cosette 🎀 (she/they) @cosettef98

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still gonna keep fighting: my survival and my children’s futures depend on it. But I do it from a VERY different place than I did in 2020-2021. These days I’m painfully aware how much of a Sisyphean pursuit this whole thing is.

And that’s where we find ourselves right now. Which is exactly why I’m not hopeful anything will change until a neutralizing vaccine is available. People are too invested in the lie now. They NEED the lie to keep from having a breakdown.

Which creates the ultimate catch-22: As long as ppl refuse to accept the reality of Covid, they’re going to keep infecting themselves & their loved ones, keeping the pandemic going. But as long as the pandemic is still going, they can’t accept the reality of Covid.

You can work together on supporting your body and mind through the ongoing trauma as best you can, sure. But you can’t actually work to process the trauma and heal from it while it’s still happening. And that’s the problem here with this pandemic as well.

There’s a reason any trauma therapist worth their salt will tell you that you can’t start work to heal from a trauma that is still ongoing. Because your brain is still in survival mode - still prioritizing protecting you over all else.

The risk is still happening, & despite the rhetoric of “personal protections” the reality is that no individual on earth has the ability to FULLY control their Covid exposure 100%. And the brain knows this all too well.

But the number one reason the brain needs to keep fighting against these realizations is the most insidious of them all. Because the trauma is still ongoing.

Right or wrong aside, these are the sorts of questions that the brain would be forced to grapple with if made to see the reality of Covid - which ones again provides even MORE cause for the brain to avoid that realization at all costs. It’s too much to take.

❓ Will my children’s lives be shorter and/or full of difficult health challenges because of choices we made for them when they were too going to choose for themselves? Will they grow up to blame me at all for choices I made? Do *I* blame me?

❓How many of my infections could have been avoided if I had done X differently, or I hadn’t done Y? How much should/do I blame myself here? ❓Are there people I love that will experience these harms because *I* infected them? Do they blame me? Do *I* blame me?

Accepting that Covid really IS a dangerous pathogen that causes serious long term harm means being forced to reckon with not only with what that means for your own body and future health, but it brings much bigger and more difficult questions. Questions like…

This is part of why I’ve lost hope that things will change anytime soon, no matter how bad this wave and the one coming in behind it end up being. Because even if people COULD see the wave accurately (which they won’t be allowed to FWIW,) their brain will fight to disbelieve it.

So instead of being angry at the leaders and systems that failed you, the brain sees the PRIMARY threat in that moment as the person disturbing the illusion your brain is depending on to feel safe. THEY are the problem you can actually deal with, the real problem is too big.

Because the brain isn’t actually thinking rationally in a way that looks at what the ACTUAL problem is here. It’s in survival mode, where all other logical processing comes secondary to the primary objective: protecting the psyche from the trauma of a reality too hard to accept.

This is also why when folks like me share about the numerous studies showing the long term harm Covid actually causes to try to warn people of the danger, people react by saying it’s CRUEL to share that because it’s mean to scare all the people who’ve already been infected before

…illusion their psyche is depending on in order to cope. They need everyone to act like Covid is no big deal to keep themselves from being confronted with a reality they are unable to process. It’s not cognitive impairment, it’s how human neurobiology works to “protect” us.

This is why the more people get infected again and again, the more they seem to NEED Covid to be “just a cold.” It’s also why people went so quickly from “you do you” to angry & aggressive towards those still successfully avoiding Covid. Because those people destroy the…

…overwhelmed to the point of shutting down. Seeing all these other maskless people and the government saying everything is fine provides the brain an option that would make it all ok, and cognitive dissonance kicks in to allow them a way to latch on to it despite knowing better.

…of Covid to reassure their psyche against the scary info coming out more and more about what those repeat infections really mean. It’s a way (not saying it’s a HEALTHY way) to cope with having to continue to be exposed at a high risk job again and again without feeling…

You don’t need cognitive impairment to explain this, b/c we are wired neurobiologically to try to protect our minds from trauma - often to the point of cognitive dissonance. Drs were/are exposed so much that it makes sense they’d subconsciously NEED to downplay the seriousness…

#9 Dream @GayFabFourFan

8 months ago

Is it possible doctors and HCWs don’t mask and downplay the risks of C19 because they’ve been repeatedly infected (including asymptomatically), and are now making bad judgments and risk assessments because of the resulting cognitive impairment? Asking for a worldwide population.

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