There have been some events recently that have prompted me to think about what happened when. As I have mentioned previously, my memory of the period between Fall 2019 and Winter of 2021-2022 is pretty vague. Kind of a big blurry smear. Blurry enough that when I sat down and started thinking about this, I was sure I had misplaced an entire year somewhere in there.
Completely by accident, I stumbled upon a possible explanation for why I might have expected there to be an extra year between 2019 and 2021, and why the first six months of the pandemic seemed like a lifetime. The possible explanation came in the form of a BBC News article about how, and why, children and adults perceive time so differently. The TL; DR, as I understand it, is that memories are more likely to come from new, interesting, or unusual experiences. The whole world is new for children, so their brains take a lot of memory snapshots. As we age, the novelty wears off and long stretches can go by without much film being used up. The TL; DR for the TL; DR is that children’s brains work more like high-speed cameras, running at 5000 frames per second, while adult brains tend to run at closer to 60 frames per second. Adult’s brains are still capable of running that fast, but it takes unusual, exciting, interesting, or otherwise high-alert types of situations. Like a global pandemic for example.
Below (I hope) will be an attempt to un-jumble some of this in my head. I make no claims about accuracy. A lot of these dates I had to look up because I couldn’t narrow anything down enough just by memory. It will also include some non-pandemic related events, just for reference. This is also incomplete. I may try to add more later and I might not.
Okay, fuck it. I’m done trying to get this damn thing to format in WordPress. Here is a link to a pdf. Share and enjoy.
Thank you for laying all that out. And yes, I personally would be very interested in reading more if you are able/willing to expand the timeline. It’s astonishing how grim it all is when viewed as a whole, how deeply it impacts one to take it all in. No fucking wonder things came to a head with you, Man. People *without* PTSD going into 2019 were likely to come out of it traumatized. I think we all were, frankly. That’s hardly an astonishing revelation…
From whence are you drawing the journal entries you included? I take it you have a personal diary that you don’t habitually share with others? Not to overstep any boundaries, but I would also really appreciate hearing more about your day to day experiences. I worry that you might be editing yourself in this blog in order to keep the content “interesting.” It’s all interesting. Anything you think or do or feel is of interest to us. You’re not a “content provider;” you’re a brother/son/dear friend who is going through some hell right now, and we’re all eager to hear anything you are comfortable in sharing.
Wow! That was a wild and indeed not a great year. I heard bits and pieces at the time but having it laid out like that really puts it into perspective. Glad you made it through.
This was the public health equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge! A long-retired artillery non-com told me that they fired more howitzer shells in an hour than the regulations specified for a day. This was a similar experience! (except that the battle was over more quickly)
Thank you for collecting the information and posting it. I hope that helped.