SOCIETY
AFTER TWO YEARS OF INSTABILITY AND WHIPLASH, HOW
DO WE STOP PEERING NERVOUSLY AROUND THE CORNER?
BY REBEKAH TAUSSIG
I recently went back to vIsIt the
high school where I used to teach. I met
with a handful of kids in my old class-
room, and as I looked around at the
same pictures on the walls, the wooden
desks, the view from the window, I was
stunned thinking about the last time
I sat in this room. It was the spring of
2020, and I was seven months pregnant,
trying to talk to a class of 14-year-olds
about this new corona virus without
being too fippant or too scary. It was
the day before spring break, and we
were fumbling through a crash course
in online learning, because we expected
classes would need to be virtual the
first couple of weeks back. It would be
weird and annoying for a minute, but
then we’d get right back in the swing of
things. To put our complaints in per-
spective, we went around the circle
and shared whom we wanted to protect
from getting sick—a grandpa in a nurs-
ing home, an aunt with a heart defect,
a loved one with cancer.
That was almost two years ago. Now
I have a toddler who runs around the
house hollering about ducks, and the
freshmen I once knew are all taller and
wearing masks and applying to colleges.
None of us in that circle—whether we
AGE OF
U NCERTA IN T Y
were rolling our eyes or wringing our
hands—expected it to go this way.
But there was something else that
struck me during that visit, beyond the
fact that we still hadn’t gone back to
“normal,” or that we weren’t even sure
what that meant anymore. I felt a weari-
ness in the school that was deeper than
I’d anticipated. I knew the past two years
had been hard. But as I moved through
the hallways, the weight was palpa-
ble, not in everyone’s words as much
as their faces and shoulders. It was like
they had had the wind knocked out of
them. Their laughter couldn’t quite lift
off the ground. The day I visited, many
teachers were out with COVID-19 or
COVID-19 exposures or kids who had
COVID-19 or whose day cares had shut
down because of COVID-19. Classroom
attendance was low, making any kind of
steady pace or continuity an elusive and
increasingly exhausting goal to chase.
Before Omicron swept the world,
it felt a little like we’d been caught in
some kind of liminal suspension for
nearly two years, our limbs aching as we
scanned for a patch of ground where we
could land—just one stretch of sturdy
earth to rest on with familiar markers
to chart our location and a horizon to
PAINTING BY JEREMY MIRANDA
