It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and although I’d like to think one day I’ll get around to it, Charles and I both know that probably isn’t going to happen.
When I was about thirteen I did a drama class after school on Wednesdays, the humble beginnings of my (very, very) short lived acting career. Each term, I, alongside a scraggly bunch of stereotypical theatre kids – think jazz hands and randomly bursting into song – would learn and rehearse and then finally perform a play, usually based on some random piece of literature that was so ancient it would guarantee no one could be sued for copyright. This particular term we were given a dumbed-down theatrical copy of A Tale of Two Cities, each of us cast as either a character from the original story or as a completely made up character that probably had no place being in a Dickens universe. I could not tell you which character I played nor what the story is vaguely about, but I could to this day almost certainly stand on a stage and scream at you the first lines of Dickens’ story.
IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES
I’ve thought about these lines a lot lately. This idea of remembering something as the best or the worst. I think we tend to look back on things in this way. Through the nature of good storytelling and the distance between recounting events and actually living through them, the pointy bits of history always seem to stick out a bit sharper. The most good bits and the most bad bits are easy ways of remembering the course of events, of remembering when we felt at our worst, dealt with our most lost, suffered the most trauma. These pointy bits are the easiest to grab onto, are the ones we love hearing most about. They’re the pandemics and the bushfires and the protests and the deaths; I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that maybe right now is the worst of times.
But much of our lives belong to neither end of the spectrum of good and bad. We tend to do most of our living in between. Having an ok nights sleep and going for an uneventful walk down the street and eating a very average toasted sandwich are things we normally leave out of our storytelling. In the scheme of things, these things won’t matter when we look back from the future. I’m definitely not going to be thinking back on this year as the year of the rona and that below average psychological thriller I watched on Netflix last night. A global pandemic kind of assumes centre stage to the everything else hanging about. The movies and the dinners and the car trips and the grocery shoppings all take a bit of a back seat in their authority to call shotgun to our importance. These things are just things and they’re neither the best nor the worst, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.
These are pretty strange times we’re living in. And now it seems like the strangeness has accompanied us long enough for things not to be strange anymore. Are we becoming used to the strangeness? Is absurdity something we’ve accepted as normality? But even so, we’re still just being. Within the strangeness and the absurdity and the utter peculiarity, we still are just being. Since the day the rona was declared a pandemic by WHO, I still have walked my dog and listened to podcasts and brushed my teeth before bed. I still have done all the normal life things that would never have crossed my mind as an option of not doing, no matter how strange things got. Even as social isolation hit pretty hard, and sometimes I’d only breathe within the walls of my bedroom for consecutive days, living still had to be done. No matter how bad the times are, we are simultaneously living a normality. We still breathe and eat and sleep and shit and swear and laugh and cut our toenails.
The curiosity with how we will regard these times in hindsight has seeped into reflections of everything I do. Will I look back on this day as the day I decided to start a zine… in a pandemic? Will every time someone mentions Amanda Bynes I’ll think of how I watched What A Girl Wants for the first time… in a pandemic? Will Harry Potter forever be tainted in my mind because of how I’ve devoured the audio books… in a pandemic? These are things I may or may not have done whether the rona decided to pay us a visit or not. These are just things that have no relevance to the virus infecting the world, they’re simply just things that are relevant to my existing in this time.
It’s only halfway through this shit show of a year but I, like a lot of people, am well keen to get to the finale. I’m pretty happy with labelling twenty-twenty as The Worst Of Times. But just because this is officially the winter of despair, doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to feel anything but. It’s a weird dance in trying to understand that the category of right now is Officially Shit, but the nuances and single steps and the filler to the cracks of the entirety are all pretty beautiful in their own rights. We can live in the best and the worst of times at the same time. Sometimes one does feel a bit bigger than the other, but surviving the worst doesn’t have to mean discounting all of the small goods.
This is probably an incredibly simple and obvious point to make, but it took me a long time to get here. I found it pretty easy to feel complacent in accepting that this year just isn’t my year, and there’s nothing I can do to help that. Because that might true. Maybe as soon as I get to the first second of 2021 I’ll write off the past twelve months and pretend none of this ever happened. But I think that in accepting that things are bad and that we feel bad and that things might take a little while to feel good, is ok. And it’s ok to feel good when things are bad. It’s ok to have the small wins and triumphs and laughs and joys, whilst still functioning in the worst of times.
All of these things, these small existences and livings and goings ons that fill the space between the bestest and the worstest, will probably all be well and truly forgotten when I’m old and grey and trying to remember what living through this year was like. I probably won’t be forgetting the rona and the way it’s stunned the world. I might remember the cloud of smoke from the bush that blanketed the city. I hope I don’t forget walking in solidarity with our black and Aboriginal Australians. I’ll definitely forget the threat of the Murder Hornets that never came to fruition.
I think what I’m trying to say is that these things, and the ones in between, are the things that make up the space that we’re living in right now. Even in the worst of times, and the best, we’re still just trying to figure out how to be, how to kill time. If we forget the specifics of the little things, I hope we remember that they were still there.
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