by Emily P.G. Erickson
I couldn’t stop looking.
It was a picture, taken this pandemic summer, of two people at a bar. One was a friend from my suburban Chicago high school. She lives out west now, but she still has the same long blonde hair she did back then. In the picture, she is wearing a low-cut, poppy-red dress, while her friend wears a matching one in inky-blue. With their backs against a brown button-tufted booth, the two women lean into each other, champagne flutes mid-clink, their Insta-smiles wide, bodies already loose with liquor.
When I saw that picture, I wasn’t wearing a dress. I was wearing what I wore every third day that season: black stretchy shorts and a black V-neck T-shirt. I wasn’t in a glossy bar. I was in my living room in Minneapolis, sitting on a fraying green couch.
Sitting there alone on a Thursday night after my children had gone to bed, I looked at that picture for a long time. I couldn’t scroll past it. I think it captivated me because of the way it captured something true.
My high school friend and I, we were a matched set. She and I, we weren’t sick. We weren’t essential. We were parents. And still, she escaped out into the night, even as I stayed in. Why was she there, while I sat here?
***
Five years before the pandemic, sitting in a classroom with a drop ceiling and crisp drywall, I learned just how central that instinct for escape is. My professor fingered his thick plastic glasses when he told us, a dozen graduate students scattered in a semicircle, all about earthworms. It turns out that earthworms have just 302 neurons. Even so, if you take a metal rod and run some current through it, and then you use the rod to give an earthworm a little shock, it will recoil. It’s an instinct, my professor said. He called it “the escape reflex.”
Humans have this reflex, too. We are wired to escape discomfort. I imagined my friend saying to herself, as she was zipping up her poppy-red dress that night, I just need a break from all this.
When I first saw that picture, a part of me envied her freedom, her keen instinct for escape. What would it feel like, I wondered, to be someone who could celebrate at a time like this? I had some idea. After all, that instinct, the escape reflex, is part of why I was scrolling on Instagram, hypnotizing myself with the glow of lives other than my own.
I was doing something else, too, sitting there on my fraying couch that Thursday night. I was heeding another instinct, one that earthworms don’t appear to have, but that our 100 billion neurons afford us: the instinct to make sense of things through story. Joan Didion writes in The White Album that “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I needed to tell myself the tale of what staying home meant. It was a story about usefulness and about care. With my restraint, I could reduce the world’s suffering, even as I was called to bear more of it. With my story, I knew who I was.
My friend had her own story. She framed her shot and uploaded it to the internet and there I was, her audience, reading into it. I think my friend’s story was about escape, but maybe she would say it was about something else. I am nearly certain she would not say that her story was about COVID-19, but when I looked at her picture, it was all I saw. It was in the poppy-red dress and in the champagne flutes, and, especially, in the way my friend and her friend leaned into each other with their shoulders touching. When I saw that picture, it had been 134 days since I had touched a friend’s shoulder. The pandemic applied its own filter to everything.
This is the problem with suffering. Even when we try to crop it out, there it is. Our lives encounter loss and sickness and shock over and over again. The question is not whether suffering will come, but when and how much. We answer with what we are capable of, with what is available to us, with our particular mass of neurons and our singular heart. Our answer is a kind of behavioral signature. When loss comes, when sickness comes, when shock comes, what role do we assign them in our story?
The escape reflex would have us treat suffering as an antagonist, something to slip away from at a sleek bar. But, I think, our stories can be richer if we treat suffering more like a confidante, something we can sit alongside on a weeknight. Something that can help us articulate what matters. Something that can show us who we are.
***
As my phone grew warm in my hand there in my old house, looking at my old friend and her champagne glass, I thought of earthworms, fleshy and sightless, gliding through the soil. There is a myth that if you cleave an earthworm in half, it will become two worms. Maybe my friend and I were a little bit like that. Made of the same animal parts. Separated by our choices.
Emily P.G. Erickson is a writer with a master’s degree in psychology. Emily’s thoughtful, compassionate writing about mental health, mindfulness, and motherhood has been featured in Forge, Scary Mommy, Motherly, and more. She lives in Minnesota. To connect with Emily, please visit her website: emilypgerickson.com