May 15, 2020

On the surface, this project is about the different ways my mom and I are using technology to stay connected during this period of isolation. As we lounge in New York City—famously the epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States—mass death takes place around us, and all we can do is find ways to cope with whatever tools are available to us. However, this website, these photographs, are about much more than just highlighting how much I’ve been using my phone this quarantine season. They’re pointing to the fact that this digital world is the only access we have to a social life right now, and our digital constructions of ourselves aren’t always very accurate. We are reliant on these digital spaces to feel less alone, and I’ve decided to construct my space as a reflection of how I’m coping with my current anxieties.

It’s a weird time to be alive right now. We know the planet is dying and that we won’t be able to survive much longer without radical, systemic change. Yet, we continue to live our lives uncritically—now locked inside, for the sake of our neighbors. Time seems to pass differently since being uprooted from my life at school and told to remain socially distant. Our sense of time is social, dependent on those around us, and having no one around me is really messing with my head. Denise Riley writes in her 2012 essay Time Lived, Without Its Flow: “Occasioned by the unexpected death, your enormous shift away from your old grasp of time is far removed from your predictable meditations on the fragility of life, from your wistful philosophizing, or from your crushed expectations” (59). I’m not sure whether the unexpected death in my life is the rest of my senior year or all the people dying from coronavirus around me (or, perhaps, both), but what I am sure of is that my grasp of time is nowhere near what I could have predicted.

“The entire stance inside which you’d previously lived,” Riley continues, “is changed,” as “[a]n unanticipated and irrevocable vanishing smashes through your habitual cognitive assumption that objects and people will continue to exist, to reappear” (59-60). I expected my graduation to take place in person, on Wesleyan’s campus. I expected to work on my finals in Olin Library and to celebrate Senior Week on Foss Hill. I expected to have more time with my friends and with my girlfriend. Instead, I am several hours away from Middletown, Connecticut, finishing this assignment from my bed across state lines. It feels like the object permanence I developed as a baby has evaporated. These people who were supposed to be in my life a little longer, my last Spring Fling and my first Senior Formal, all the experiences I was promised, vanished, and my whole life has shifted. It’s hard to keep track of what day it is when all plans have gone out the window, and it doesn’t seem like time even matters anymore. Riley believes this is not unusual upon facing unforeseen death: “I find myself wanting to claim time’s standstill as an ordinary enough phenomenon—if not inevitable, then perfectly to be expected in the wake of a sudden death” (58). My plans for the future died, my expectations shattered, and with that, time slowed down to an insufferable pace.

I’m about to graduate college. Once I finish writing this, I will officially be done with my last assignment of senior year. When I turn this project in, my identity shifts from Student to Unemployed. I have no idea how we just passed the ten year anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah, the nine year anniversary of the first time I met Cody Simpson (which lead to a years-long obsession with the pop singer), and the six month anniversary of when I first met my girlfriend—all the same date. My Bat Mitzvah feels like just a few years ago and meeting my girlfriend feels like a lifetime ago. Time doesn’t feel the way it used to, and it doesn’t even feel the same way as it did yesterday or the day before. In December, when I was scared about the uncertainty of life after graduation before this global crisis was even added into the mix, my therapist told me it seemed like I was regressing to past behaviors from my childhood due to my fear of the unknown. I think she was right.

I find comfort in the familiarity of the past. I think we all do. The people protesting coronavirus-related restrictions just want to go back to the way their lives were before; they want to feel comfortable and safe, even if it actually means making everyone more vulnerable to the virus. Many people in the U.S. want things to reopen so they can get back to the neoliberal pressures of the capitalist system we’re used to, not because it’s what’s best but, rather, because it’s what’s familiar. Spending this much time alone in my room, occupying myself for hours and days on end with my phone and my laptop, reminds me of my life growing up. In elementary school, I would watch as my older sister played on the family computer, making hot girl icons on Dollz Mania. That 2000s aesthetic really stuck with me. As a kid, it symbolized being cool and popular, hot and fashionable, having good taste and the right opinions. At the time, whatever my sister said was cool became cool to me; I was a child, and I didn’t have to make any big decisions or form my own opinions. She told me what to wear and we listened to whatever music she put on. I think my subconscious wants back these simpler times. I don’t want to have to worry about what to wear or what to do with my life. I just want to put these fun glitter GIFs on my website and pretend I’m living in 2004 again. It feels like everyone else desires a return to last year—before we were living through a pandemic—and I’m all alone desiring a return to last decade—before I had to cook for myself and secure a stable income. I made this website look the way it does without realizing what I was doing. My mom says it looks “very Ginger.”

I chose the themes of this photography project in an attempt to help me work through my feelings as I transitioned from life on a college campus to a life of Zoom meetings from my mom’s apartment (I know this won’t last a lifetime, but it definitely feels that way). This project is about using technology to cope with living my mundane daily life as death takes place all around me, but it is itself one of the tools I have been using to cope. This project is self-reflexive, participating in its own quest to keep me sane. I made these photographs about sitting around using my little devices all day and performing my digital self and I built this website to remind me of the past, and all of this is part of my coping process. If our sense of time is dependent on the social and I’m not doing any socializing, then why can’t my work be rooted in my longing for the past? Let’s pretend it’s 2009, except there are iPhones with facial recognition software and I can still post on Instagram when I crave attention.

Not only did this project help me process my nostalgia-soaked regression, but it also provided me with a digital space to document my final quarter of college. During the last critique of this website for Photo II, my professor asked me if there was a way I could capture the nostalgia I was going for with the GIFs through the photographs I’m taking. She doesn’t get it. The glittery stickers are essential for documenting how I’m feeling right now, how I’m currently experiencing time and dealing with the unknown. This project means my experience finishing college from home can now live online, just like my entire social life during this period. With this website I get to curate the memories of this time, to decide what is important enough to capture and leave up on the Internet. It is not the experience of everyone during quarantine, but it is my experience and it is in my control how I choose to depict it. I know this website won’t last forever. Technology will change and the credit card attached to the auto-renewal of this domain will eventually no longer exist. Still, my sex toy still life and my bathtub self portrait will remain online for an undetermined amount of time.  Just as we will remain inside, unsure of when the outside world will be safe to inhabit again, this project will exist for as long as it does, shaping my memories of this time period and reminding me how badly I wanted to be prepubescent again. We all cope in our own ways.

_{(website designed as my final project for Wesleyan University’s Photo II class, above piece written as a final paper for Professor Ben Haber’s Death and Dying at the End of the World Sociology class; all work made throughout the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, March - May 2020)}