For the last 6 months, I felt like I was in a daze. From the economy to the lira to the environment to the emigration, every grain that fell through the hourglass was another piece of the country collapsing. Lebanon was disintegrating. It felt like we were suspended in gelatin, unsure of what was waiting for us after the new year, unsure of what was to come with every parliament meeting, unsure of where we were supposed to put our faith except in the hands of one another.

In February of 2020, I had gone for a walk in downtown. It dawned on me how my own feelings towards the beginning of the uprisings had shifted from that of euphoria to utter exhaustion.
I wanted to keep protesting.
I wanted to feel that high again.
I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t succumbing to the fake detente, the rain, the strain, all the impediments that the government was counting on. How I felt that first week in October was nothing like the dumbbell sitting on my chest. I didn’t know how to lift it for one last rep. I had fallen in the mud under the monkey bars and my inner coach was berating me because there was still the rest of the obstacle course ahead. I wanted to crawl away. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. Maybe I wasn’t an activist, I was a privileged fraud. Maybe the doubters who thought this was pointless were right. Maybe I didn’t know what we signed up for when I went to Riad el Solh on the 18th, that Friday morning that I wouldn’t believe happened if I didn’t have the pictures to prove it.

To go through my phone’s photo album is another obstacle course. It’s exercises for my emotions. I scroll through a sea of Lebanese flags that get thinner as the days pass and I lose more of the sense of control over the days that haven’t been logged yet. The more I scroll, the harder the wave hits. The crash of suffocation, of lost direction, of wanting to check-out without guilt.

With the virus taking hold of the planet, the limbo that Lebanon had been suspended in has become the global pandemic’s main symptom infecting our entire species. We are all crippled by anxiety and fear that someone we love will die. We are all learning how to cope with plans becoming a word we don’t use anymore. We are all taking it one day at a time and hanging onto whatever piece of normal we can find in the dark.

We are all just trying to adapt and figure out a way through. To where, no one knows. We just know that through is the only way forward. And, in a way, because the whole world is now somersaulting in this darkness with me, I feel less alone.