The Great Debriefing and How To Sign Up For One

According to our devices, it's the middle of July 2021, but facts don't always track with our feelings about time.

I recall tuning into NPR in mid-March, 2020, catching the end of a segment in which Eric Klinenberg projected, "…We are entering into what’s likely going to turn out to be an historic event... We are going to learn who we are, and what we value, because when societies are under stress a lot of true things come out…”

I had plenty of privileges in my first pandemic year—like having a job I could do from home and living alone (while managing not to feel lonely).

There was also a personal sea change. I left an organization I’d been at for more than eight years. I started this business. My parents moved to California, where my sister and I live. I met and formed real relationships with my neighbors when I began facilitating recurring community circles on our street, to talk about race and class, to learn one another’s stories and, in the process, build trust on our block.

As the U.S. began to “open up” and people seemed to remember what summer was, I found myself feeling as if I were waiting for something—not the reopening, so much as a debriefing of what we’ve all been through. We skipped a step, it seems to me, in failing to pause to ask, “WHAT THE HECK JUST HAPPENED?” 

I still don’t know how to move forward without some collective reflection. To return to Klinenberg’s point, I’ve learned how much I value talking about the elephant in the room, especially when the elephant is society’s aversion to talking about unpleasantries. I’ve noticed that I don’t want to go back to normal (not sure I ever want to feel busy again, as this article outlined almost ten years ago) and that I don’t suffer from FOMO, though I sometimes feel the pangs of Fear of Looking Like I’m Missing Out. 

Here we hover, far enough out to turn and see the lengths of our pandemic shadows.

New questions formed, like, “How do we enter physical space with people we’ve only Zoomed with for more than a year?” and “What do we do with our hands at a social gathering?” or “What values did we overhear in our hearts and minds that we didn’t recognize before?”

I am finding it hard to believe that any of what comes next—including the continued racial justice reckoning and the preservation of democracy—is going to be linear, and so I find myself looking for meaningful conversations about what just happened and what anyone is thinking about possible futures from here. Not processing the pandemic, one of the many crises the globe is living through, feels like an invitation to more doom.

We are missing a great debriefing, and we need one.