On March 13th, I hugged my students goodbye, walked out of the school, and went home. And then I stayed there for eight months. I am still here, on Nov 13th, all those minutes and hours and days and weeks that rolled together into all of these last eight months. Have I written anything of substance during that time? Let me check…
Google drive folders say no. Instead, I spent March to June in a blur of disbelief, online teaching transitions, and precarious mental health. June to October, I have been in a time machine of my own making, papered with writing from 2012 to now, as I transferred everything to this website. Let me just say, as you sit in quarantine in the four walls of your apartment, it’s bizarre to sift back through the thousands of words describing your travels and moves and adventures and freedom, stories of feeling limitless and like anything could happen.
Strangely it wasn’t depressing, but reassuring- life would come back to that. Eventually.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t written in real time, as it happened, and stuck to transcribing the past- it made it easier to imagine a future that was like the past, neither of which was, or hopefully will not be, like the present.
And so, this is it, this record of right now, just this first draft I will write without editing, rambling, stream of consciousness. This seems a bit foolish, definitely lazy, and maybe ill-conceived to decide that the first thing I write about everything won’t be filtered or read over or gate checked for things that should stay at home with me, but here we are. Well, I’m home. Chances are a lot of people aren’t, but that’s another post for another time.
I left Sweden and got on a boat and then a train and then another train and then a final train August 2019 to move to Kazakhstan for an adventure. I would say that, like the entire planet, this wasn’t quite the adventure I had planned on. Anyone who has ever moved to a new place- and I don’t mean only a new country, I mean a new town, or a new state- knows that the first three to six months are a disorienting feeling of rootless ache, excitement at the unknown, trial and error of rebuilding your whole entire life from scratch, and moments of both profound joy and deeply unsettling fear that you have, in fact, blown up everything good and rebuilding it from scratch will never be possible.
Of course, it’s always okay. Six big moves later and I can say that the six month mark feels so good. It feels the way things always do when you worked really hard and weren’t sure it would happen and at some point you thought oh man this is not going to work and then you feel overwhelmed but you keep going and then one day it’s easy. I’ve been moving around enough to know that’s just the rhythm. You hate the new place for not being the old place, are convinced you’ve trashed your life, and then suddenly it’s fine and the new place will eventually be the old place you pine for as The Perfect Old Place when you move on, inevitably, yet again.
Would you like to know when I started feeling like Kazakhstan was finally home? Because I know exactly when it was. It was mid-February. Spring was coming. I was looking forward to hosting two sets of visitors in March, a month that was giving me a three day weekend on my birthday plus a two week vacation. School was in a flow. My apartment was one of my favorites so far (and I’ve had some incredible setups). Almaty was a charming whirl of cafes and restaurants, bars and nightclubs, parks and weekend hikes.
Mid-February was the moment I looked around, took a deep breath, and said “I made it. I did it, again. This place is home, even when it tried not to be.”
And less than a month later, there I was, hugging my students goodbye on March 13th, all of us expecting the schools to shut down, none of us knowing when they would open again. My first group of friends squeaked in from Germany on my birthday weekend, but it was touch and go and they barely got in and barely got out. My other friend never made it, as everything was shuttered and in lockdown by that point.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my friends from Germany would be the last people in my house. Because I haven’t had anyone in my house since my birthday weekend. That was March 9th. I haven’t been in anyone else’s house since then, either. My partner and I have been strictly physically isolating from that day to now. That’s our bubble- us.
During the most severe lockdown, when you could only leave the house for essential errands and not even daily walks were allowed, I just didn’t leave my house at all. I was working from home, groceries were delivered, there was no dog to walk. One day I woke up and realised it had been six weeks since I had been outside my front door. I would spend hours reading news from home, and donating money, and crying, keeping up with the George Floyd and BLM protests. It’s all my students wanted to talk about; overnight their zoom profiles changed to so many circles of Black power fists.
I considered how ready they were to empathise with Black people in America and wondered what was so hard for other people to understand.
We talked a lot about protests. The grid of these children in their bedrooms, safe and sound on zoom, was a shadowbox gallery of concern, furrowed brows and shaking heads. They were reading the news and watching documentaries and I thought, maybe this will be okay in the end, for where this all goes, with kids growing up like this, so ready to say what’s wrong.
