She’ll Be Right

NOTE: The actual date of this post is October 31, 2021.

So. Wow. I haven’t updated this blog for over a year. How is it possible that I only have four lonely little posts (well, five, now, I guess) on a blog–a blog largely intended to be a travel blog, no less–I conceived of over two years ago? I could write an entire post about the reasons why, and I suppose it’s not impossible that I will at one point, but I so don’t want to be that person who starts every post with an “OMG, I’m so sorry that I haven’t written in so long, you guys!” disclaimer.

The long story short of it is that I spent the early months of this year slogging through a pretty intense period of anxiety and depression and overall disconnection from myself. Sure, there were some pretty cool bright spots sprinkled in there—a long weekend touring wineries on Waiheke Island, nights out at Auckland’s Sky City casino—but mostly I just floundered around and skipped yoga and went on long teary walks around the city and went to sleep and woke up with my entire body experiencing that awful pins and needles feeling like when one of your limbs falls asleep. It was pretty fucking grim, and almost everything felt flat and pointless and exhausting. Just getting ready in the morning often felt like an act of triumph.

Trying to pull myself out of that flat dark place felt like the world’s most impossible deadlift, and it took a lot of time and effort to get to the point where I started to feel even mildly back in touch with myself. By the time I did, I was generally more interested in trying to keep myself healthy(ish) than I was in writing, and by the time I was at last starting to feel that I was on an upswing, we were heading up north and the weather was turning to spring and I felt more interested in lounging catlike in warm patches of sunshine and drinking wine and reading Raymond Chandler novels.

And now, as I’m writing this post, it feels hard, not because I don’t want to write, but because I feel out of practice, and my brain feels sluggish, and the fear that maybe I can’t write anymore keeps prowling around. So I guess that maybe isn’t quite as long story short as I imagined, but the point is that I’ve had some rough times. Anyway. On the off chance that someone is actually still reading this blog after so much silence (it’s not as though I’ve ever been rolling in readership, but I’m aware that even the few people who made it here last year may well have given up by now), on to the actual post. 

For most of my adult life, I’ve had two recurring dreams. The first is pretty cliche—I’m enrolled in a university course somewhere, and either because I haven’t cared enough or because I have somehow been oblivious to the fact that I was enrolled in the first place, I haven’t attended a single class all semester, and now it’s time to write my term paper or to take my final exam.

The second is a little less detailed, more like an interlude than a proper dream; I’m maneuvering a car around hairpin turns high up on some nameless mountain road, my brakes go out, and I try frantically to steer as the car plunges ahead on its ever-accelerating downward trek. It doesn’t exactly take a psychoanalyst to decipher the meaning behind such dreams, and as recurring dreams go, there’s nothing particularly exciting or unique about these two.

Since I’ve been in New Zealand, however, I’ve added another recurring dream to my roster, and it’s a doozy. I always wake from it feeling tight and panicky and breathless. In this dream, I am somehow either on board a plane to leave New Zealand, or I’ve actually flown to the US and have exited the plane, when it occurs to me that I can’t return to New Zealand. I either am, or soon will be, trapped outside of it. Somehow this very obvious fact has eluded me until it’s too late, and I am faced with the reality of life outside of NZ, and even the colors of the dream become dark and cold and scary. The relief that I feel upon waking and realizing that it was all just a dream can’t be overstated. I had this dream for the first time very early on in the pandemic, and it’s become increasingly frequent since. The fact that it’s so terrifying to me, and the fact that I have it with such frequency, says a lot about how I’ve come to feel about this country, what it represents to me, and how I view the world outside of it.

I said in an earlier post that for most of the pandemic, New Zealand has been a bubble world, and not only because of its COVID response. Tucked away here at the bottom of the globe, it’s easy to feel not just isolated, but insulated. People, places, events…they feel distant both geographically and emotionally.

While people were storming the US Capitol on January 6th, the news appeared on my phone as a lonely NY Times pop-up notification. There was no in-my-face relentless news coverage, no one was buzzing about it in the busy city streets outside of our house in Newmarket, the news wasn’t surging to the top of New Zealand’s Twitter trends. It was already January 7th here, anyway. It was literally already history. This isn’t me being callous, or me downplaying it, this is me trying to explain how muted it all felt in that moment, how very far away. 

One of my good friends recently asked me why I never post on Instagram anymore. This is a fair question, as there was a time when I was posting almost daily (in case anyone is curious, my Instagram is largely devoted to sixties fashion icons). My response was that initially I found it hard to keep up a posting schedule while traveling, but once the pandemic hit, the bigger issue was that I felt like I didn’t know how to interact with people outside of New Zealand anymore. I know that probably sounds a little bit ridiculous, but hear me out. 

Apart from those early days of lockdown back in 2020, I have literally never known what it’s like to contemplate the dangers of COVID without the existence of a vaccine. I have never had to approach with trepidation essential things like going to the grocery store, where who even knows how many fellow customers might be infected. I have never had to be scared for my health because of this virus, I don’t have the faintest clue what it’s like to spend the better part of a year, or longer, staying mostly inside and being unable to go shopping, to the cinema, to a concert, to the local cafe. Until recently, I didn’t even really know what it was like to wear a mask. 

