Author: Graeme McMillan

What with COVID and all of its fallout — me losing work, conventions essentially going away altogether (No-one cares about virtual conventions, let’s be completely honest) — I have entirely lost the ability to travel well in the past year or so. Whatever skill I had at letting the entire process wash over me and surrender to it has, based on recent experience, curdled into a touchiness that meant every small complication felt like a pretty substantial body blow.

In my defense, the small complications from this week’s cross-country excursion weren’t really that small — a delayed flight ended up derailing the planned connection, meaning that we had to leave a day later than intended, with the delayed trip becoming delayed further thanks to airline screw-ups and what simply looked as if no-one has worked out how to keep everything going in this era of sickness and stress. (Seriously, why would you re-assign seating twice with less than an hour to go before the flight leaves? Ahem.)

Nonetheless, I share this not to complain about how inept American Airlines is at the basics of being an airline. (Very.) Instead, I’m writing it because, two days after arriving home, I feel as if I’m still in transit, somehow. I’m not sure quite what’s happened.

There’s a feeling I get when I’m traveling for a reasonable amount of time — anything over, say, six hours — where I just feel as if I’m constantly in motion. My focus vanishes, almost, and you’ll get perhaps 30 minutes of good attention out of me before I have to drift for a little bit. Depending on how long I’m in the air, I lose my appetite, and I start to feel low-level dizzy — not so much that it’s a problem, but enough that I find myself wanting to remain in my seat as much as possible.

I still feel like that today, despite landing in PDX Wednesday evening. For all of yesterday, I told myself that it was the mental hangover of traveling for 15 hours the day before, and perhaps that is still the case — or perhaps it’s the wildfire smoke that makes the air feel simultaneously thicker and thinner than usual outside right now. Maybe I simply just need a good night’s sleep, which has escaped me for days now, thanks to the heat on both coasts.

All I know for sure is that I’ve rarely been more grateful that it’s almost the weekend, and that I have an opportunity to reset my focus. I need it, I think. (Or, at least, I think I think… It’s hard to tell, right now.)

Talking to a friend last week, the conversation turned to how the year has been so far. For me, I said, it’s been a particularly strange year that’s been far more difficult than I’d expected heading into it; I’d thought that 2020 was the difficult year, the one that was so hard that it had to be the bottom of the cosmic arc — there was a global pandemic that essentially closed the world, after all — before we headed into an emotional upswing, but so much of 2021 had been, if not bad per se, then at least more trying and weirder than I’d anticipated.

The friend was far more pessimistic, as it turned out. 2021, they argued, was so much worse than last year, in part because many people had started the year thinking as I had, only for things to somehow get worse. How could a year that dashed all those anxious raised hopes be anything other than cruel and difficult? (In his defense, he’s had a particularly difficult year to date, with illness — not COVID-related — and family stress combining to make things far more stressful than anyone should have to deal with.)

The conversation got me thinking about how the year has been going for me. 2021 has, admittedly, been far more of a struggle than I’d anticipated — I’ve lost work, and watched as seemingly new opportunities disappeared as if by magic for seemingly no reason. There have been sick pets, and sick friends and family, as well. (My nephew has tested positive for COVID more than once, although both times was thankfully free of symptoms.) I’ve tried to self-start a couple of projects with varying degrees of success, and it’s not been something I’ve found particularly easy.

Throughout all of this, though, I’ve had an optimism that wasn’t there last year — a feeling that I can get through it somehow, even if it’s just by stubbornness and sheer bloodyminded force of will. The setbacks have, almost entirely, been something I’ve viewed as “weird” or frustrating, rather than debilitating, and that’s what’s been different this time around. Maybe this year has been worse, but my attitude has been better.

I found myself out for dinner the other night, eating in a restaurant for the first time since… February 2020, I think…? Perhaps even January? (That would make it, what, 19 months or something similar; it’s genuinely surreal to think about, that way.)