I would hear garbled daily announcements on creaking speakers, crackling Russian into the air and telling me things I didn’t understand. I was terribly sick during this time as well, and I’ll never know if it was covid or not. I taught my lessons, didn’t leave my house, devoured the news, and tried to comprehend that I was in Kazakhstan, during a pandemic with no end in sight, while my country reckoned with a past and a present that moved the entire globe to protest in solidarity and anger. I watched my social media feeds show me the insides of people I thought I knew, the filter of the protests drawing out different things I was both disappointed and not surprised to see.
I have to say that in those overwhelming, uncertain, surreal first weeks, I was so grateful to be in Kazakhstan. Schools closed, mask mandates came, then everything closed, then came the strict lockdown that made me, an American in Central Asia, feel scrappy solidarity with Italians singing from their balconies during their own housebound weeks. The speakers crackled on with announcements that felt official and in control. There was a website to check in English, an interactive map, reassuring and calm messages from the President. I found myself teary eyed as I read English translations of the speeches, talk of working together, protecting the precious elders, doing our part, trusting the scientists.
I won’t deny that I found more encouragement and calm from the Kazakh President than from the American President. I watched how quickly the world cleaved into conspiracy or concern. I wondered at the arrogance of certainty, and the willingness to discard experts. The ego, as always, is at the center of the conflict here.
The most interaction I had with the outside world at this point was that twice a week, city workers would disinfect the hallways, spraying everything with sanitizer. The engines of the sprayer machines breathed hot stink over the chemical smell of the sanitizer, and the drumming of the liquid on the door reminded me of being in a carwash, which reminded me of being outside, which already felt like a long time ago.
Sketched out by take-out and waiting for more research and information on transmission, my partner and I made everything from scratch ourselves for almost three months. We ordered pizza twice, too much, so we could wrap it and freeze it as a treat. We made bread, and chicken stock, and tortillas, and cinnamon rolls, and crushed spices and mixed marinades.
These were contemplative hours carefully following tedious recipes that distracted us from things like the emails from our respective home countries that told us if we didn’t leave now, we couldn’t be helped. There was visa stress, and job uncertainty, and questions about leaving or staying, and nights where I woke up panting and sweating.
I had nightly panic attacks for a few weeks, full body episodes that made me feel like I was disintegrating around a frenetic meltdown heartbeat. Eventually my body exhausted its capacity for fear, I suppose, because even as things got more stressful they went away.
We started doing yoga every day, and meditation, to mark the difference between teaching online and being off work. It was the same place and the same kitchen table, so something had to mark it. I studied Salesforce, I taught myself to play guitar, I built this website, we made a home gym. When summer break rolled around we started walking two miles every morning, cursing under our breath when people got too close.
Summer was green and lush and filled with flowers and we couldn’t spend it anywhere other than within walking distance of our apartment, so that’s what we did.
We met up with friends for the first time after that hard lockdown, and it was like this: masked, outside in a park, sitting at a distance. I wore a mask I made out of an old T-shirt, following a YouTube tutorial.
Since March 13th, I haven’t been in a restaurant, or sat in a coffeeshop, or gone shopping, even though those places are open. After one or two trips at the very beginning, we gave up- groceries are delivered at the door, and then they sit outside on the porch for 72 hours, yes, still, because by the time we found out surface transmission is probably not a thing my partner and I had gotten into a comforting routine and breaking it wasn’t possible. I don’t go to the gym, and I cancelled my dance classes. I now own both a spin bike and mini-trampoline. Both have bolstered my sanity.
Summer trips home were cancelled. Trips on fall break were cancelled. We just found out today that if you leave Kazakhstan you have to be gone at least 90 days- we weren’t planning on traveling for winter break anyway. Related- I see travel influencers on Instagram justifying travel because it helps the local economy, speaking about their trips (to countries chosen due to no pesky things like required quarantine) as though they are missions of charity. I quickly realised that Instagram isn’t a place for me to be right now. When the school year ended I went on a hard hiatus from Facebook for months, because the response to the protests and to covid was such a double whammy of vicious rhetoric I couldn’t handle it.
