What We Got Wrong About Covid
TOPICS DISCUSSED
Fire Storm in Maui
What We Got Wrong About Covid
Long Covid with Jennifer Senior
Outside of Politics: The Ones We Sent Away with Jennifer Senior
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EPISODE RESOURCES
Get your ticket to the Pantsuit Politics Live show in Paducah, Kentucky on October 21! Get information about our weekend in Paducah here.
Hawaii churches offer prayers for the dead and the missing after devastating Maui wildfires (The Associated Press)
What I got wrong about Covid (Slow Boring)
What Not to Ask Me About My Long COVID: A Brief Guide (The Atlantic)
The Ones We Sent Away (The Atlantic)
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:09] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers. Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.
[00:00:14] Music Interlude.
Sarah [00:00:34] Thank you so much for joining us at Pantsuit Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. Today, we're doing that in a big way. More than three years after we all learned what COVID 19 was and experienced varying levels of trauma and stress and change throughout lockdowns and loss, life is mostly back to normal for lots of people, but we have been shaped and reshaped by our experiences through the pandemic and wanted to take today to look back on the last few years and identify some of the things we got wrong about COVID, both personally and culturally.
Beth [00:01:06] We've also invited Jennifer Senior to return to our show. We love talking with Jennifer, and we thought it was important to ask her to share about her experience with long COVID, which is still a very present part of her life. Long COVID is a medical reality we're still coming to terms with, and it is impacting thousands of people in a variety of ways. And we know when we say life is back to normal for lots of people, it's lots of people, but not all people. And we wanted to really highlight that experience today as well.
Sarah [00:01:33] And Outside of Politics, we invited Jennifer to stick around and talk with us about her recent cover story in The Atlantic. And let me politely advise you, go get some tissues for that conversation.
Beth [00:01:45] Before we get started, just a reminder that tickets are on sale for our live show in Sarah's hometown, Paducah, Kentucky. It's going to be a great time. The tickets are going fast.
Sarah [00:01:55] Very fast.
Beth [00:01:55] So if you'd like to join us, we hope that you will follow the link in the show notes to purchase those tickets today. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our team. But we're really excited. We have a lot of fun things planned for you and it's going to be a special time.
Sarah [00:02:07] Yes, our premium member scooped up most of the tickets, so they're open to the public now and so do not dally. That's what I told my friends in Paducah who want to come. Don't dally, go now. All right. Before we start this conversation about COVID, we did want to take a minute, obviously, and acknowledge and discuss the firestorm and complete and total tragedy in Maui. The breadth and depth of this disaster is so impossibly hard to contemplate. As we are recording 96 people have been reported dead. That is the largest loss of life in a fire in over 100 years in the entire country. The stories of survivors who sought shelter in the ocean for hours, the images coming from the town of Lahaina, which is is gone. It's it's gone. And it was a place of enormous importance to Hawaiians and to hear what has been lost, how much the recovery will cost, what it will take, it's just overwhelming. Overwhelming is the only word I can bring to mind when I read stories, look at images, or try to talk about this tragedy.
Beth [00:03:22] I know that this part of Maui is very special to many people in Hawaii that it has real cultural significance and that this loss is felt on a number of different levels. Hawaii is such a unique place in the United States. And so I think it hits especially hard to see these images of such a special place burning. It's also hard to take in how much fire is shaping reality for the United States at this point in our history, when I think about our friends in Canada and what they're experiencing and the large scale effect of those fires. The Western United States experiences so much fire. Fire is just terrifying in a pretty unique way and can wreak such devastation so quickly. And I'm afraid that's going to be a part of our story for a long while. I hope that we are learning a lot about how to better manage this when it happens. But just on a heart level, I feel so much for the people of Maui and Hawaii right now and just want to send lots of love there.
Sarah [00:04:27] Fire and smoke. I'm really overwhelmed by the stories of the smoke and how it moved and how it overwhelmed people. It was like crushing clouds of smoke. And I think with this particular fire, it's it's one of those moments where if you've never been to Hawaii in particular and you think, what do you mean? It's such a surprise location because you have this image in your head of this sort of like tropical, lush paradise. And parts of Hawaii are absolutely like that. We vacationed in Maui almost 20 years ago, and I was so struck by how many different ecosystems were on this one island. But there are parts of Maui that look like California. It's just grasslands. And I think the reporting that much of this was an invasive species that is particularly flammable has been really interesting and important to think about and consider. It's just so hard and it's so heartbreaking and you feel so powerless when people are suffering in this way and at this magnitude. Like you said, I think that is a reality for us. And it's another in a series of wake up calls. It doesn't seem like the right word anymore. Of course, as we always are here at Pantsuit Politics, we are committed to following the story, to doing what we can from our far away place in Kentucky to donate and support the people of Maui. And our hearts are with them.
[00:05:49] Music Interlude.