As protests and riots swept the streets in the US, as fires raged on the west coast and the Capitol was draped in Trump flags and people apoplectic with rage delivered aggressive and vaguely menacing anti-mask tirades at school board meetings and threatened people in parking lots, I’ve been here. It’s not that I don’t know these things are happening, and it’s not that I don’t feel deeply alarmed by them. It’s that I don’t know what it’s like to be confronting it all on a daily basis. To be in it, not just outside looking in. And as I’ve discussed in a previous post, this disconnect between my daily reality and the daily reality of my friends and family in the US (or anywhere else, really) is disconcerting.

Unless you are devoid of empathy or are abiding like The Dude or are, I don’t know, living in a remote monastery somewhere, I don’t see how all of these events over the past year and a half can be anything less than traumatic, both consciously and unconsciously. Who even knows how much psychological damage this has all caused for so many. But I haven’t had to face this trauma in the same way. I’ve been insulated. 

While my friends are feeling overwhelmed and like they’ve aged ten years in the past two, I’m…sea kayaking? Celebrating my birthday with a surprise package weekend at Sky City Hotel and Casino? Touring island wineries? Sharing tales of my exploits here feels almost cruel. How can I possibly relate to what so many of the people I know and love have been going through? I can’t. And the fact that I can’t often makes it easier to avoid interacting at all.

While this sense of disconnection and inability to relate certainly contributes to feelings of anxiety and depression, it’s not without its benefits. For the vast majority of my time in New Zealand, I’ve been able to live a life that, all things considered, has felt pretty carefree. I’m (obviously) not a Kiwi, but I’ve been able to construct the fantasy that I’m an honorary one. I’ve been able to reap all the benefits of being in New Zealand without having to deal with any of the potential downsides.

I mean, that’s sort of what traveling is always like, right? It’s like being in the honeymoon period of a new relationship, except the honeymoon never has to end. You may know on some level that there are darker aspects of your new paramour that have yet to reveal themselves, but you’re too dazzled by their best and most attractive qualities to worry too much about it.

When you’re traveling, when you’re a visitor, you always get to see the best and sunniest aspects of a country, because you’re privileged to not be obligated to engage with the shadow side. Even some of the things that in other contexts you may deem annoying (logistical hassles, visa policies, etc.) you become quick to categorize as charming quirks.  So being here for as long as I have, under the circumstances I have…well, that feeling is multiplied by approximately infinity. (And I should say, just in case anyone out there thinks I’m knocking New Zealand, its shadow side, comparatively speaking anyway, is pretty damn pale.)

I’ve been able to cheer on the government and their gold star COVID response (well, until recently; more on that later) and what that’s meant for my own personal health and freedom here without the necessity of balancing that with concerns over things like rising housing prices or immigration issues or government subsidies or any of the other political issues that directly affect NZ citizens. Even if I may have had my own personal issues while being here, even if the world in general still feels like a pretty dark place at the moment, New Zealand has been a safe haven. A place where I get to pretend that things aren’t really that bad, a place where I can ride out in comfort the shitstorm that’s been continually sweeping over the rest of the globe. And that means that the rest of the world, particularly my home country, feels even scarier by comparison. When we first arrived here from Australia in March of 2020, we were on one of the last international flights into the country. At the airport after deplaning, I rather dramatically and relievedly declared that we’d gotten the “last chopper out,” and while R poked gentle fun at me for elevating our current plight to Vietnam-level evacuation, I still had the feeling that perhaps it wasn’t as over the top as it might have seemed on first appraisal.

I’ve been in the one place on the planet where living like it’s 2019 has been possible, AND I’ve gotten to do it while being a tourist, and while I’m over-the-moon grateful for that, I can’t help but feel that is has also rendered me particularly vulnerable to, and defenseless against, the harsh reality of the pandemic and the turmoil of the US political and social landscape. My friends and family have been forced to develop coping strategies for everything that’s been going on, have had to become walking embodiments of keep-calm-and-carry-on resilience (well, at least the “carry on” part), have had to construct at least some mental and emotional fortitude against the daily chaos and in-your-faceness of the events of the past year and a half. I haven’t. It’s no wonder that I have such a clawing-at-the-walls-no-you-can’t-make-me resistance to the idea of returning to the US that it infects my dreams and leaves me feeling panic-attack ready. It feels overwhelming and frankly, inconceivable, to imagine being yanked out of my bubble world and dropped in the middle of all that.