And in spite of the distance and isolation, I’ve spent more time off social media than on, because streams of pictures of normal life either piss me off or make me resentful.
I think about my life here in Kazakhstan, and how it is enjoyable because I have accepted what it is. I read about mask politics back home, and those who believe in hoaxes, and don’t believe in death tolls, and finally, recently, I read about vaccine discoveries. I watch America, from a distance, deciphering what is happening there and noticing how everything is detached. I feel a relief to not be there. I feel a strange feeling of being more comfortable here in Kazakhstan, undoubtedly harshly isolated, than I would be in Texas.
I see what’s happening, and over eight long months of the pandemic, it’s getting even worse. The election went the way I wanted it to, but I wouldn’t say it feels triumphant. The morgues in El Paso don’t feel triumphant. Anti-mask protests, abuse of essential workers, the cavalier attitude of expected sacrifice from teachers and healthcare workers doesn’t feel triumphant, unemployment and attempts to take away healthcare in a pandemic don’t feel triumphant. Massive disinformation campaigns created solely to outrage us and click on more ads doesn’t feel triumphant. I’d say right now, it’s a draw. And a lot hangs in the balance before I’m going to be cheering.
I have a job, a safe home, a healthy relationship, and once work is over I don’t have to worry about kids who depend on me to keep it together. I can be a spectacular mess of anxiety and lay in bed all day if I need to, order food in, and go for a walk. I know I’m lucky in so many regards. I am, strangely, not depressed about eight months spent largely in my apartment or in neighborhood parks on walks.
I haven’t struggled with isolation or staying home nearly as much as I have struggled with the lack of empathy and human kindness people have around community health in a pandemic.
I have no idea how long all of this will last. But it will be unbearably long, however long it is, if we can’t find some sort of human kindness and collective spirit. Over the summer I was working 8-10 hour days on building my website, organising my writing, and trying to be creative, positive, and productive. But there were many days when the sheer human misery outside of my house felt like a physical weight.
I was depressed far more about refusal to wear masks, about denial of science, about painful dismissal of Black experiences, about bullishly ignorant rejection of historical facts, about the knowledge that a certain sector was growing grotesquely rich as people lined up for food in the richest country in the world.
I know I don’t have a monopoly on hard days. I just wish some people would stop specializing in creating them for others.
It’s been eight months, strangely overall good for me, bizarrely overall productive and meaningful, but mostly just surreal. I moved to Kazakhstan and then lived through a pandemic here- am still living through a pandemic here. Put that on the list of things I never thought I would say.
All things considered, I’m doing okay. And I’m happy to be right here in Central Asia, exactly where I am. I sign petitions, I send money, I write emails, I make calls, I go on walks and do my meditation and ride my spin bike and jump on my trampoline and force my fingers to remember how to make an F chord. I slowly, post by post, build this website. I have joyful classes on line with my wonderful, adaptable, kind students.
I think I have been able to accept this radical shift in lifestyle because I just refuse to believe that I can’t do my life just fine, right here, staying home, so that others can keep their lives. I have the privilege of being able to adjust. If the sacrifice for me is to stay home, to not travel, to give up the gym and restaurants? My God, I should be grateful. I AM grateful. Many people don’t have that choice, or security.
Today the first snow fell. I watched the sunrise from my balcony. I considered that maybe, by spring, I won’t be watching the seasons pass from inside anymore. Maybe this vaccine will come through without a hitch.
Whatever happens, I can look back on this time and know I lived by my values of community, solidarity, and connection to others. If this was a test of whether or not I believed the good of community requires individual sacrifice, I now know, in a visceral way, that my beliefs are durable when put to the test.
I’m not saying they are better or worse than others’ beliefs- I’m saying they are mine and I know they aren’t just mine when it’s easy. They got me through these hard times because I deeply believed this was the right choice.
I think that’s the point of values and beliefs. They should carry you through difficulty because of your conviction. That’s exactly how I got through these eight months, physically isolating with my partner, in a foreign country, far from home, without any certainty of when this would end. And I reckon that’s exactly how I’m going to get through the next eight months. I hope y’all have something getting you through, too.
