my body still lives in that first winter
or reflections on a song in the midst of the COVID-19 response
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the music that got me through the response or, really, the absence of music. I spent a lot of the response not listening to much of anything, except some Bob Ross painting videos overlaid with lofi. One song stands out though: Shout Me Out by TV on the Radio. I’ve been listening to TVOTR since I was 15 — I don’t even remember how I first found them. What I do remember is what it felt like to listen to Shout Me Out during the response.
It was winter. Or at least I think it was. Most of my memories of the response live in a hazy grey, in those early days of harsh air and sliding on ice that never seemed to melt and bundling up at 6am to rush into my beloved’s car, bags of work and food clanking against my hip, tea clutched in each hand, one for her and one for me. I know it couldn’t possibly have all existed in darkness. I have memories that seep into my focus to prove it: the warm September afternoon when I saw my team in person again (the team that will always and forever be my team, no matter that I left, that it’s changed); the federal site visit that I know happened in April, that ended in me lying on the bathroom floor, a lightning storm in my skull; the hot June day when most of my new, covid team and I got together for the first and only time at a park in Denver, saying goodbye to two of us who would be moving to opposite sides of the country in just a few weeks; a series of sweaty, ash-coated walks from our home to our beloveds’ to say hello from a distance, from not on a screen, to remind each other that we were here, to remind her and I that we were more than the work before us; the blurry, concussion days of late August when I would cram in work for an hour before falling into a feverish sleep, my injured brain unable to keep up the pace. These memories exist. They weigh me down, a reminder that this was years of my life. But when I think about the response, my body lives in that first winter.
I don’t remember deciding to put on TVOTR that night. I remember closing my computer, still logged into everything, and sliding it under the bookcase where I could try to pretend it didn’t exist. I remember sitting cross-legged on our faded brown couch, my work phone tucked under my leg, sound up and notifications on. I remember sinking into comfort at the opening sounds of the song, and my chest heaving with recognition when Tunde Adebimpe sang I know your reason is stalled and your freedom’s dissolved in your passion, dear. It’s burning your eyes and it’s killing your mind and it’s broken your atmosphere. I remember my strained voice whispering along, Lord, if you’ve got lungs, come on and shout me out.
I had always loved this song, the warmth in Tunde’s voice, the beat of it, but I had never felt it as viscerally as I did then, do now in the context of the response. When it starts, it almost plays with silence between the notes, but halfway through it builds up into an ocean, pulling me under until all I can see and hear is it’s obscene in this grey. I was still years away from leaving the response, but each time I played Shout Me Out, I felt like maybe I’d get out at some point, like maybe the specifics of the response were new but that this feeling of despair and too much and I’ll-never-be-able-to-leave weren’t, like maybe others had survived it, like maybe I would too.
Because TV on the Radio had felt it, or at least it sure as hell sounded like it.
I remember going to therapy that night, or maybe another night, and asking my therapist if he’d ever heard of TVOTR. He had. I asked if he knew Shout Me Out. He did. I told him about the line, about the way I knew my reason was stalled, knew that if it wasn’t, then I’d be able to think about anything other than the next crisis in front of me, or about leaving the response before it devoured me; about the way my freedom had dissolved in the need to keep working, to keep fighting against this virus, to be there for the entire damn state; how having my dream job had turned into a nightmare and I couldn’t see any way out.
Working in the public health response felt at once like being under a microscope, my every move tracked and analyzed by countless strangers, and being completely invisible. The signs that lined so many sidewalks across the city thanking those who worked in the response never once named public health. Public health professionals across Colorado were being harassed and fired from their jobs for treating the pandemic as a reality. I learned early on to stop tracking the media coverage of the public health response because, too often, it left out the context we were working within. It’s not that there weren’t and aren’t legitimate criticisms of the response, but that so often those criticisms were targeting public health as if we were solely responsible. I don’t yet have words for how exhausting it was to have my work, and the work of my colleagues, suddenly thrust into the spotlight while our humanness was erased. That tension still lives in me, nestled deep in the sinew and muscle. It freezes, locks my joints and sends my muscles into spasms. It keeps me in this space of being terrified of talking about the response, about what it felt like to be in it, about the very real imperfections and impossibilities, about the shame I feel for the work I did or didn’t do and for leaving. And yet, I need to be seen.
I don’t remember if we’d already been talking about me leaving public health by the time I put on Shout Me Out that night. I don’t remember if we’d decided to move to New York yet. Like most other memories, I can’t place them in the context of a larger narrative, can’t make sense of the response as a thing that happened over the course of linear time. Like I said, my body still lives in that first winter.
In Shout Me Out, Tunde sings about being cast out, about feeling things that you won’t talk about, that others won’t talk about. I know it’s not enough, that I need to keep carving spaces for myself where I can return to the response, a little at a time, and be held in that. But when I was still deep in the response, when my body still is, Shout Me Out holds me, and for four minutes and fifteen seconds, I’m allowed to feel everything, and I’m allowed to leave.
I have wondered from a distance (curse that distance!) what it was (and is) like for you to carry these years in your body. Thank for a sharing a glimpse with us
Feeling those emotions can be so hard. I need that to happen in incremental doses I can manage. And how you speak of your humanness being erased....... yeah. I feel that deeply.