To Be Grounded, Again
The government has grounded naughty girls and boys across the world, who protest their innocence.
There is no precedent in our lifetimes. Doing as we are told, we crowd around the broadcasts like the wartime wireless, and await the terms of our retribution.
It seems unlikely, then, that these sentences have been dealt many times before. I received mine not from the politician, but from the doctor.
I have a gene that increases my chance of contracting cancers of the breast, ovaries, pancreas, and skin. This diagnosis left me dangling in a realm of terrifying possibilities, irrevocably disrupting my life’s imagined timeline. My academic work and everything outside it became meaningless, simply a distraction from the inevitable. A distraction when I was incapable of being distracted.
I battled with disorientation. I asked my journal how I would go on when
‘the details of my life will never be quite how I imagined them – even if those details had yet to be imagined’
This privilege – of knowing – had been hollowed from within me.
But everyone continued as normal. If I did not, I would find myself excluded from real life.
I continued with my work. It made me feel formidably human. I found strength in the everyday, and learnt that I could not exist in the world without playing my small part in its routine. I did not let the extraordinary deny me of this.
In extraordinary times we must do the same. This is a rallying cry for routine.
I chose to have risk-reducing surgery. The recovery swept me out of real life, forcing me to stay at home for two months. But these two months in exile saved me from risking years of unreality. Staying put became victorious.
The time stretching ahead of us is impossibly unknowable. It will challenge us every day, as we sit at our desks, our beds, our kitchen tables, learning new routines. But in the end, it will be our making.
Continue as you did before in your new world. Let’s celebrate the before, and the again, as it will be. Soon, we will no longer be grounded! And we will discover joy, all along, in those moments of ordinariness.