[00:06:05] Several weeks ago, Matt Yglesias of the Substack Slow Boring wrote a piece called What I Got Wrong About COVID. He said, "I was very frustrated intellectually and emotionally with school closures. I argued against closing schools before the vaccines were available, but had lost that argument internally to the politics of blue states. I wanted vaccination to be the game changer that ended NPIs, so I expressed erroneous overconfidence about the vaccine's ability to block transmission. And because I overestimated vaccines ability to block transmission, I overestimated the case on the merits for mandatory and quasi-mandatory means to promote vaccination." He also talks about how quickly we abandon the Flatten the Curve playbook for complete shutdowns. But we were both really drawn to this piece because of how rarely we take a moment to look back and examine the flaws in our own reasoning, both individual and collective. But it seems like a very useful exercise. And so we thought we would take Matt's lead and talk about some of these things.
Beth [00:07:03] Even preparing for this conversation, I realized that I needed to make a bunch of different distinctions because often when we say, "Well, here's what I got wrong," you attach to that an immediate sense of regret. Or if you say, "Here's what the policy got wrong," you attach to that an immediate sense of nefarious motives or negligence in work and reasoning. And I think as I've reflected on COVID and continue to reflect on it, I'll probably have a different lens on this five years from now. But as I've reflected on it, I realized there are a number of things that I both got wrong and regret. There are a number of things that I got wrong and do not regret. There are a number of things that I, in hindsight, might do differently but feel neutrally about today. It's complicated.
Sarah [00:07:54] Yeah. One of the distinctive qualities of Matt Yglesias's writing is it's very intellectual, but very rarely emotional. And so he's just so cool headed. This is what I got wrong. And, look, I just read that piece to you. If you listen to a Pantsuit Politics during COVID, you can probably easily identify the sentence that I very much identified. I was so emotionally attached to the vaccine's ability to affect transmission. I was convinced that they would stop transmission. And I think back on that and I think I'm such a gut-driven person. I'm in the gut tribe on the Enneagram. I can see the moments in time over my life where something I felt so strongly, like my gut was telling me, "This is right, this is right, this is right," I was so wrong about. This is definitely in the top like five now of my life, along with thinking that Barack Obama was going to lose the Democratic primary in 2007. Obviously, I had prejudices working for Hillary Clinton that informed that. But with the vaccine, I'm like, did I just want that to be true? I am an eternal optimist and often my optimism serves me. But this time, I think it was that there was the newness of the tech of the vaccines. I think that's really where I put a lot of it. But this is so new. And so assuming that they were going to act like other vaccines and not block transmission in the way that we think we will, I think that's where I kind of attached. You hooked into something. You hook into this little piece of information that fits this narrative, gut-driven or otherwise in your head, and then you just can't let it go.
Beth [00:09:29] We are differently situated than people who have confronted pandemics in the past because we do witness so many medical and technological miracles daily. And the story of our lives have been, look at all of these diseases that vaccines have eradicated. We've never taken a vaccine and been told, "Well, you might still get polio, but it won't be as bad."
Sarah [00:09:53] Yeah.
Beth [00:09:53] And one of the things that I feel regret about, that I was both wrong and I regret, that I think I was following what the scientists were saying as closely as I could as a person who has no expertise in science or medicine whatsoever. And so I really quickly adjusted to, well, of course, you might still get it, but it won't be as bad because of the vaccine. And I sort of acted like people who didn't make that turn with me were either selfish or ignorant, and that was unfair. That was a huge turn in our thinking to say, here's a vaccine that doesn't prevent transmission. That's huge. And I did not take seriously enough how people struggled with the newness of the tech of the vaccine and how people struggled with what is the vaccine actually doing for me versus the risks. I wasn't serious enough about it. This is where I think my desire or optimism or something kept me from being more grounded. I so badly wanted our collective action to solve this.
Sarah [00:11:04] Well, when I look back, I think there were times when I was able to sort of see through the politicization, and see the places where people were just being human and not do that judgment that they were ignorant. And then there are times I wasn't. And I can't really piece apart what was happening. I do think that Matt Yglesias is right. I did feel in the beginning that Flatten the Curve was do what you could. And then all of a sudden, particularly in progressive circles, it was do everything or else all is lost. And I instinctively kind of pulled away from that. So it's not my personality. It didn't make sense to me. I couldn't see why people were doing that. I was just frustrated that they were doing it. Like you said, I couldn't take that bait to say, okay, why are they reacting this way? We're reading a book I can't wait to talk to the author here on the show in a few months. And he describes this psychological tendency we have when the stakes are high to enforce that purity of thought with a fervor. And so when I read that, I was like, oh, well, of course that's what we were doing. The stakes were high, and so you had to be all in or you were the worst. I did that to a certain extent. And when I felt like, no, this is not the right answer, like you said, I was not gracious enough to understand where people were coming from in that reaction. I was angry. I was just angry at people for reacting that way.
