Turbo cancers. Jobs taken away. People forced to die alone, loved ones never to be seen again. Children dismissed as unimportant—they don’t need people, they don’t need to see faces, they don’t need to play. Fear shall be all encompassing. All of us locked down. Some of us locked in. People sequestered, no recourse, all in the name of public health.
Years lost, opportunities lost, lives lost.
One mother’s tragedy. Another mother’s choice. Requests for exemption from medical mandates on the basis of medicine, or religion, or science1. Requests denied. Individual autonomy revealed to be a surface value, context-dependent. When it’s my body, I get to choose; when it’s your body, I also get to choose. Those who had long questioned corporate power over individuals now embracing it, embracing the conclusions that came wrapped in lab coats and jargon, fueled by corporate profits.
March 2020: Mask up. Don’t go outside. Distance yourself from others—it is other humans that are the problem, of whom you must be afraid. Shut down. Wash your mail. Doom scroll.
April 2020: Beaches, parks and festivals closed, ended. How dare some people come together and be in each others’ presence. Don’t they know there is a pandemic afoot? A virus has been unleashed on humanity, created in pursuit of goals we do not yet know. Its origin is murky, the product of collaboration between powerful labs in the United States and China. Speaking of this will not be tolerated.
Summer 2020: Daily protests become nightly riots in some American cities. How brave of these people to come together and be in each others’ presence. They have seen the true pandemic, and it is called racism.
Fall 2020: A promised vaccine is on the horizon, and it shall save us. First, we shall give it to all of the health care providers, all of them, for even though this is new technology, we already know that it is safe and effective. We just know. Trust the experts. Follow the science.
Winter 2021: People rush to get the shot, coming up with ways to jump the line and get early access. Magical thinking abounds, and hope for a return to the good old days when life was simpler. Other people wait it out, skeptical, concerned.
Summer 2021: Those who evaded the shot are derided, excluded, demonized. We are killing grandma. We are science-deniers. Conspiracy theorists. Now is not the time to ask questions. Now is not the time to invoke our rights. Now is the time to comply.
Family and friends denied entrance to celebrations and holiday meals. Papers required to dine out, to go to a show, to buy groceries. Those without papers are not worthy of respect. Those without papers are beneath contempt. Those without papers might not be fully human.
January 2022: Many in Canada stand up and say—no more. Truckers form a Freedom Convoy that stretches across Canada, people lining highways in frigid January weather to show their support, to insist on their liberty, to remember the joy of being in the presence of others.
We all lived it. We all made choices. But memory is fragile and fleeting. We are forgetting. Some of us want to forget. Others know that we cannot stop the loss, even though we try.
And so I invite stories. Individual, personal stories, of some aspect of what you yourself, or a loved one, experienced, during the Covid Era. These will not be complete stories, and it may be hard to choose what to include. Omitting details that are true can be excruciating, feel like a betrayal of your own history. As Blaise Pascal, great 17th century mathematician, inventor, and philosopher, once wrote to a friend, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”2
Brevity is often more difficult than verbosity. It can also be more powerful.
The project is Covid Era Stories. Please submit pieces of up to 2,500 words to Assistant@SmilodonVentures.org, along with contact information. Depending on the amount of response, we will likely have to pick and choose. Those chosen initially will be asked to supply contact info for two people who can vouch for what they say. Fiction is powerful, but we want real history, actual lived experience.
I have help in this endeavour, and the wonderful woman with whom I am collaborating will be working with you to help you pull your story into focus if that is warranted, and do light editing, and make contact with your references. I will also edit before publication, but you, the author, will have final say on what is published. You may use a pseudonym for publication if you like, but behind the scenes, we must know your real name and identity. We will appreciate photos, too—of people, or places, or scenes—so long as you have full rights to use the images.
For published vignettes of less than 1,000 words, I will pay a $100 honorarium. Longer pieces will receive $200. All will be posted with free access here on Natural Selections; comments, as usual, will be restricted for paying subscribers only.
I published several people’s Covid Era stories on Natural Selections already. Here are many of them. I recommend them all:
Get Ready for the Biggest Game of Whack-A-Mole the World Has Ever Seen
“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” Blaise Pascal, From Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
I'm glad you are doing this. Covid was an absolute nightmare on so many fronts. I hope we learned that most experts aren't, and that careful thinking and self reliance are our best tools in many cases.
