Our Different Perspective

Yesterday, I attended a company holiday party. It was your standard end-of-year fair with finger foods and a Secret Santa exchange and much laughter and smiles. It comes after a very hard year and so many were sharing their reflections on what it meant to get to this point, letting down their hair, relaxing and looking forward to the typical New Zealand bach and beach holidays.

This group of people worked amazingly hard during the pandemic -- particularly during the early lockdown and again for second Auckland August lockdown -- to ensure that our healthcare system had the tools and supplies necessary to do their work. We don't normally think about these people. They are even more invisible to most people than the grocery store clerk or the fireman. The supply chain is foobar in ways that few of us can even begin to grasp. It is the work of people like those I was standing with to make sure that our healthcare workers have everything from tissues and PPE to surgical supplies and testing materials.

I wasn't there when they pulled off miracles. I wasn't one of the senior leaders who put boxes in their car to drive them up at the last minute to Northland hospitals and clinics. I didn't yell at suppliers or try to create intricate forecast models for the community. In fact, I didn't start here until everything calmed all the way down. The pandemic caused enormous disruption in their lives and work processes, and it wasn't until way WAY after the fact that the leaders even a moment for the thought, "You know what we need? Someone who understands change." Not their fault. The pandemic exposes all sorts of hidden gotchas in the ways we had ourselves sorted previously.

But as a result I felt oddly distanced from their reminiscences. They were like any group of people that pass through a very difficult time and who have a shared experience. As hellish as it might have been, there are stories to tell, heroic efforts to celebrate, failures and recoveries to parse, commiseration to share on the sacrifices made. I just am not part of the group. While these people were working so diligently, I was in my basement — mostly tweeting — thinking I was depressed but mostly just short on oxygen with a heart slowly unwinding.

It's not that we don't all have a story to tell about this pandemic year. It's that there isn't one story, there are many. This group has their set of tales, while my family and I locked into Niccol Bubble and wandering the streets of Devonport for weeks on end share an entirely different one. And in that moment as my current coworkers laughed and shared their stories, I felt disoriented and left out as I can't share their vision, their memories, their perspectives.

I think this is a prelude to what we New Zealanders are going to feel far more strongly when the world starts to reopen. There was a Twitter thread this morning with English speaking Europeans and Americans talking about the neutral, not exciting things they miss the most. Top of the list is apparently browsing in a grocery store... just the simple act of picking up a box of cereal, contemplating it for a minute, returning it to the shelf. I say apparently. Those on the thread upvoted that to the top and commented vigorously. I have zero connection to this wistful thought. Other activities being upvoted that struck me: sipping a coffee while walking down the street, putting on lipstick before heading out the door, sitting on a bench at the mall.

After the 1918 pandemic, the world erupted into the excesses of the 20s. Scholars have long argued that the Roaring 20s were in no small part an emotional reaction to double impacts of the first world war and and tremendous losses of the pandemic. I wonder what will happen in the northern hemisphere when the virus is brought under control, what new behaviours and norms will surface. But even more, I wonder how we Kiwis will feel when we stand on their streets or visit our northern based family members. How alien will we feel, how left out of the special club of loss and sacrifice and trial these people have gone through.

I don't wish even a moment of the UK or US experience on anyone here. We are so incredibly fortunate, and I am fully aware of how much we are responsible for having MADE this good fortune. Nevertheless, for the rest of our lives, our experience of the Pandemic Year is going to be radically different from those in countries where the virus has run more or less out of control. It will shape us in ways that are both foreseeable and simultaneously unknowable. Sometimes we are going to feel left out of the conversation like I was at the party. Sometimes we are going to feel smug. Sometimes we are going to be baffled at the depth of the hurt, the length of the emotional recovery, and just want them to 'get over it already'.

And they are going to look at us -- as they do now -- with a similarly baffled expression. What do you mean you pick through the fruit at the farmer's market and taste the samples offered?

“There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.” ~ Charles Duhigg