Beth [00:12:42] I did it in both directions too. I had a lack of graciousness for people who weren't viewing it as I was because they were unwilling to take that ride of the vaccines or the ride of whatever the latest scientific guidance was. And I had a lack of graciousness for people who were more hawkish about it than I was because I did not adequately account for the variance in our geographic experiences of COVID. I did not understand. I could not understand what it felt like to be in New York City or in San Francisco, or a place that was so densely populated that the transmission was happening like fire. We were just talking about that overwhelming in a blink of an eye things changed. That was not my experience here in Kentucky. And I was so focused on the collective action components of the solution that I did not account properly for the unevenness experienced by people of the problem.
Sarah [00:13:45] Yeah, and we were in such a weird spot because we were experiencing it, but we were also living online in a very coastal, elite, informed media space. So we're reading media from those spaces. We live a very different existence here in Kentucky. And so there was a lot of tension and a lot of I don't understand, I don't understand why we're still talking about closing schools two years later. It was frustrating, especially if you're living a very different experience. Which we all were living different experiences even within New York City, even within the coastal areas. And so I think that was really hard. I guess what I regret-- and I don't know if I could have done this as an individual, even as an influential individual with a political podcast. But I do have some sadness that when Trump politicized COVID-- which he absolutely did, I don't think there's a lot of debate about what happened. He was kind of on board at first, and then he decided not to be. I wish we'd had a little sort of political jiu-jitsu. Instead of being, of course, because your side's the worst, we'd sort of leaned in when they expected us to lean back and say, "Hey, no, we're still going to flatten the curve. We're still going to distance. We don't have to be the purity police on how far you go with all of this," which just created more conflict. But I don't think that's realistic. That to me is like a fantasy I have in my head. I just think that when the stakes were high, people were so emotional. People were afraid. But if I could go back and wave a magic wand, I guess that's what I would do.
Beth [00:15:26] I think the person who did that the best of anyone that I saw was our governor, Andy Beshear. And I wonder how he reflects on this time period. There were times when his emotions, I think, ran away from him because he was living in the numbers every day. Someone brought to his desk every day how many dead Kentuckians there were from this. And so I think where he pressed on people a little bit more, and the most controversial instance of that was around church services in our state where he pushed that, I totally understand why.
Sarah [00:15:57] Yeah.
Beth [00:15:58] I think you're right. Just acknowledging that even when we lived in the same areas, even when we maybe had similar preexisting conditions or people in our lives who were affected by COVID, it was this thing happening to everybody that no one experienced the same way, but we all experienced it in a deep way. And it's hard to get that right. And another thing I was thinking about in preparation for this conversation is that where I lacked graciousness, I was also lacking graciousness because of how I experienced the Trump presidency.
Sarah [00:16:34] Yeah.
Beth [00:16:35] I wrote at one point that I do not like who I was during the Trump presidency. I don't like the way I approached him or the people who love him. I thought that I could hang on to my own principles and my own sort of sense of righteousness. And that was like trying to walk a straight line through a hurricane. It's not possible. And so I'm really trying to settle myself as we go into a new primary that Trump is the leading candidate in, and to say, what can I learn from that period? To do the same thing. What did I get wrong? What do I regret? How do I adjust for that? And also have some grace and understand that I will get things wrong again this time.
Sarah [00:17:21] Well, I think there was a way we oriented ourselves towards Trump, and I think there was a way that we oriented ourselves toward science that I really hope we can learn from. I don't want to use science as a weapon again. I don't want to bludgeon people with ''I believe in science". I think that's maybe how we got like RFK Jr. right now. I don't want to do that again. Not because I think anybody who did it is a morally terrible person. I don't want to do it again because I don't think it works, and I think it alienates people. I think there's a lot of distrust in our institutions. I think there is so much swept up in people's experiences inside the health care system that came to play with how they thought, viewed, reacted, felt emotionally about COVID, that using and talking about science in that way I think made it worse. I don't want to make it worse. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt because how people feel about science, how people feel about health care is literally life and death. And it certainly was during COVID. And I hope that we can learn from that. I am looking forward to all the sociological studies that will be forthcoming for the rest of our lives about what we've learned, about how we talk to people and what works and what doesn't because it's so, so important. And this was a terrible situation, but we sure as hell learned a lot. We had a lot of contained experiments as far as communicating with people about public health and watching the outcomes of that communication. And I hope we learn from that.
