My four-year old daughter has anxiety. Sometimes it erupts in waves of rage or fits of hysteria and it often ends with a tight and cathartic hug. That’s what happened the other day. When I asked her what was wrong (I’ve learned not to ask: What’s wrong with you!), she said: It’s that pesky Coronavirus, ruining everything. I can’t see my friends, my teacher, my Nana, my favorite park. She was right. The Coronavirus is many awful things, including pesky, disrupting our active routines and forcing naturally social beings into isolation. Because of the pesky virus, activists can’t take to the streets, teachers can’t refocus daydreamers, comedians can’t turn an uneasy audience into laughter, even mothers can’t tell their children with full certainty that everything will be just fine.
So, I joined my four-year-old in her fit of despair and hurled a few insults at the pesky Coronavirus. When our tantrums subsided, I started to ask a question I often ask myself in those moments when I feel unhinged: Why the hell is this happening? What are we meant to learn from this tragedy?
That’s why I’m interviewing some local legends--folks I consider Good Influences--to better understand how this pandemic may be shifting how we organize, experience art, engage civically and politically, educate and even parent our children… In light of all the social distancing, my first entry is dedicated to this primal question: How might this moment forever change the way we see our own humanity and the humanity of others?
To answer this question, I turned to Gerry Katzman. Gerry is someone who makes me think and laugh harder than I thought possible. He’s an actor, a performer at Hollywood’s Magic Castle, and a popular teacher of standup comedy. Here’s what Gerry taught me:
“This is all so surreal. Here we are, talking about this over FaceTime on a sunny California day, trying to make sense out of the tragedy that’s surrounding us. And I think that it’s important to acknowledge, before we say anything else, that this is a tragedy. Period. Even with that as the background of this conversation, I’m still afraid that any attempts to analyze things right now might seem callous. So let me clarify that any lessons I’m trying to identify are simply attempts to find useful contexts to help us move forward. I hope that talking about this with you will support other people in finding their own insights that might benefit us all.
One of the first things I’ve realized in all of this is how unaware we are of our feelings. My therapist and I were discussing the power of routines - creating them and sticking to them. I was agreeing with him and began speaking with growing enthusiasm about focusing on my work ahead. And yet, as I spoke, my words started feeling hollow and I found myself breaking into tears, revealing a cache of sadness that I hadn’t realized I had been carrying for weeks.
That’s where my first insight about this situation came to me.
This is a time of immense contradiction.
In order to survive, we’re going to have to become masterful at holding two (or more) contradicting emotions at the same time.
You see, in that conversation with my therapist, I actually was hopeful about the idea of re-starting my work. Simultaneously, the idea of preparing for a comedy class during a pandemic seemed ridiculously futile. While life has always been a series of contradictions, it seldom has been as “in-our-face” as it is now.
A useful metaphor for this emotional contradiction is a pendulum. If the weight of the pendulum swings upwards toward “happy,” it eventually will swing downward toward despair. I realized that I was trying to block that down-swing and suppress the sadness. But doing so only leads to an emotionally-exhausted and tangled-up pendulum.
In this vein, I have many friends who are pretending not to be upset, especially in front of their kids. I can tell you firsthand that having a parent who never shows fear only makes you wonder why you’re the only one who feels afraid.
My philosophy (now) is feel all the feelings. Be open about them. Let the pendulum swing, and swing with it. We cannot pretend that this is not a rollercoaster. It is. So ride it and be unashamed to ride it. We’ve all experienced moments of great beauty and great sadness and we will continue to. Lean into the curves and scream out loud, because sharing the emotional experience with others (as opposed to pretending it’s not happening) will make all of us feel less alone.
I’ve noticed something else. As an inveterate people pleaser, I’ve become much more assertive than I was prior to this crisis. I’m more direct in asking for what I want and more able to refuse offers that I don’t wish to entertain. I was puzzled by this sudden personality-change until I had my next realization…our survival instinct is kicking in and it’s making us weird.
Animal instinct is a powerful thing. It turns normal people into toilet-paper hoarders and it turns people-pleasers (like me) into normal people. And while it may be refreshing for me to have newfound powers of “no,” we have to be careful to master an instinct that can easily master us. That instinct is the thing that makes you want to buy the last can of beans on the shelf at the market just because it’s the last one.
And that survival instinct can also make us behave romantically. About two weeks ago, the L.A. Opera had one of their strongest weeks of ticket sales ever. Why are people buying October opera tickets during a life-threatening crisis in March? Because of the impulse to act. To do anything to regain a sense of control.
That need for control when we’re scared can take many unexpected forms. I have magician friends whose clients have been asking them how much they would charge to cast “spells of protection” for their families. These are guys who do card tricks at Bar Mitzvahs, not wizards!
But when we’re scared, we can become selfish and irrational.
That’s why, right now, we have to be on guard against our natural tendencies to become selfish, impulsive, superstitious, and easily manipulated.
Every crisis calls upon us to find new resources within ourselves. This one is demanding new levels of emotional agility and a keen awareness of our instincts. May we all find what we need to help one another get through this."
Gerry shared a post from the Grammy-winning songwriter Paul Williams that helps illustrate his idea of holding contradicting emotions…
Paulielama2: “When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself, “It looks like the end of the world.” What you’re seeing is love in action. What you’re seeing, in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, for our immuno-compromised brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet. People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you’re out on your walk, or on your way to the shop, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love. Let it fill you and sustain you. This isn’t the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness in our lifetimes.”
Artwork by the amazing Shauna Dixon, a high school student in Las Vegas, Nevada.