It's so hard seeing people now just pretending as though the Covid situation is over. But I also understand it. The human brain and body weren't meant to handle this much stress for this long. Stress activates the fight versus flight mechanism, and there's nothing to fight --
-- so after a while flight kicks in and we run from thinking about the problem. And there's also the issue of trauma, which happens *after* a given event. Trauma is how we process a stressful or painful situation. But we've been caught in that stressful situation now for --
-- months, and there's been no relief during which we could process that, and address the trauma, so we're getting it from both sides, the current tension *and* the brain's desperate need to process the trauma and put it behind us, which it can't do while it's all ongoing --
-- then you add in the current situation in the streets, and finally the brain just goes all Robby the Robot flashing circuit breakers and it decides "Okay, here's the one enemy I can't see, so I'm going to pretend it's not there so I can have at least ONE part of my life --
-- where I'm not stressed out." And that's so dangerous because this isn't over, and people need to be careful or face a much bigger problem. I know it's so hard to keep doing this, like keeping your hand in a bucket of bees, but we need to be strong to address this.