Beth [00:18:50] I think that what we did in terms of science did not benefit the scientists either. I think we put an awful lot on the science- I did. I discounted almost everything I know about human behavior as I took in what I was learning from the CDC and the task forces. That is not a problem with them. That's a problem with me. But I think that I, along with lots of other people, kind of had that entitled sense that I have had about medicine throughout my life. Because it has delivered so much, I just wanted it to deliver here and I didn't have a lot of patience for the process that it takes. I didn't appreciate the decades of research that went into making all those medical miracles that have been the standard fare of my lifetime happen. I think that I often talk about health care as though it's one thing. I had a fantastic experience with a physician just this morning before we started recording. So every complaint that I have about health care was not contained at all in my experience today. I was scheduled for a 15 minute appointment. I was there for an hour and 15 minutes. I was listened to, cared for. And sometimes when you say, "Well, here are problems with our health care system," the doctors who are out there doing what my doctor did today hear, "You're not doing enough." And they are moving mountains. And I just think that any time I look to a system for an answer, I will be disappointed. And any time we criticize or critique a system, the people within it will be disappointed. And I don't know, in the midst of something as urgent as the early year of COVID 19 was, you can slow down enough to try to unravel all of that. But we could have here, and I wish that we had.
Sarah [00:20:53] Well, and I learned just enough and have just enough research skills to be really dangerous when it came to like the science and the health care information. I definitely during COVID would go out searching for what I wanted to hear. One hundred percent did it a lot. I will own that. And that's the problem almost with the health care system, is we all participate enough to feel ownership and to feel like we understand the problems and what's going wrong. And in some ways we do. In some ways, we've lived them in really heartbreaking ways. But in other ways, that doesn't make us a virologist. Those people go to school for a reason. And I think there were moments where I just thought, well, I understand this. The fact that I have no medical degree and didn't even take that many science classes in college. So, I definitely can look back and see myself doing that, to see myself grabbing the pieces of information that confirmed what I wanted to hear. I think we all did that across the board. The Internet is very, very good at offering you up what you want to hear.
Beth [00:21:58] I still don't know how I feel about school during this period. One accountability mechanism that Matt Yglesias has in his writing that I really respect, is that he has picked apart his position on schooling in a very transparent way. And I would like to be able to mimic that, but I can't. I think I still have a lot of questions for myself about my own parenting during this period and the decisions that I made. I got a message from a listener about-- I promise this is related. Will Hurd has put on his website these characteristics of what a modern Republican is or what his aspiration for the modern Republican Party looks like. And most of them are just no brainer how to be a good human. They seem unrelated to partisan politics to me. But one principle is that you put your own family above everything else. And so I said to our listener, "That is the one that hits me wrong." Because while in the abstract, my family is everything to me. Of course. There are many situations where I don't think I have put my own family ahead of everything else, and I don't think that that would be the right thing to do.
Sarah [00:23:17] Yeah.
Beth [00:23:18] And I think about this period with COVID and how I am certain in retrospect that I could have given both of my daughters-- but especially my younger daughter, who was in kindergarten the first year that was almost all online. I'm certain that I could have given them a better educational experience if I had withdrawn them from public school and home-schooled them. I'm positive in retrospect. That is no shame on anyone. Everyone tried their hardest. Their schools are wonderful. I'm certain that I could have done a better job if I had just gone all in here that year. And I don't know if that was the right move or the wrong move. I put the community ahead of our family in that instance. It would have also been more convenient to do that than what we lived through. But I thought to myself, I understand how school funding works and I don't want to withdraw my kids and jeopardize funding at the very time the school desperately needs that funding. And I don't know if that was the right answer or not. That individual versus community balance that we never got right during COVID and that we pushed each other around on-- and I was part of the pushing sometime too-- I have not figured that out yet.
Sarah [00:24:33] And I don't know if it is figurable.
Beth [00:24:34] Maybe not.
Sarah [00:24:35] I don't know if it is. I just think like, how exactly would you do the calculus? Because then your child would what? Re-enter the public school in a totally different space educationally than all of her peers? What would the cost of that be?
Beth [00:24:51] Right.
Sarah [00:24:51] So, to me, I don't have many regrets around the schooling. My kids weren't out of school-- I'm saying that so flippantly now. My kids weren't out of school for that long. It felt interminable at the time, but comparatively, I understand now it was not that long. And that's where I struggle with the sort of parents debate and the parental control and all that has wrought in our politics. Because while I was stressed, I never felt out of control when it came to my kids. I never felt that my kids were suffering harm and I could do nothing about it. That's not an experience I had here in Paducah. We had a head of our school board who was our local virologist, so I was very blessed. I never felt like people were not trying their best to get them back in the school, not trying their best to understand the spread. There was just an enormous amount of trust. And so, I didn't feel as if I was battling for my kids or I was watching my kids suffering. And I know millions and millions of parents felt that. And I try to remember that when they expressed that in ways politically that I find abhorrent. That's a terrible feeling. It is a terrible feeling to feel like your child is suffering and you can't do anything about it. It's a terrible feeling. And I know so many people felt that over the course of COVID. And so, I just try to remember that because that's not an experience I had. And I'm so grateful for that. And I need to give grace to those who did experience that.
