Welcome to NEVERTHELESS, PERSISTING
A newsletter inspired by a moment in time, about the moments we persist through over time.
Have you ever looked back on a moment and known that’s when everything changed? Now in my 5th decade on earth, I’ve learned that several such moments occur throughout life. For me, a fateful decision to honor a commitment is simply the latest.
On March 10, 2020, I boarded a flight bound for Des Moines, Iowa. I boarded that flight despite the fact that mere minutes before, my employer had banned employee travel due to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. I boarded that flight with my boss’s blessing because I’d made a professional commitment and I intended to honor it. I boarded that flight and along the way, picked up a companion I haven’t managed to shake: a virus described by some as innocuous, nothing more than a nuisance, a cold, no reason to change business-as-usual. I boarded that flight and I’ve been suffering from Long COVID ever since.
In the four years since I became host to the viral squatters who refuse to leave my body, I went from an active, deeply engaged woman at the height of her career to a person who on most days is quite certain she's been buried alive, left to live out her days suffocating unheard while the world carries on. I sleep 10-15 hours a day and still feel exhausted all the time. There's a dense fog that lingers in my brain, dissipating for only the few hours a day a magic pill whooshes it away. I've been almost consistently nauseous for over a year. I've had to fight to keep my job and medical insurance. I've been misdiagnosed countless times. I still meet medical professionals who have never heard of my condition. And yet over 17 million Americans are afflicted.
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So is this newsletter about Long COVID? Yes and no. You see, for me, Long COVID has changed everything. I can’t un-see the world from the perspective that Long COVID provides. I can’t un-learn the lessons of Long COVID. I can’t un-live the experiences of Long COVID. And I want to share all those things. They are worthy of light. There are millions of us suffering and too many in the dark about our condition.
And too, I boarded that flight in 2020 on a years-long continuing mission, with knowledge and a perspective to share. I’m a public sociologist. I work hard to spread the gospel of sociology because I believe that if more people saw the world, their worlds, through a sociological lens, we'd all be better off. It really could change everything.
I didn’t come to see the world through this lens via our usual mechanisms of socialization because we don't learn this perspective through our usual mechanisms of socialization. We don't tend to notice how deeply social forces shape our lives. We’re often not aware how much we, as individuals, lack power. Not knowing keeps us doing our work; cogs in the machine. Not knowing keeps us from seeking meaningful change, from breaking the machine or - gasp! - from building a better one.
It’s not that all individuals lack power. It’s that too few have it all and too many have none. Sociology helped me understand that. It has also helped me understand that we, as individuals, are not entirely powerless. We can change the system. We just have to notice it first. And we have to take care of ourselves in the process.
So what’s this newsletter about? It’s my way of sharing a perspective that I think more people need and can benefit from. It’s inspired by my experience with Long COVID because that happens to be the most recent moment in my life that changed everything. But at its heart, NEVERTHELESS, PERSISTING is simply the next step along my years-long journey to use what power or influence I’ve been lucky enough to collect to shed light on the variety of ways individual lives are shaped by social forces.
Why the name NEVERTHELESS, PERSISTING? For some readers, the phrase will call up visions of a 2017 Senator Elizabeth Warren persisting through a speech over Senator Mitch McConnell’s protestations. McConnell's description of the event went viral and that’s when everything changed. “Nevertheless, she persisted” became the rallying cry of the modern day feminist movement. The phrase became a symbol of all that women have persisted through and of the all-too-familiar experience of being shushed, silenced, or ignored.
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“Nevertheless, she persisted” began as a single moment but came to represent persistence through harassment, inequality, and injustice across time and place. A moment you look back on and know that’s when everything changed. NEVERTHELESS, PERSISTING is a riff on the phrase. Though inspired by a different moment, the newsletter title, like the original phrase itself, pays homage to the significance of a moment and of persisting through others’ attempts to ignore, brush aside, or silence. It’s also feisty and has a bit of a give-no-fucks/take-no prisoners ring to it and that suits me just fine.
I love the adage, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” Yes, Elizabeth Warren said it once but others have said it too. Having a seat is as critical as understanding that there's often little space in the current design to add more chairs to the table in the first place. Well, pull up a seat and let's make some room.
Thanks, Amy, for writing this and for using the power of YOUR sociological perspective to help the rest of us see the realities of Long COVID. I look forward to reading more.
As a fellow sufferer (is that a word? words are hard sometimes now) of Long Covid AND your cousin, this is pretty moving for me. I have thought about writing about my LC experiences, but so far it's too triggering. I am so glad you are writing this. Thank you cousin.