35 Some things are just too difficult to believe
Denial is a perfectly natural human response to difficult situations. When a new fact is just too big and too painful to get our heads around, part of dealing with it is to deny it’s there. It gives the psyche some space and time to begin to accept what’s happened, and to start learning to live with it. It usually happens as one of the first stages of bereavement; at one level we know that the person we’re grieving has died, but other parts of our personality haven’t got there yet, so we still expect to see them doing the things they normally do, and even think we’ve heard them in another room. It can be scary, but it doesn’t signify madness! It’s just part of the process.
The problem comes when there’s no process: when it’s impossible to get beyond denial. The death of a loved one is too obvious a loss to be denied forever. When a threat is more diffuse, less graspable, it’s possible just to keep on denying it’s there, especially when the consequences of doing otherwise just feel too great to deal with.
That’s where we are, I think, in the current muddle and disarray, which we see most publicly in the USA, but it’s present everywhere. Especially when it hasn’t come close to you personally, it can be psychologically more straightforward to deny the reality of the pandemic than to have to make the changes to life that it involves. Particularly if you are one of those who tries to lead your life without too much reference to government rules and regulations, and someone who thinks of themselves as an individualist, the idea of conforming to the restrictive regulations being imposed can be more than an inconvenience: it can involve a major revision of your sense of your own identity. No wonder people would rather deny the reality of the pandemic.
And for those of us who are, with whatever difficulty, accepting that it exists? Well, it’s really important not to despise or denigrate those who can’t. Rather let’s remember what hard work it is to deal with challenges of the sort we’re facing.