Lemons, Contrecoup, and the Great Unraveling

Are you feeling it too? This terrible mixed metaphor involves citrus, poultry, sweaters, and car crashes.

My life is in low-grade turmoil; my husband has a health crisis and has had to take time off from work. I say “low grade” because I know this terrible pilgrimage from my own health conditions, which included rheumatoid arthritis and then in 2020 Long Covid.

I felt alone then, in 2008, and then again in 2020, but today it feels systemic. I see it as a kind of unraveling and ricochet effect of the pandemic, and the racial reckoning which is very much not completed or resolved, and all the hell of those very recent years, that have continued into our present. And add fascism and violence and hate crimes to top it off. It’s harder to find medical care; everyone is extremely burned out. I’m seeing it in my students, and it’s the same thing I’m experiencing: it’s harder to concentrate, to remember stuff, to find calm, to even feel a sense of “normal”—especially if you’re still being cautious about Covid and your isolation has increased, or if you’re not cautious about Covid and you’ve gotten it a few more times and you’ve seen too late exactly what we were trying to warn you about. Or if you’re in situations where the institutions where you work and live are not making decisions to protect all who live and work there. So many of my students are sick, deeply unhealthy, as a result of just wear and tear on their bodies and souls.

It’s a background level of chaos that’s like the recoil from a car accident, the snapping of the neck that jostles the brain and creates whiplash. It creates an injury via a contrecoup impact, from the French for the “opposite side.” The brain slams into the opposite side of the skull from impact, and the injury is there, 180 degrees in the other direction. So you might have had a certain five things explode, and as a result, ten completely different things broke. I wonder how much we are leaning into denial in order to function.

We used to use the word “resilience” a lot, but it was often also leveled at people, especially marginalized folks, as a kind of minimum as opposed to an amazing quality. Your life is falling apart: Have you tried resilience? It reminds me of a cartoon I clipped from somewhere that depicts a young person with their head down on a table or desk. They have a lemon juicer to make lemonade, but they are being positively pummeled by a cannon launching lemons at them full force. You can make lemonade, sure, but the lemons will leave a freaking bruise. And after that kind of treatment, your thirst for lemonade might be done for.

And the stories matter: the adage about making lemonade with life’s lemons is a story about what a person did, or could do, or might be able to do, about how a happy ending might be somehow whipped up or squeezed out of nothing. And stories become expectations and silences. The ending of that story implies we’re happy with the lemonade, but you know what? Fuck lemonade. Give me a latte.

Suck it, Lemons.

I am here for your unraveling, and my own. This sure isn’t my first one. At one point in my life during my most difficult unraveling, I stuck a note to myself on my fridge with bullet points on how to live, how to get my life together again, because I just forget stuff that’s most important. Number one on that list was “Don’t keep secrets.” That, as well as most of the other positives in my life, came at me via Twelve Step stuff. I’d been carrying a whole ton of other peoples’ secrets and bad behavior, trying to be the functional, productive, positive one in the midst of absolute chaos, and it broke my body in some ways.

I am here for the Great Unraveling. What I mean by that is, I’m here for naming it, for marking it in time and in our bodies. I need a way to put this time in parentheses or in all caps, to name the terrible fanged chickens that have come home to roost. I need names for this place in time. I need a way to mark the fact that shit has gotten real broken and it’s not okay, we’re not “back,” it’s not “normal.” Did your life explode? Mine did too, and some of the bruises cropped up exactly where the impact was not.

Some of my best unravelings have been my greatest achievements, in that I let them change me, I took the note, I parted ways with the monsters. One of the hardest things to do during an unraveling is to have steady patience, or faith, to take the next step in spite of the storm around you. And that’s where I’m at.

May your unraveling be your greatest achievement.