Louis Pansulla, LCSW Entry

Entry: Brooklyn, New York, 26 March 2020 – Brooklyn, New York

Sirens blaring steadily outside our windows; intermittently a resounding ‘quiet’ fills the air, leaving room for a splendid chorus of chirping springtime birds to be heard. The 2nd full week of this ‘pandemic’ in NYC, and we are, all of us aware that our landscape has shifted seismically, and I wonder, perhaps forever ? Once again, my beloved NY is caught in the eye of a horrific storm, as we hunker down !

After ‘boarding up’ my office in Chelsea, not knowing when I might return, the streets through Manhattan and Brooklyn feel eerily “Kafkaesque’ in this new dystopian reality.

It reminds me suddenly of other ‘catastrophic events’ we’ve labored through here in my lifetime – of 9/11 and its aftermath, of course, and going back even further to the 1980’s, and the AIDS pandemic. My mind quickly rifling through both ‘common and contrasting themes and feeling states’ which each event holds. I’m placed in mind of the ‘universal connectivity’ many of us feel, of a 9/11 in 2001, a feeling of ‘all of us, New Yorkers, in this together’ on that ominous day, our collective bonded bundle of shock, fear, dread, confusion, melancholy, anger, sadness and grief. A contrast to AIDS of the 80’s, and how, while numbingly cataclysmic and equally deadly , our awareness that ‘this pandemic’ was only aimed at a much smaller mar- ginalized group, a group having to fend for ourselves for a time, shunned by others. Another reverie, while 9/11 happened on one sunny, solitary day in 2001, both AIDS and now this ‘corona-wave’ would ‘roll in’ steadily, over time, like a powerful, and almost imperceptible tsunami, created in nature, off our shores, and unknown. And…. so, I brace.

Another searing similarity – ‘What I Do with what is happening ? ’, my own re- sponses to these powerful events. The range of feeling states that would engulf me during each of these mind-numbing moments – vacillating through a wild array of feelings – from shock and potent fear, to dread and desolation, profound sadness, grief, rage and confusion, from numbness and at times complete dissociation, and yes, ‘melancholia’. While acutely aware of my own ‘professional status’ as clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, I told myself that I needed to be more ready, present and able to serve my patients, supervisees, students, other colleagues, say nothing of staying present for my family and dear friends. They need me to help them move through this morass, to lend my expertise and guidance now more than ever. Yet, all i could muster up was to simply ‘be’, to feel all that was washing over me, to cry, to go numb, to scour for answers and resources, to shudder in fear and confusion, for myself, for the others, and in this great ‘unknown’.

Then it occurs to me – You are not merely ‘OF it’, but you are “IN it’ ! Yes, this is not simply happening around me, beside me, but TO me. I could not, initially summon up within me my ‘analytic position’ of merely being the ‘therapeutic witness’ for others. This wave was, indeed, washing over me as well, and recognizing this, al- lowed me to enter a more ‘relational space’ or ‘letting go’, yes what Emmanuel Ghent would call “surrender”, to be intersubectively ‘in it AND of it’ mutually. It is

this truly humbling, ‘relational’ awareness’ which prompts a slow reconstituting of my more ‘robust and present analytic self, yet again. Reminded of the transforma- tive power of such shifts and. And above all, it is what, as Stephen Mitchell had of- ten said, “What really happens… REALLY matters” ! It draws me back to that which matters to me – my Love of my family/friends, of my patients, students and super- visees, to my colleagues, my writing and research, to my passion for music and the arts. ‘Rolling with these waves’, and ‘letting go’ , I now realize, has helped trans- form and reconstitute me after the storms of 9/11 and AIDS in the 1980’s, in fact what drew me into this field in the 1st place ! And yes, it is truly ‘melancholic’ now, with all of its textured layers of ‘ambiguous grieving’, there is most certainly true profound losses, and beyond that all of the ‘unlived experiences’, or yet-to-be real- ized, and beyond that, I arrive at hope and regeneration.

Fast forward: Last week, Inundated with a rash of calls and emails from my pa- tients, supervisees, and colleagues , all clamoring for my assistance, my presence to ‘help out’. Resisting the temptation to ‘crawl under my blanket’, aware of my sta- tus as ‘affected’, I begin to recognize some ‘part of me’ that has been a familiar respite. What i get to is, that, after allowing myself to ‘be’ in such states, during and after the AIDS crisis and 9/11, I must now resurrect, once again ‘leaning into my letting go’, to surrendering,to resume a position of ‘witness’ .

An academic institution in the East Coast had asked me in January, and I had agreed to teaching a “Gender and Sexuality Class” for them, with our first class on 27 March 2020, yes, tomorrow. I test the waters by attempting to re-read an article I had assigned for this first class – “Melancholy Gender – Refused Identification” by Judith Butler. More reveries wash over…

Reading again about ‘Melancholia’, Butler’s own adaptation of Freud’s 1917 seminal work “Mourning and Melancholia” applied to gender identification and sexuality. It is my reacquaintance with ‘transitional space’ and about ‘melancholy’, which brings me another reverie – my connection to a beloved writer – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Gabo”, and I think about his exquisite work “Love in the Time of Cholera” marking a time where love seems to transcend in the midst of a painful, chaotic and terroriz- ing world. As I sit contemplating ‘melancholia’, Butler urges us to consider this melancholy as “the miming of the death it cannot mourn”, of such ambivalent and split off ‘losses’. She asks us to think about it as a form of “mourning of unlived possibilities”. And as I glance around the barren streets of Brooklyn, bracing for what is here and what may come next, I wonder about all of us, not only for those lost or that shall die, but to mentalize a sense of ‘future’, to all of those “unlived possibilities”.

Then, from the streets below and beyond, a faint, yet growing rumble of rising sound permeates our apartment, bellowing, louder still, until I am called to the window to see, and discover that this sound is that of ‘human clapping’ of hands. Immersed in my reading to prepare for that next day’s class I would teach, I was unaware of another ‘alert’ that had gone out earlier that day. This was a call to all New Yorker’s denizens to amble to our windows, and terraces and streets at 7 pm that evening, to raise our collective hands in ‘loving applause’, in gratitude and ap- preciation for all of NY’s heroic nurses, doctors, and frontline health workers, who have been valiantly showing up to attend to the sick, the dying and recovering pa-

tients throughout all of the city’s hospitals. As we jump up,ascending to our roof to join the ‘chirping chorus’ of other hands of love, now connected together through the ‘touch of the sound’ together… of love and hope. As I stand there, joining my hands with others, tears streaming down my cheeks, tears of love and appreciation, tears of fear and dread of the unknown, of gratitude and blessing ,for reconstituted resiliency and, of HOPE. Hope for one another, our beloved city, nation and planet, and the transformative power of ‘change’, and while still quite ‘unknown’, the ‘hope- ful fantasy’ that we may live through ‘100 days of Solitude’ rather than 100 years…. transformed.

“We are all of Us More Human than Otherwise”.     – Harry Stack Sullivan.

“When the Ego Weeps for What it Has Lost /The Spirit Rejoices for What it Has Found.”  – Ancient Sufi proverb.

Louis Pansulla

Brooklyn, NY , 26 March 2020