You Are Still You

By: Jay Fenster

The crowded A train rumbled into Midtown Manhattan. It was a chilly morning during the second week of March, right as the gravity of the coronavirus outbreak was beginning to settle on New Yorkers.

Somewhere south of Columbus Circle I looked around the subway car – and I will never forget that moment – because it was one of powerful unspoken solidarity with my neighbors. Each face wore the same expression of fear and distress. Few faces were in masks. It was a sobering realization, to be surrounded by strangers and know that every single one of us was stressed out about the same thing.

Now, here we are, half a year deep into our collective trauma, dealing with grief of previously unimaginable scale and scope. And for some of us, with our personal share of sadness comes a sense of survivors’ guilt.

After all, do you have the right to grieve the things you’ve lost, when others have lost people?

Of course you do.

Your pain is real, and is not rendered invalid merely because others may be suffering more. 

Life under capitalism demands that we deny and ignore our pain from day to day. We are encouraged to dull it with alcohol or pills, tempted to distract ourselves through consumerism. Society orders us to find a way to suck it up and keep it moving.

But you have to give yourself space to feel pain, to acknowledge and process it. Otherwise it twists and gnarls inside of you, like a broken bone that sets incorrectly and leaves you with a limp.

This pandemic has taken much away from each of us, even those of us lucky enough to evade the virus itself thus far. Some of us have lost loved ones. Many of us have lost jobs. All of us have lost the human connection that sustains our souls. And a few of us might even feel like we have lost ourselves.

But you are still you.

Define yourself by your job. Your job disappears tomorrow. You are still you.

Define yourself by the people in your life. People leave and change. You are still you.

Define yourself by the things you do. Then do different things. You are still you. 

All of the words we use to define ourselves – mother, father, brother, sister, friend, employee, entrepreneur, raver, rower, runner – these are our identities, not our selves. They are merely outfits we wear, and change between as the moment requires. You may think you’re not the same person to your children that you are to your parents, but it’s just a costume change. Underneath, you are still you. 

In this pandemic it’s easy to look at all of the things that we once used to identify ourselves – our careers, our home lives, and our passions – and ask, who am I without this?

Who am I without my job?

Who am I without my friends?

Who am I without my world?

And the answer is always the same.

You are still you.

And you are still important.