On Trees, Collective Trauma and a Pandemic

This piece was originally published in The Feminist Library Zine (Issue 1): Care in A Pandemic on 17 July 2020. Click here for the Zine.

Stay home, think in terms of the binaries inside/outside and safe/dangerous, think in terms of the minimum needed, obsess over washing your hands, be fearful of contact with others, dread the death of a loved one, assume the worst. All of this sounds too painfully familiar to me as someone with pre-existing mental ill-health. These instructions are packaged as the key to dealing with this pandemic, to being well, but they also make up my own experience of not being well. Don’t get me wrong, I very willingly follow them and even entered a self-imposed lockdown before this one officially came into being. I just wish there was more acknowledgement of what social distancing and self-isolation mean for those of us who have a predisposition to mental ill-health, or who are currently struggling.

I’ve always practised social distancing and self-isolation one way or another. The language I use to talk about it is different — I normally speak of ‘hiding’ that happens in my room — but it’s very similar to what we’re doing now during this pandemic. I normally hide in an attempt to feel a bit more in control of my state and my immediate surroundings, but I also sometimes lack any choice in that hiding as (yet) another bout of depression takes hold. I really appreciated coming across the term ‘collective trauma’ to describe what we’re experiencing at the moment and I want to see us speak more in those terms, but I also remind myself that this collectivity is more complex than what meets the eye. In addition to what many can relate to as we go through this, from crushing helplessness to existential dread, I’ve personally found the instructions for staying safe incredibly jarring to say the least, and that has been a defining feature of my own experience of this trauma. I’ve found it an added burden to that experience: in order to be well in one way I also have to re-live being unwell in another, and it’s been a struggle to navigate the mutual exclusivity of the two. There is no neat way in which I do this navigation or just deal with this traumatic experience in general, but I often find myself oscillating between being unwell, actively pursuing distractions, experiencing dissociation, and a different type of hiding to the one I usually do: hiding outside home through walking.

When experiencing dissociation, I know I’m here, I’m present, but it just doesn’t feel that way; it’s a coping mechanism of sorts to help me deal with an impossible situation. It has, strangely enough, enabled me to better be able to give care and listen as injustice after injustice continues to unfold for people I know and as the broken nature of the systems we live in locally and globally is further revealed. My body becomes a separate entity that I observe as it moves and feels. Any activity that will allow me to be with it with more intent becomes an impossibility in moments like these. And it is outside of home that there’s more possibility for that to happen, where I can be with and in my body as it moves and feels. I’ve been trying to walk regularly since the start of this pandemic. The start of spring poignantly coincided with the lockdown, and so as my eyes notice the buds appearing on trees, flowers blooming, and woodlands gradually transforming into new landscapes, I’m also present and I’m also seeing. When the wind blows and kisses the skin on my face, I’m there too, to witness and to feel. The warmth of the sun on my eyelids is felt by me directly. Spring has also given me respite in other ways: the transformation of familiar sights in my neighbourhood has given me a sense of safety in the certainty of seasons, in the cyclicality of the environment, a familiarity that I needed to ground me and a reminder that I’m not stuck in relentlessly inflexible concrete.

Even though I continue to practise social distancing while walking, I still manage to feel a remote sense of connection to others around me, a connection that Zoom calls can never give me, whether they’re walking past, sitting on the other side of their living room window, or delivering post. I never thought I’d ever long for this, but I do sometimes secretly picture myself on a crowded train carriage during the morning rush hour, hidden in a sea of people where we’re not afraid of our proximity to one another in the same way we are right now (although in other ways still, unfortunately). Sometimes my walks extend to hours, where I walk beyond my immediate neighbourhood and into neighbouring boroughs. When that first happened, a month into the lockdown, I realised how much I’d been experiencing a sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped. Walking and observing have become a source of much-needed healing.

But as I reflect on how collective trauma has distinctive manifestations on an individual level — with a focus on myself — I also find it necessary to ask other questions about the term: how collective is ‘collective’ when not everyone who wants to is able to access the walking I’ve personally found helpful? When this trauma intersects with other collective traumas for many? This city in which I walk, London, is probably best defined by the disparities that exist across it, and predisposition to mental ill-health, poverty and access to even the mere sight of a nearby tree through the window are all interconnected. The wealthiest boroughs have more private gardens and parkland per capita than the poorest, more overcrowded ones. This borough in which I walk, Hackney, is one of the poorest in London but one which also hosts its own shocking disparities, and where it’s very evident how much poverty is racialised. Near my flat are estates with attached green spaces, but at the rate at which gentrification is taking hold here, these are also likely to be eyed by ‘developers’. Not everyone is able to roam public spaces freely in this city; stop and search and more police powers during the pandemic mean that Black communities will continue be targeted more than others. Pseudo-public spaces that are open to the public but with added layers of private policing are also cropping up all over the city, and even the green space attached to City Hall (where the Mayor of London is based), ironically, is one example. Not everyone feels safe in public spaces for other reasons as well; even in the middle of a pandemic sexual harassment is still going strong, something I’ve witnessed first-hand during my walks. I’ve also been on trips to prominent green spaces and sights with my students, many of whom are visibly Muslim women and who communicate in a combination of languages, and have seen what hostile staring at people who are othered in these spaces can do. More elaborate green spaces in the form of national parks already often exclude so many as access to them implies you have a car. And if one does manage to get there, the always-intrusive, always-hostile question ‘where are you really from?’ also manages to follow you. And, of course, walking is not physically accessible to everyone and neither are enough green and/or public spaces. Not everyone can go out for a walk even if they are able to; there are people stuck in abusive contexts at home, especially with the lockdown, women with increased gendered labour, key workers working in multiple jobs with no time at hand, and people who are especially vulnerable in relation to the virus.

Given the facts about the predisposition to mental ill-health amongst people of colour, women, people with (other) disabilities and queer, working class, and migrant communities, and the plethora of research on the importance of green spaces to mental health, it’s difficult not to see the disparity in access to green spaces as an added injustice to that already experienced by these groups, particularly by those living at their intersections. While mainstream narratives will try to amplify essentialist ‘reasoning’ behind the predisposition to mental ill-health in many of these groups in the same tone that is being used to explain the over-representation of people of colour in cases of COVID-19, the structural nature of this predisposition and its twinning with poverty and poorer access to care, including access to greenery and green spaces, will continue to scream back at us.

As the pandemic continues to unfold, I’ll continue to seek solace and grounding from the trauma it unleashes. In the trees, in the walks, in the daisies that are slowly appearing, in the breezes. But as I look around me and see who is not here, I’ll also continue to be reminded of how mental health — and access to care connected to it, be it in the form of therapy or trees — is political in the same way this pandemic is.