I was nervous, I admit — I’m nervous going anywhere public in this age of COVID still, despite being vaccinated and wearing a mask as much as humanly possible while out the house. It’s not that I am particularly convinced that I’ll be one of those so-called “breakthrough cases” and get the Delta Variant despite everything, as much as I’ve become particularly conscious, paranoid even, of the need to protect myself no matter what when venturing out into the world. Who knows what could happen, after all…?

Despite that, I was in a restaurant, surrounded by other people,  nervous. “Surrounded” was a good way of putting it; it was a small place, but particularly busy — every table was seated, filled by happy and excited customers eager to eat and socialize and be there in that moment. I’d genuinely forgotten what that was like, as anything other than an abstract idea, in all the time it had been since that had last happened for me.

I’d forgotten the physical feeling of that many people around me, and the sound of it all — the way that the sound around you rises to a new volume and you go with it, like a boat on a rising wave. I’d forgotten the joy of passively people watching, catching glimpses into conversations and lives as everyone else pairs their food with the emotions of their day, and overhearing other people’s conversations nosily. (I can’t help myself. I’d apologize, but I wouldn’t really mean it.)

I stayed nervous through the meal. I can’t help that, either. But I wasn’t only nervous, and that proved to be the pleasure of the whole evening — more than the (delicious) food, more than the good company. The surprise and joy of rediscovering how much I love eating out, for all the many different reasons, and the discovery that it’s still there after so long, made the meal such a special experience that I’m still giddy, days later.

Reflecting some more on the idea of needing a break, I find myself thinking about the fact that this year — thanks, in no small part, to the new freelancing gigs I’m taking after losing the permanent THR position — I’ve been dealing with relatively longterm projects for the first time.

In my past, while I’ve had gigs that have continued for some time, they’ve generally been centered around the idea that I’m handing in work on a regular basis and moving on. Even on previous projects that I’d considered “longterm” — which seems almost embarrassing, looking back, because they’ve lasted a month or so at the most — there’s been a regular back-and-forth between myself and editors or collaborators that allowed me to feel as if I’ve reached some kind of ending point, or at least a milestone.

That’s not really been the case this time around; there’s the mystery secret project that’s slowly continuing in the background, that I’d hoped to have finished last week but reality — and other gigs — got in the way, and then there’s a second longterm project that’s been in the works in some degree or another since… February, I think? Maybe early March…? A significant period of time, nonetheless.

Admittedly, for much of that time, it was “in the works” in the sense of, “occasionally I’d think a little about it and then move on.” It didn’t become more of an actively-work-on thing until a month or so ago, when the deadline started looming large in my imagination. This meant that I spent a large period of last month working primarily on the two longform projects, and not having many — enough — short term things happening. I was, for want of a better way to put it, missing the relief that comes from submitting a piece and thinking, well, now I can move on.

The absence of that sense of closure, or that moment of “Thank fuck, I can put that particular mental box away” for a month, might have contributed to my burnout last month, looking back. Or perhaps I’m just overthinking things, now that the first draft of that second project has been submitted and I feel as if I can move on, at least until the inevitable request for rewrites.

I’ve been thinking about lost iconography of the past recently.

It started when looking back over GMT 2000 for the first time in at least a decade or so; it’s a collection of photography from the Magnum agency taking in multiple locations across the U.K. on the last week of the 20th century, and it’s very much a snapshot — pun only half intended — of the cultural zeitgeist of that curious moment in time. Looking at that got me nostalgic not only for that era and those places, but also for the “trash photography” I used to indulge in when I was in art school and just fresh out of it.

The term has been borrowed by others and abandoned by all, now, but “trash photography” for a brief moment of the 1990s was intentionally throwaway, pop photography — done quickly and cheaply, and with subjects that were intentionally lowbrow or accidental: graffiti on walls, branding in store windows, that kind of thing. It’s an aesthetic that I still enjoy, even if iPhones and smartphones of all makes have tended to transform just what counts as throwaway photos in this day and age. (Is everything trash photography now? There’s an argument to be made that it is, far more than it’s “content.” Alas.)

Thinking about this reminded me of the photographic process that was: shooting photos on film, and then having to have that developed into negatives and the finished prints. I’d take them to a local store to handle, and because so many of them were out of focus or blurry — usually intentionally so, but not always, I admit — they’d be returned to me with a sticker attached explaining that there was something wrong with the image.