Beth [00:26:25] For all the reasons you just articulated, I don't feel regret about my decisions about this. I just don't know if they're are in the bucket of what I got right or what I got wrong. They're certainly in the bucket of things I'm still trying to learn from. I think, relatedly, I am still trying to learn from how to deal with the situation. This is a different expression of that same issue in terms of unevenness of experience by population density. I don't know yet how to talk about and think about and strategize around a risk that is so much riskier to a certain part of the population. And even as we were contemplating this episode-- and we talk about this with Jennifer Senior in a minute-- that sense that it is behind us when it is still very present for people through long COVID, through the latest strain of COVID, which a lot of people are getting right now, I don't quite know how to best respect people who have a very different experience than the sort of average risk profile. I want to do that badly. I also understand that a society has to have some sense of averages and a direction and a strategy that is built for the masses in a number of ways. And balancing that care for people who fall outside the average experience when the average experience is so arbitrary in many ways, I don't know that yet.
Sarah [00:27:58] Well, I think that aspect of, like, what can we learn? That awareness we all have now that everybody is not affected the same by the flu. Everybody is not affected the same by viruses. I think we all knew that intellectually, but COVID put it in our bones in a way that any intellectual exercise could not. And I think that is a success. The awareness itself is good. We all have to come to a conclusion about how this is going to sound, work, feel every time for every person. The increased awareness, which there absolutely is, that some people were affected differently. Some people are continuing to be affected and some people will be affected in the future in ways we cannot contemplate or predict. I think that's really, really important and I think that's really valuable, and I think that is a good transition into the conversation we had with Jennifer Senior. We didn't want to have this conversation like COVID is over. There are lots of decisions, both personal, societal still being made, and that's why we invited our next guest, Jennifer Senior, back on the show. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic. She's the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, and she is currently living with long COVID and we wanted to talk to her about it.
[00:29:12] Music Interlude.
Beth [00:29:29] Jennifer Senior, we are so thrilled to have you back on the show.
Jennifer Senior [00:29:33] I'm so excited to be back on the show.
Beth [00:29:35] I knew that we had to talk with you again the second we hung up from the first time, but especially when I read your piece, What Not To Ask Me About My Long COVID. It connected with me so much as a person who has fibromyalgia. So another kind of vague symptoms constantly changing. It's not going to get better. Every day is going to be a little bit weirder than the day before it situation.
Jennifer Senior [00:30:02] Weird. Such a good word because it's neurological. So there is weirdness associated with it. [inaudible] I didn't know that you had it. Oh, honey. Jesus.
Beth [00:30:14] Yeah. And the list of things that you described as part of your experience, even down to some of the medications I recognized instantly.
Jennifer Senior [00:30:22] Gabapentin.
Beth [00:30:23] Yes. It feels to me like Gabapentin is like we have no idea what to do for you. Let's try this.
Jennifer Senior [00:30:31] And we just discussed Gabapentin is not like all that great at solving this. I'm convinced it's a placebo at this point, unless I took-- and you're allowed to take a lot of that stuff. But if you do, you become horribly vague. And you and I have jobs where all of our words need to be at least on a shelf that we can reach them. Yeah, it's tough.
Beth [00:30:57] That's exactly it. I stopped taking it because my brain felt so disconnected from my body.
Jennifer Senior [00:31:02] Yeah.
Beth [00:31:03] I think these vague conditions at least-- vague is not the right word. It's very specific in my experience of it. I'm sure yours too. But the misunderstood or not well understood conditions just lead to that sense of like, well, we're just going to throw things against it and see what happens.
Sarah [00:31:21] That makes so much sense to me, though, the way you described how that drug made you feel. It makes sense to me that if you came to doctors with a weird, vague condition that involved pain, they're like, well, we'll just disconnect you from the thing that's telling your brain, that's telling your pain. Let's disconnect that. That should do it, right? But no.
Jennifer Senior [00:31:42] Well, then it disconnects you from so many other things and you have to take it in high doses. And and I also get the sense that Gabapentin is like the old antidepressants where they just kind of targeted too many receptors. That it's a kind of like-- I don't know.
Sarah [00:32:00] A blunt force.
Jennifer Senior [00:32:01] Yeah. It doesn't feel like it's particularly well targeted to whatever my weirdness (to take your word) is. But, yes, you're absolutely right. I think that's right. That there's like a let's just kick the chord out of the wall and hope that works kind of attitude. But it didn't really work for me anyway. It doesn't work.
Sarah [00:32:19] Well, we dove right into the deep end. But let's back up a bit. Tell us when you thought, wait, something is off. I'm not recovering. Do I have this thing that we talk about all the time that's not well described called Long COVID?
