Some days, time crawls. There’s no reason for it. It’s a normal day as far as you can tell. Things are happening, there’s stuff to do, but the minutes refuse to speed up and each second must take its time in the present before moving to the past. This feeling is magnified, though, when times are not ordinary. When your days are not normal. When you live in the years leading up to the rise or fall of a facist government where at least an attempt at democracy once stood, you can wind up with some pretty extraordinary days in the worst way possible and time absolutely crawls then. In better times, your escapes might have brought you relief or a few moments of inattention that let the clock speed up. In current times, there is no escape. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about what is going on in the world and even taking a break from all that to rest isn’t true relief because how can you really stop thinking about that? As someone with a lot of experience with trauma, I’m familiar with how that dagger of an experience can stick in your mind and heart in ways that resists all attempts to quickly dislodge it. I’m not surprised that there’s no real chance at escaping it, but it is still so exhausting and, on days when there isn’t enough going on to distract me, causes every minute to drag out unbearably.

I’m not going to recount all the abuses and human rights violations of this regime and its secret police. I’m not going to review the failures of literally everyone who had the power to stop this. I’m not even going to rant about what I think we should do about it or how we might be able to restore trust in these instituations now that it has been so thorughly shattered. All I really want to do is find a way to let the time pass more quickly but, failing that, I’d like to really think about what all of this means if, like me, you’re at a physical remove and likely safe from threats unless you choose to involve yourself. Because it’s a lot! It’s confusing to need to work through! After all, you’re not a victim here, you’re not endangered, you’re not in a precarious position like the poeple out there on what front lines exist, or the people being snatched off the street. Why should it be so hard for you to handle?

The easy answer is that connecting with people we’ve never met and really feeling for them in a way that bridges whatever might divide us is a core part of what makes us humans. Did you know that the reason people find the crying of babies such a difficult noise to drown out or put up with is because there is still a part of us, potentailly so deep down that it’s easy to misinterpret the response, that KNOWS we, specifically the person hearing the noise, need to do something to help. It’s why people can act so weird about upset babies: the cry stirs an involuntary reaction in us and, depending on our own self-management and the various chemicals our brains spend the day stewing in, our responses can vary wildly. There’s a similar thing for seeing children in pain or otherwise suffering. It’s less effective as the person being perceived gets older, but there is still a part of us that sees a person in pain or upset or suffering and wants to do something about it. All that bystander effect stuff is bullshit (it’s literally a fabrication based on one unfortunate incident where people did, in fact, call for help and a newspaper inaccurately reported on it): our entire species exists because we help each other out. That’s even one of the first markers of civilization in prehistoric cultures: healed broken bones. We didn’t just abandon people to suffer, we took care of them.

It’s more complicated these days. Our ability to perceive and interact with other humans is so much greater than what these instincts were meant to handle. It’s so easy to spend ten minutes online and see it full of nothing but human suffering, and that can really warp your day if you’re not self-regulating well (and you’re probably not since you just spent ten minutes staring at human misery). Our old, instinctive definitions of who counts as one of “our” people has been warped by the environments we’ve grown up in and the lessons that have been crammed into our minds about who counts as “other” and who we need to care about, so we can’t rely on this reaction alone to guide us. We still need to put in the effort to feel for other people who don’t look like us, just as we need to put in the effort to manage our emotional responses to this stuff as it happens so we don’t do something drastic or unhelpful. That’s one of the reasons I don’t go to protests much. I’ve had a lot of trauma that has shifted my freeze/fight/flight analysis heavily towards “fight” at this point in my life and I’m not sure I could hold that back if I saw a child being hurt and that’s not necessarily always the best response in a given moment (I’d absolutely argue it’s the only response in the moment, but this is why I’m not exposing myself to these situations since I already know how it’s going to go and who it’s going to go the worst for). It’s too easy to see myself in those poor, suffering children and so it’s better for everyone if I keep myself out of someplace that might trigger that response until it’s absolutely necessary.

So it’s no surprise that it’s difficult to regulate these days. Time stretches on because there’s a part of your brain investing itself in staying aware of your surroundings and it’s the same part of your brain that helps you track the passage of time, that experiences passing seconds often subconsciously so you can tell without a clock that ten minutes has passed or that it’s probably half-past four. That part of your brain being activated by all this stress, by the perception of there being currently unperceived threats in the environment, will wear you out. Hypervigilance is exhausting, and that’s probably what you’re experiencing even if you’re not twitchin and flinching at every movement in your peripheral vision since that’s not really how hypervigilance works. After all, it’s not a good survival strategy to spasmodically move every time a potential danger appears on the edge of your field of vision: it’d give you away instantly. There can be some of that from fight/flight responses seen through past trauma, but it’s not the hypervigilance itself that does it.

So take it easy on yourself. Do some grounding exercises. Breathe. Walk around your environment a little bit to show your overactive brain that there are no threats in your vicinity. Get a drink. Meditate. Have a snack. Do some kind of activity that your brain can only read as an action taken in safety (or, better yet, comfort) to help give yourself the signals your brain needs to chill out. Finding a way to deal with this is going to be important in the years to come. After all, even if you’re not going into this traumatized by childhood abuse, you’re probably going into this truamatized by Covid-19 and the brain notoriously is not good at making sense of different types of threats. You went through a period of your life were other people being near you represented danger, where strangers were potenionally a risk to your very being because you had no way of know if they carried the virus or not. You also probably haven’t done a lot to process all of that fear and emotional trauma since society kind of just… moved on. There was no mourning, no closure, no time free from fear of the disease that continues to spread even now: we had to get back to work.

Is it any wander people seem so much more hate-filled than they used to? We all had a traumatic experience that taught us to fear anyone who wasn’t a part of our household. This isn’t an excuse for those people, mind you. It’s just an important piece of the puzzle that is the process of making sense of the current moment. You need to understand why it feels like things suddenly got worse and this was definitely a part of it. It’s going to take a lot of work to untangle these knots.