A review of 2020 and an exploration in how we define our crises.
by Jenna Griffin
January // A paroxysmal attack of pain, distress, or disordered function.
I was told that one of the little girls from the climbing gym where I work was yelling for me, and so I ran to her. She stood halfway up the sledding hill, doubled over, crying with her whole body. She had been hit by a boy in a sled, but I couldn’t tell where she was hurt, or how badly. I tried to ask her where it hurt, and she said: “everywhere.” I asked where it hurt the most, and she said, “everywhere, Jenna. It hurts everywhere.”
She wasn’t calming. In fact, it seemed to be getting worse. She cried out that the pain was unbearable, that she needed to see her mom, that her mom needed to take her to the hospital. The kids around us knew where she lived, and so I picked her up and began carrying her up the hill behind the gym, up and up to her neighborhood of ten-story apartment blocks, none of them with workable elevators. The weight of her ached in my arms and my back, but I ran as best as I could. She kept crying out that she couldn’t bear the pain, and all I could do was carry her.
When her mother saw and assessed her daughter, she wasn’t exceptionally concerned. The girl was crying quietly now, on the bed in the living room where I had laid her, and no matter how many times we asked her, nor how many different ways we rephrased the question, her answer was always: it hurts everywhere. “Poor thing,” her mother said with a little smile, “she doesn’t even know where it hurts.”
My mind had immediately flown to some terrible injury, but I suddenly saw that we were merely witnessing the experience of pain and distress as perceived through the eyes of a child. As we grow, we learn to define and compartmentalize pain, although if we’re honest, we feel it everywhere, too. I imagine this girl became annoyed with our incessant questions about “where.” It didn’t matter where it hurt; it mattered only that it hurt.
A half-hour after I left their apartment to get back to work at the gym, I heard a little tap of knuckles at the door. There she stood, beaming and throwing her arms wide when she saw me. “I’m better!” she said, and I hugged her hard.
February // The turning point in an acute disease or fever—for better or for worse.
The sickness came on quickly, and I was co-leading a weekend in Bucharest where our team was competing. The fever woke me in my sleeping bag where I had spent the night on the mats of a climbing gym. I nearly passed out when I stood, and I made my way carefully to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I looked flushed and sickly.
The six-hour drive back to our valley was painful. My muscles ached deeply. The fever made even my skin hurt. It hurt everywhere, actually. Due to nausea, I could eat only a few handfuls of granola.
Once back in my apartment, I got into bed and pretty much stayed there for a week. The first few days were the worst, with my fever hovering consistently around 104. I could barely get out of bed, and even sitting up to take a sip of water required more energy than I felt I had to give. And while I had never before minded living by myself, I became very aware of my being alone. I felt on the edge with very little safety net.
But as bad as it got, it got better. I lost a good deal of weight, I had a lingering cough for weeks, but I was okay.
March // An emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person’s life.
I hadn’t expected it, which was part of what made the email so devastating. I was being pulled out of the field, away from my work, my home, my community, my entire life it seemed. I had only a few days to leave Romania, and I had no choice.
I could barely process the information. After years of moving from place to place, I felt like I had finally arrived somewhere stable, somewhere I could finally make my home. That’s what I had been putting my whole heart into for the past two years. How could I lose that now? I couldn’t even cry, because crying would be admitting that it was actually happening. I dug my nails into denial.
Until, of course, I lost my grip. By the time I was on the first airplane of far too many, I had sort of numbly resigned myself to the feeling of disappearing off the face of the earth, of thinking I might be forever caught in this limbo, unable to touch down any place at all. Everything had changed too much in too short a time, and it hurt everywhere.
April, May, June, etc. // An unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending.
This is a story everyone knows. Everyone has a slightly different version, and yet they are all, in their essence, the same. Personal crises played out over national and global ones, and instability became the new normal. More pain. More everywhere.
I had started the year with a bout of anxiety uncharacteristic of my generally glass-half-full outlook. Though the memory is clearly colored with the realities that have played out since, I vividly remember feeling like I was experiencing some sort of premonition of great sadness. Whether it was actually a foreboding of the year to come or just coincidental timing isn’t important. I forgot about it quickly once I got back to my home in Romania, back to my work, my friends, my exciting plans for the future. When the gravity of what this year meant was finally apparent, anxiety was replaced with grief—just as strong an emotion, though somewhat easier to handle because you know what’s causing it.
I never forgot that sensation though, that unnameable sense of doom, that tipping into an unknown year, unsure of where any of us would land.
...December // The decisive moment (as in literary plot).
I lived once with a host mother in France who told me stories from her life, some hilarious and some harrowing, and one evening after recounting one of the latter, she smiled and looked right at me. My whole life, she said, I feel like I’ve been walking on a tightrope, but God has had hold of me by one single strand of my hair. She sort of mimed it out for me and laughed. One strand of hair, but that’s enough.
I’ve thought about this image many times over the years since I first heard it in that warm, second story living room—that room where I ate my dinners and she painted large canvases and we watched evening talk shows together. But when I thought about it at the end of this year, I fully understood what it was to live like that.
It requires making your home on that rope, walking always on that edge, acknowledging both the terrible and the absurd and making peace with both. It means shouldering years of learning that it can all hurt and you can still be okay at the end of it. Years of defining crisis, and seeing that it can be more than one thing at once. Years of walking the tightrope, and finding that you are held, if only by one single strand. And somehow, it’s enough.
Comments