Nic
Heather.
I want to submit my story about how my twin sister got covid in spring 2020, but we couldn't get he tested anywhere but a homeless shelter under the el. I want to talk about how my very best friend, who started to watch "seer" and "truther" videos on the internet, laughed at the virus and mocked and derided people wearing masks to me, who, when she found put my sister had developed long covid (a month into infection, where she would go on to suffer a cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem, disabling her for life, on our 35th birthday, while I was caring for my dying mother at home alone with no help) said "I mean covid is real for you, but not for me." I want to talk about how I begged God on my knees and still do, to this day, to touch her heart and prove to her that covid is and was real. I want to talk about how she screamed at me that half the country doesn't believe that long covid is real so I should shut the fuck up about my sister. I want to talk about my other best friend, closer than that even, who I called my brother, who cared more about the "woke SJW language" my sister used during her Facebook posts updating friends and family from the hospital than the fact that she was IN the hospital for 3 months. (Her crime was saying that she was shaking and crying when a male doctor implied that he disbelieved her symptoms --- this was before her infection, and after her anoxic brain injury from cardiac arrest, my friend said he was more concerned that the hospital was "infantilizing" my sister and that he "couldn't engage with her illness." ) I begged God more and more telling Him to please, please let the worst most terrible things happen to me if He had to, let me be homeless again or tortured and murdered and raped if only, only, He could prove to the very best friends I ever had that the virus that killed my uncle and crippled my aunt and disabled my sister was real.
I want to talk about how while this was going on with my twin sister, the first friend and a former teacher of mine was sending me videos from Martin Kenney and Jonathan Kleck and Sevan Bomar and other seer/truthers talking about how people who masked were engaging in rituals cutting them off from God and that anyone who got the shots would turn into monsters. I cried for hour every day watching these videos they sent, up all night caring for my mom, because I knew that covid was real and that I would eventually have to get the shots because I had lupus and emphysema and couldn't risk becoming disabled like my sister or aunt. I want to talk about how I agonized over getting the shots and didn't get them until 6 months after I was eligble, about how I was so scared of dying from them and having my soul turned off. I want to talk about how, the day my mother was denied hospice in 2021 for not dying quick enough and sent from the hospital to a terrible snake pit "rehab" warehouse for the poor, where she would die in the 3 month window qualifying her anyway, my one friend sent me an email about how all our other friends didn't believe covid was real anyway and that they were placating me, even though one friend she mentioned had called me terrified in February 2021 bc he was sick and scared and wanted to know where he could get a covid test and what supplements I recommended. I almost ended my life over that because I couldn't figure out whether SHE had lied to me about him not believing it was real or whether HE was pretending that day and made that up to fuck with me, which is so unlike him. I still cry and beg and plead with God to reveal the truth to me about this to this day. I want to talk about how in that email I got she didn't mention my mom or ask about her at all but said I had participated in "demonic experimentation" by getting jabbed. I want to talk about how I was so scared for years that I DID cut my soul off from God by masking or getting the shots, but why God would give me all this proof that covid was real if it wasn't?
I have to go back to work cleaning houses under the table, but I wanted to double check? Would you consider such a story that wasn't about how the measures were worse than the virus or about how the shots were worse than the illness or about how people not masking or vaccinating were ostracized, all of which I believe, but would you consider a story from someone like me whose trauma and pain comes from the "other side?"
I can forward all the emails and group chats to you where these things happened. My sister is disabled and I could not risk upsetting her by having you guys contact her, but I could send you her posts from the hospital and proof of the conversations that happened. My mom is dead and my Dad is a private person, but I could prove everything that happened to her with emails and my Dad Might talk about it if he thinks it could help my Mom get justice by the medical system (she was dropped by her PCP in May of 2020 bc she mentioned to a home nurse that maybe the care would be more consistent if she was considered a "VIP patient" ( a real concierge demographic at the practice) instead of a poor woman on Medicaid.)..
People like me are real..we aren't sheep. I still mask with fit tested kn95s because if I get sick and disabled like my sister we both will end up homeless. I would do anything to prove to the world and the friends i lost that what happened to my family is real and just as painful as what "seers" and "dissidents" went through. Would you real my story if I sent it?