Yes, I know it sounds privileged. It is privileged. Like oh boo-hoo, poor me, I haven’t really had to adapt to the realities of the world right now? I’m just too insulated? World’s smallest violin, you’re needed for this party of one. But it would be a lie to claim that it doesn’t impact me on a daily basis, in ways both obvious and subtle. And while my extremely fortunate circumstances may have led me to view the idea of the United States as a bigger boogey-man than it actually is, it’s not as though the things that have been happening there aren’t real and genuinely disturbing. Yes, things are perhaps better than they were. Yes, people are starting to reclaim at least a little bit of normalcy in their lives. Yes, I can see that things are opening up and literal fires are being extinguished and the streets seem much calmer. But it’s still not the same as it was. And there’s a reason why I haven’t spoken to a single friend or family member in the United States who hasn’t urged me to stay in New Zealand for as long as possible (well, maybe not my mom, but that’s because she misses me). 

This awful panic at the idea of having to return to the US in the nearer-term future has multiplied exponentially as the days to my next visa expiry have been ticking down. We’ve been in Northland since August, and while this area has its own challenges, it is unbelievably beautiful. Crazy beautiful. This-might-be-my-favorite-spot-in-all-of-New-Zealand-and-yes-that-includes-Queenstown-and-the-southern-Alps kind of beautiful. Walking the beach in the brilliant sunshine, staring out onto the Bay of Islands, watching the boats chug along on the water, having my breath taken away every time I round a particular curve to see the view, the idea of leaving feels impossible. Like I could, through sheer force of will, prevent it from happening (this is obviously completely delusional thinking, but that’s sort of the point). Hiking along the Paihia-Opua trail, feet firmly planted on the ground, flowers exploding into their full glory all over the place, birdsong trilling through the air, the sea stretching out past the horizon–like how could it be that I’d have to leave soon? 

Obviously I know I have to leave sometime, and it’s not as though I want to stay in New Zealand forever, but surely not yet. Just a little more time. A little more time to wait this out. A little more time to stay cocooned in this bubble, so that by the time I reemerge, maybe the world outside will feel a little softer, a little warmer, a little brighter.

R and I have applied for another extension. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Previously, the government has handed out extensions with a generous hand. So far, R and I have received three automatic extensions and only one we had to apply for, but the government relaxed the restrictions for that one, so the process was pretty smooth and seemed more of a formality than anything. But this one feels iffy, less of an assured thing. There’s no guarantee. Even applying for it felt strange—hasn’t most of the rest of the first world, rightly or wrongly, decided to declare the pandemic over? That’s it time to “live with COVID” and trend “Freedom Day” on Twitter and ignore overrun hospitals and practice a “some people will just have to die” shrug?

Even though we’ve done everything by the book, my anxious brain sometimes floods with images of deportation, headlines about entitled American tourists, some sort of black mark by our names for even having the audacity to think that we may be able to impose on our hosts even just a little bit longer. Because as I said before, no matter what kind of fantasy I’ve constructed for myself, no matter how much I want to view myself as part of the “team of 5 million” or how many Kiwi-isms creep into my speech or how many times I feel in on a Kiwi joke, I am not a Kiwi. I am not a native. New Zealand owes me nothing, though I feel like I owe it so much. And this particular honeymoon does have to end sometime.

New Zealand has been so gracious to us. Truly, I cannot thank this country enough for what’s felt like true kindness and compassion, and if we have to leave sooner than we’d like, you’ll never hear me claiming that New Zealand didn’t treat us right. I’m not so naive as to be unaware that the generosity hasn’t all been straight from the heart; certainly it’s been beneficial to have some tourist dollars supporting local people and businesses at a time when the borders are shut and international arrivals have been MIA since March 2020. But we’re not going to be able to make up for all of that lost revenue, and New Zealand didn’t have to offer all that it has.

R and I have what we call a “break glass” plan, a failsafe in case our time here is up sooner rather than later. This plan used to be Australia, because there existed a travel bubble between Australia and New Zealand before things blew up in NSW and Melbourne and delta hit New Zealand and the bubble burst. Basically, this is the plan that keeps us out of the US for just a little longer, and with a few borders opening up elsewhere around the world, we’re hopeful that we can seek a couple of additional months of shelter elsewhere. 

So this post turned out to be a lot more serious and a lot darker than I expected. A lot longer, too. And no pictures! There’s so much else I wanted to say—things about our adventures in Northland, what the recent delta outbreak has been like and the changes I’ve noticed in New Zealand since. So I WILL write a new post, soon, that covers some of that. I’m generally hesitant to make guarantees, but I feel pretty comfortable offering that one.

Maybe what I’m writing here feels like going back in time for people outside of New Zealand. Maybe, if you read all of this, you’re thinking I’m making mountains out of molehills (and, I mean, it’s not like I don’t have any awareness of how my anxiety can work like the reverse of a rear-view mirror, making objects appear much closer and more threatening than they actually are). Maybe the fact that I’ve basically been existing inside a time capsule makes it hard for me to perceive the things outside of it with any accuracy. Maybe I really can’t relate to people outside of New Zealand, and this post feels out of place. 

Endings are hard for me. That’s true of journeys and it’s true of writing. So after all of this, I don’t know if I’m any closer to feeling that I’ve arrived at a truly satisfying ending to this time in New Zealand or to this post. So instead, I’m choosing to try to place my trust in one of those Kiwi-isms I mentioned earlier:  She’ll be right.