Jennifer Senior [00:32:32] Yeah. No, I mean, it's interesting because when I got COVID, I'd managed to go a very long time without getting it, and I may have even gotten it outdoors. And if I didn't, I got it at this one unventilated venue. I said yes to go to the Aspen Ideas Festival because it's outdoors. But then they put me in a panel about friendship, based on my article. So they had me moderate it and sort of shape it, and it was in the one unventilated ballroom. So I could have gotten it there at. And I knew I had like a Natural Killer Cell Deficiency. I knew that I had gotten in my life all sorts of crazy infections and was very incompetent in fighting them, including spinal meningitis. But I wasn't particularly afraid at that point because I was, like, it's Omicron and everybody seems to get it and seems to be able to fight it. It seems like it's a cold or whatever. And I had almost no symptoms. I was essentially asymptomatic. So I'm walking the dog. I'm driving us out a four hour trip to the Cape. I'm doing all these things, not feeling much of anything. And that was ominous because when people are so, so, so, so sick with Omicron or COVID, what they are really feeling is their own bodies putting up a ferocious fight. Whereas, I was just getting trampled by this thing. It was just quietly colonizing every nook and cranny. So on day five, I was like, that's weird. I'm feeling I've got-- I've had this before-- lymphatis where you feel like you're standing in the cabin of a cruise ship and everything is really wavy and wobbly. And it's like-- are you guys old enough where you had a VCR growing up at all?
Sarah [00:34:26] Yeah.
Beth [00:34:27] Oh, yes.
Jennifer Senior [00:34:26] Where like you'd have a tracking problem on the screen. I have a flipping screen where just everything would bounce. And I was like, huh, that's odd. And then at day I was like, okay, this feels like the Blair Witch Project. I just feel like I've got a verité camera on my shoulder and the world is bouncing when I chew, it's bouncing when I walk. There's no smoothing out device to just make the world looks like-- I mean, just imagine what it would look like if you just had a thing bouncing. I mean, here, I could take my screen. This is like what it looks. [Inaudible] listeners taking the screen and bouncing it up and down it because that's what it looks. Your brain automatically corrects that so that nothing jostles, and mine wasn't correcting it. So on about day 10, I panicked. I assumed it was an inner ear thing. So I went on a big ENT adventure and I had no doctors. My regular doctor had sort of retired during COVID, as many had. And like an idiot, he told me not to take [inaudible] a little bit. He had treated before for 27 years, and that had involved hospitalizing me for a million infections. So I wanted to kind of kill him. I couldn't believe that he had sort of forgotten who he was treating because he was so unimpressed with how I presented. So all the long-haul, Long COVID clinics are set up for a certain kind of suite of symptoms. Like, oh, you're short of breath, exhausted. You have muscle aches. I didn't know any of that shit. Everything that I have is Bizarre world weird. I'm just going to keep coming back to your excellent word because it's all neurological.
[00:36:18] The bouncing has never changed, but I also get very dizzy. I feel like a bobble head. I feel like my brain is moving. I feel like it's an ice cube being swirled in a martini glass so that if I throw my weight to the right, my brain feels like it's slanting to the right, which is obviously not what's happening. I'd be dead if my brain were loose. It's something else. There was about three months where I had ear fullness and worrying (Tinnitus) then it went away. Now it's back, but only in one ear. I feel like my head vibrates every time I walk. And every time I talk, it feels like I'm frying an egg in my head. Which is the other reason I wanted to be lying down. So for listeners, I'm horizontal right now. My head seems to vibrate less when I lie down. But I'll want to pass out by the end of this podcast. I mean, it'll be horrible and my ear will really be roaring. Now I have Potts, which is an autoimmune disease where when you stand up, your heart rate goes up, you're sort of tachycardic. You go up to about 100 or 110; unlucky people have like 120 or 130. I'm more like about 100. Whereas, when I'm sitting or lying down, I'm more like 60 because I used to be in good shape. My blood pressure was too high when I stood up for a while. Then it was too low. You have to take beta blockers-- just all this stuff too. And it affects your whole autonomic nervous system. So your blood pressure, all the things you don't think about, your breathing will be weird for a minute, and then it'll be normal. Now, I don't have any breathing issues.
Sarah [00:38:07] It just fried your circuit board, it sounds like.
Jennifer Senior [00:38:10] Yeah, that's exactly right. That's a perfect way of describing. My body feels kind of like Martian soil. It just feels inhospitable to life. It doesn't feel like it ought to be lived in. It's very hard to explain that. And, again, that goes to that whole disconnection thing, like, let's just kick the cord out of the wall since your body doesn't seem to want you there.
Sarah [00:38:33] Yeah. A hard reset on the circuit board, but that's not how bodies work even if it is a good metaphor.
Jennifer Senior [00:38:38] Well, and actually, every once in a while, I'll get a jacked up dose of steroids thinking they can do the hard reset. Like, let's just Blitzkrieg her because clearly she's inflamed-- which I am. They're great. If I could live on steroids, I would. Cause they fix the problem. But, of course, you can't. And then the second I go off them
Sarah [00:38:57] It comes roaring back.
