You Aren't The Captain Now
We have been living in a crisis for almost a year. Be ready for when we're not.
How often does this newsletter come out? And what day of the week? Man, I don’t know. So far, it comes out whenever I think I have something to say.
My son Charlie and I were watching Greyhound a few weeks ago. Tom Hanks plays the captain of a Navy destroyer in World War II and faces a lot of challenges. It was just okay. Charlie said, “It’s not even the best Tom Hanks as a ship captain in danger” movie.
The best one of those that I’ve seen is Captain Phillips (2013), where Hanks is captain of a container ship that gets hijacked by Somali pirates. I have been thinking of this movie a lot lately and caught it on cable the other night. Barkhad Abdi delivers an intense and truthful performance as the leader of a group of pirates who are given a lot of dimension by the script. The pirates are not evil, they are pushed by the necessity of their condition and environment to where hostage taking, violence, and high risk are a path to addressing the mortal threat of simply trying to live in Somalia. Over the course of the film, you see Phillips and the pirates slowly crumble over the fear and anxiety of being in such a desperate situation.
It’s the final scene that I’ve been thinking of the most in recent days. Phillips has been rescued (spoiler: that’s not really a spoiler) by the Navy amid a flurry of violence and is taken for a medical examination. The actor playing the medic giving the exam was an actual medic on the ship being used and the script is whatever she would say under those circumstances. And Phillips (Hanks) has a breakdown as a result of the psychological effects of all that had just happened to him over the course of the hijacking. Because of course he does!
The tendency in high-stakes thriller movies would usually be to show Phillips smiling and high-fiving, happy to put it all behind him, pan back, roll credits. Or to simply cut away because the story is complete. Instead, Phillips can barely speak. He chokes out that the blood on his body is not his. “Everything’s going to be okay,” the medic says, “It’s going to be okay.”
That’s trauma. Yes, you may be safe at last but the horror of what you’ve been through will be there forever. It must be addressed, processed, and known so you can walk forward. You’re not getting over it, you won’t forget it, but you can manage it.
I tweeted this on the Friday after the election as Biden’s victory became more apparent:
A little cheeky, yes, but mostly because I’m a straight white guy in a tower atop privilege mountain. If you’re trans, if you’re part of an undocumented family, if you’re Muslim, and you’re in America, you have been through existential trauma the last few years.
I’ve been thinking of that scene again as new and very positive information comes in about vaccines for COVID-19. Help is coming. Things are on track to get better. These vaccines haven’t been approved yet, mind you, and as I write this, we’re in the worst position we’ve ever been with COVID. Infection numbers, fatality rates, hospital/ICU occupancy rates are all at their worst. We’re on the bridge of the Maersk Alabama and pirates are sticking a gun in our face. Or we’re on the bridge of the Maersk Alabama and hijacking a ship while the US Navy is heading toward us, heavily armed. Either perspective, we’re in danger. Any of us could still get COVID, any of us could still die from it. But it will end one way or another.
Again, I think that in the movie the pirates and Phillips are in equally dire positions forced upon them by economics. In the captain’s case, pressure to save time by getting too close to the Somali shore. For the pirates, poverty, government corruption, and a need to protect their fishing waters for the food. But let’s stick with the captain’s plight for purposes of this analogy.
Soon we’ll be headed for the exam room. Soon, all the terror we’ve been living with will begin to fade. Whatever mental tools we’ve been using to keep the terror at bay all these months will be put back on the shelf. The memory will remain. There will be a feeling of relief, sure, and we’ll be glad to be on that side of it all. But as with any trauma, all that we felt during COVID will still be accessible. It will live inside the musculature of our bodies. Depending on your experiences during the pandemic, it will carry grief for those who died, claustrophobia, loneliness, panic, economic distress. The movie didn’t end with the captain’s rescue and the COVID trauma won’t end with a vaccine.
So know that. Be ready to do the work after your vaccines. Honor your experiences. And set the expectations inside yourself that 2020 will live in your bones. Captain Richard Phillips went back to sea 14 months after the incident.
Two silly thoughts that occur to me:
Tom Hanks could dress in his Captain Phillips costume, carry a volleyball with a face like Wilson in Cast Away and it’s a Halloween costume: Wilson Phillips.
If Tom Hanks is “America’s Dad”, I wonder if Colin Hanks ever gets jealous of everyone in America because he has to share his dad.
I have a book called The Hilarious World of Depression. It’s about depression. And hilarity. And the world. And of.
Many people like this book and are buying it as a holiday gift. I hope the recipients are not alarmed.
COVID is not a matter of some breathing trouble and then it’s over. 1 in 5 COVID patients are diagnosed with a mental disorder after their physical recovery.
Okay. The Winter Holidays are coming and if you have two neurons to rub together you won’t be spending them with a heaping houseful of people you don’t ordinarily live with. CANCEL the friggin’ massive gathering for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Let’s not have this guy show up for turkey.
Since the company will be different, maybe it’s a time to make the holiday different. Take an inventory of all of your holiday traditions. Make a list and write them down. Then go through that list - with your domestic co-habitants if you have them - and decide what you want to keep and what you don’t. Go Marie Kondo style: does it give you joy? If not, dump it! I paraphrase Ms. Kondo.
My favorite newish tradition? Giving my family vaguely upsetting custom-made shower curtains. Here was last year’s. It may be responsible for all the trouble of 2020.
It’s going to be hard to top. But I’ll try.