That sticker or ones like it because, in its own right, an iconic image to an entire generation, I think: an editorial comment when least expected, a judgment that seemed to misunderstand the intent of what people were trying to do. The aesthetics of those stickers had their own messages, their own meanings, and they became visual objects in their own right.

But those stickers don’t exist anymore in the popular consciousness, because who gets photos developed these days? There’s no outside voice letting you know that you weren’t in focus, or that the lighting was too low, or whatever; you just get whatever you see on your screen.

It feels like a sad thing, for those stickers to be consigned to history. It feels like a loss, even though I could not come up with a coherent, aesthetic argument as to why that’s actually the case. This might just be what nostalgia is, I guess.

It’s perhaps telling that it took me until switching off my laptop last Friday, and finally stopping thinking about work as continuously as I had been doing, to realize just how exhausted I actually was.

I knew something was wrong, of course; I knew that I was struggling to meet deadlines and juggle the various bits of work that were hanging over my head across the last week or two, and I knew that this blog was suffering even more — after all, it’s the easiest thing to put to one side when I’m trying to make sure that I’m taking care of the various bits of business that are actually, you know, business.

Despite what old GI Joe cartoons claimed, though, knowing isn’t really half the battle — even though I was all too aware that everything wasn’t really going as it normally did, and that I was finding it harder to actually do what traditionally came easier, if not easily, my thought process pretty much stopped there: I got to the edge of “something’s probably wrong” and never managed to progress to “I wonder what it is?”

Instead, I just pushed myself through the days by force of will as much as anything else, making sure that I was doing at least the bare minimum and hoping that things would get better magically, somehow. Maybe I was just having an off day. Maybe I was just having, like, a couple of weeks of off days. That’s not impossible, right?

Weirdly, it was the most obvious leap of logic that put everything into focus for me last week: for pet-related reasons, I’d been sleeping like shit for three or four nights by that point, and as I finished work for that day, I thought to myself, I’m really tired. And then I thought, wait, what if I’m not just sleepy tired, but actually, really and properly exhausted tired? What if I’m burned out and need a break?

That broke a mental dam, somehow, and I almost immediately started feeling better — it was as if just naming the problem was the start of recovering from it. A weekend of doing as little as possible (but sleeping well for the first time in weeks, honestly) later, and things seem like maybe they’re on an upswing again. It’s not the rest that I need, not yet, but maybe it’s a start. Maybe that’s enough for now.

Last week, as part of everything that was going on, I found myself forced out into the real world for more than simply groceries or a gentle walk for the first time in… honestly, quite a while, actually. (Months, certainly, but I genuinely couldn’t tell you how many — which might, in itself, give you an idea of how long it has been.) On the one hand, this is clearly a good thing; COVID and lockdown aside, there’s no reason for me to become any more of a shut-in than I already am, and it’s been so long since I interacted with people I don’t know that I’d genuinely forgotten that I like talking to people at times.

That said, I have apparently lost the ability to make small talk.

Small talk is an all-important part of interacting with the outside world; it’s the social grease that eases the wheels of conversation with strangers, and, I’ll be honest, it’s something that I had previously prided myself at being good at, or at least, not entirely shitty at. Those days, apparently, are long gone.

Whether it was the Lyft drivers that made sure I got to the vets, or the vet techs themselves as we walked around the block desperately trying to get Gus to pee while the small plastic tray was close to the clinic — he didn’t — I found myself depressingly unable to keep the small talk going without awkward pauses and overthinking my responses.

On the plus side, I’m not entirely sure this was just a problem on my part. Indeed, I’d hazard a guess that this is an endemic problem to the wider populace, all of us still in a mild recovery position from the last year or so. We’ve all been in our little bubbles, and not needing to make small talk, after all. Can you blame us for being rusty at it now?

And yet, as we think about the possibility of a post-lockdown world — even if the idea of a post-COVID world feels a little unlikely just yet — it strikes me that small talk is something I need to return to, sooner rather than later. If I can just remember how.