Jennifer Senior [00:38:57] Yeah, exactly. It's like I was never on them. It's like think the whole thing was a dream, that I was well. I'm contemplating taking them when my son comes home from summer camp-- he's 15. And how many more summers do I have with this kid? And I wanted to go away with him. And I just don't think I can. I think it's going to be very modified. I could take steroids, but then I'll be immunocompromised in a big way while I'm on them. It's just a nightmare. It's tough. And everybody else seems just great. I envy everybody on the subway is not wearing a mask. It's just like I've gotten Covid, I can't get it again. I'd love to be able to kick Covid's ass, but I can't.
Beth [00:39:45] That brutal honesty about it is what I have really admired in your writing. Sarah and I have been talking about what we got wrong about COVID. We have this like past tense orientation to it, even as everybody's out there getting it again. And I feel like we have no clue what the risk of Long COVID is associated with, whatever the latest strain is. And I wonder how it lands with you to be doing these sort of COVID retrospectives. I love that your piece started out like I didn't read about this because I'm sick of COVID. We're all sick of COVID. How does it land with you to hear COVID described in sort of the past tense? And what can we do better around that?
Jennifer Senior [00:40:24] Well, I don't know what we get is these really generous questions. But the truth is, I mean, okay, so how does it land with me? It's a gut punch every time some people say it because I experienced that to be true. Like my now former colleague Ed Yong was very dedicated to writing about all of us Long-haulers out there and saying that we're really not paying enough attention to this and that this really is a crisis. And it could be that over time more people will wind up like me because as people get infected and reinfected, eventually this will happen to a lot of people. And I'm just a canary rolled over in a coal mine. But that's not how I experience it. And I've been very blunt with it. I don't insist that my husband or son wear a mask. The world does look like it's ready to move on. And they're all tired of it. And my son's 15 and no one around him masks. And also I'm conscious of being like an older mother. I got pregnant at 37, had him at 38. I want him to feel like I've got a certain kind of vitality left, which I did before all this. I think I'm going to make myself a little bit unpopular with people who are kind of the die hards in this universe saying, like, I don't really feel like the world is obliged to mask up because of the likes of me. I just don't think that's fair anymore. And kids don't mask up at school. I think everybody did that for a good long while, and I think it saved my life. If I'd gotten the OG COVID pre-vax, everybody has been very clear with me I would have died. Because I had a ferocious cytokine storm in response to Omicron. I was really in the midst of an acute autoimmune flare that seems to have been with all the Meniere's disease symptoms that I had, which is an inner ear thing.
[00:42:37] My body really attacked itself hard and still seems to be doing so on some level. And in fact, there's even some thought that people who got the-- I got the Omicron vaccination 12 weeks later because I was doing so much better and I was going to my stepdaughter's wedding and I didn't want to run the risk of getting sick again because I couldn't get sick again. And people were getting reinfected with Omicron just six weeks later, it's very quick to reinfect. And there is some evidence that some people when they get that vaccination, they make antibodies to their own antibodies, which means effectively they still have the spike proteins still in them. So I could have had a double blow with that. And people are just starting to hypothesize that that's a thing. And then of course that's going to give anti-vaxxers all kinds of ammunition. But, of course, I'm convinced that the original vaccines were what saved me in the first place. And if I had never gotten Omicron and I had just gotten the Omicron booster, it would have served me very well. I wouldn't have COVID. The problem was that because I was already in this riled up immune autoimmune state, it was probably, in hindsight, the wrong move.
Sarah [00:43:57] I think we're going to learn so much about the mistakes that were made and what we've learned. But I also I was reading about the National Long Covid Research Initiative where they're looking at these treatments. And I do think because Long Covid is so weird (back to the best word) and it sweeps up so many things, autoimmune response, vascular respiratory, I do wonder what we will learn about other conditions as we dig into this particularly weird one. Like, what will we discover? What will we figure out about we can't just kick the plug out of the wall and that works? If we find something, God willing, that does work, I just wonder what else we will learn. It just seems like it encompasses how many people read about Long Covid and have the reaction that Beth does? Oh, that sounds like my autoimmune thing or that sounds like the vascular issues. You know what I mean? That's the only thing I hope comes from this.
Jennifer Senior [00:44:59] No, you're right. Because it's a mosaic. They'll be looking at a lot of different conditions. I think you're right. Also, neurological conditions are not very well understood. And (EBV) Epstein-Barr was not taken seriously for so long, and now it finally is. So in that way, you're right. The depressing thing is I think it'll take a generation. I think they'll be quite old by the time they figure a lot out. And number two, I looked at the same thing you did. And Sarah, honestly, all of the trials that they're doing, I've taken all those drugs.
Sarah [00:45:33] Yeah. They're very limited in the treatment they're testing.
