denmark, and many other places in the world.
I am angry. I am angry at people I know and people I don’t know, people I follow on social media, sharing photos and videos and writing posts about all the people they are seeing at Christmas and New Year’s. Different people. Parties.
It’s not illegal here in Denmark, unlike, say, in London. It is strongly discouraged but not illegal. And I know many probably had even bigger parties in mind.
But it makes me blind with rage to think that because people had to go see people for Christmas and then other people for New Year’s, that we are now looking at more deaths. More people will die because of this.
We are also looking at another two weeks of lockdown, and possibly more weeks and months after that. We won’t really know the full effect of this until mid-January at the earliest, and we most likely still won’t know if the curve has peaked by then.
And don’t get me started on the people ranting about masks. Look, I wear glasses, they fog up, it sucks. But seriously. Are you kidding me?
Do you really need for it to be illegal to stop seeing other people indoors right now? WHY?
WHAT IS IT THAT YOU DON’T GET ABOUT HOW DEADLY THIS IS AND HOW OVERWORKED OUR DOCTORS AND NURSES ARE?
This is what I mean about the whole ‘living through history’ part I said at the beginning. Some events are clearly historical. Most people who lived through September 11th or the election of Obama – and Trump – realised at the time that these were cataclysmic, historical events, even if the full extent of their consequences was yet unknown.
This is somewhat different. I am not sure that most people think about the fact that how they spent Christmas and New Year’s 2020 were historical and cataclysmic for their personal history – although we already do know the consequences. We can foresee them. It is foretold.
People will die and hospitals will be overrun. And we will all have to stay home even longer.
I wish that people would think about that more. But I also hope they never delete those social media posts and pictures. I want us all to remember. I want them to remember. I want their grandchildren to ask them about it and them to be ashamed to admit it.
Anne Frank spent TWO YEARS holed up in an attic and you couldn’t even forego one New Year’s Eve?
For shame.
Where I'm Coming From 