I am in the National Park of Fear. A few weeks ago, my next-door neighbour suddenly passed away of a heart attack. We weren't friends, but we were friendly. At first I felt disoriented. Later that day I thought of a podcast I had recently listened to (Sugar Calling, episode 1.) The guest was talking about how people experience trauma. He said that we all live on the back of a tiger, and every once in a while the tiger wakes up. I thought it was a powerful metaphor about how we live our lives, believing we are in control. Whenever something terrible happens, we wake up to the realization that there is so much we can't control, and so much we don't know. I started to think of all my fears regardless of whether they had anything to do with the pandemic, and wondered which one would materialize next. There was the fear of dying, of getting sick, of losing someone, of losing my job, of my life never returning to normal. After a while, the various fears became a single mass, and I was enveloped in it. I felt like a particle on the back of a tiger.
The place I'm in is monochrome, musty, and completely quiet. The terrain is bumpy and slippery. It looks as if it is covered with exposed tree roots. They are giant and look like unfriendly hills and valleys. In the valleys, it is dark and I can't see what is beyond the next hill. When I get to the top of a hill, I look around, and the place goes on forever. It is hard to know what is the way out because all directions look the same. Going forward is scary, because I may not like what I find behind the next hill. But staying put is also uncomfortable. I dread the feelings I am going to have once I confront the "thing" on the other side of each hill.
Julia Grozdanova, 48
Toronto, Canada
This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.