Jennifer Senior [00:45:35] And I've done all them, including like some of the really-- I took an intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) which is one of the more expensive ones, and I had reason to. There are all sorts of things that they're looking at. It's like, yeah, I've done that. When I finally found top tier care, they do all that for you. And I'm really glad that-- it didn't do a damn thing for me. Nothing. I've also done some wacky stuff where it withstood the scrutiny of peer review, but it's like an end of ten. So I did hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It didn't do anything. And then you look at the study and it turns out it helped with people's fatigue and brain fog. Well, fine, but I don't have either of those. But I did it anyway in case. No, it didn't do anything. And then you have all these extremely well-meaning people who are like, "Have you done acupuncture?" And it's like, have I done acupuncture? Of course, what do you take me for? Who doesn't love acupuncture? It's fabulous. I've done tons of acupuncture. It's great, but not for this. And people would have known by now.
Sarah [00:46:53] Yeah, if acupuncture fixed Long Covid it would be everywhere.
Jennifer Senior [00:46:55] It'd be everywhere. It's not like have you heard of this tiny, obscure little treatment for Covid. Yeah, I know about that. So I've tried vagus nerve stimulation. I had a gizmo sent from England. I tried that. People are trying. It's like there is more spaghetti against the wall of my apartment.
Sarah [00:47:23] You're like that place in New Jersey where people dumped 3,000 pounds of spaghetti in the creek and they couldn't figure out why.
Jennifer Senior [00:47:30] They you go. Oh, my God. [crosstalk]. If you got things at the bottom of a creek in New Jersey, better it be pasta..
Beth [00:47:42] You know what I do Sometimes when something really weird is happening in my body, I pull up those websites that illustrate how deep the ocean is. There's just have you scroll and scroll and scroll to get a sense of of how deep the ocean goes and how little we know as you go deeper. And I just tell myself, like, this is the body Beth. There's just a lot of unexplored terrain. We just don't understand it all yet.
Jennifer Senior [00:48:05] I love you. First of all, that's brilliant. Second of all, how soothing and how reassuring.
Beth [00:48:14] It is. And it just makes me remember I'm part of something bigger than whatever this experience I'm having is right now. It just kind of settles me in. Which I think might be a lovely transition to talking about your new cover story for The Atlantic. If you'll stick around and spend some time with us on that.
Jennifer Senior [00:48:32] Oh, my God.
Sarah [00:48:34] Let me just get my tissue out now. It's going to be fine, guys.
Jennifer Senior [00:48:40] You're so nice. Thanks. It was, like, the most personal thing I ever wrote, so I'll talk about that all day.
[00:48:45] Music Interlude.
Sarah [00:48:55] Jennifer, this piece, which is about your mother's sister, your aunt Adele, who was institutionalized--
Beth [00:49:04] Sarah can't even give the introduction. That's how good it is.
Sarah [00:49:07] I can't. At a very young age and how you reconnected with her later in life. I'm going to tell you the first thing I thought when I finished your piece. Did you write All Joy No Fun after you found out about your aunt.
Jennifer Senior [00:49:21] That would have been highly precocious of me because I did find that when I was 12. So, no.
Sarah [00:49:28] I was like 1998. Yeah. Okay. If you've listened to this podcast, you know that I became obsessed with Jennifer when she wrote that book. It's my favorite parenting book of all time, and I thought the pieces clicked for me because I thought I always read that book and it just felt filled with such grace for parents. And that's why I loved it. But when I read your piece, I was like, "It wasn't just grace, it was perspective." It was this powerful, perspective of her grandparents decision and what that means. I thought that the way you spoke about their decision and how it really was that they weren't given a choice, they weren't given great options. And I thought, oh, okay, that's why that book feels like it doesn't shouldn't be on a parenting shelf and it should be somewhere else. Because this wisdom of experience within her own family, I would imagine, animates so much of what you do up until you even wrote this just incredible piece.
Jennifer Senior [00:50:23] No one has made that connection for me. Funny thing is that if it were there, it was rattling around in some back alley of my consciousness. You know what I mean? I don't know. My grandparents I'm assuming Adele provided them with joy. I'm also assuming she was a source of real anxiety for the brief 21 months she lived with them. Because my grandparents knew that something was the matter and no one could tell them. First, everyone insisted that no something wasn't, which made my grandmother feel dismissed and paranoid, I am sure, and probably less than. Like she couldn't handle the routine challenges of motherhood when in fact there were more complicated challenges that were going on. And she caught them and the doctors pooh-poohed them because she was a working class woman without a college education who lived in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Then to be told that you've got like a microcephalic imbecile or idiot or whatever the crude words were that were technical.
Sarah [00:51:37] And not even be prepared, she was just there for her own treatment.
Jennifer Senior [00:51:41] Exactly.
Sarah [00:51:42] Took my breath away.
Jennifer Senior [00:51:44] She goes to the doctor because she is like a like a persistent sore throat. And the doctor doesn't look at her, but looks at my aunt who's on her knee and diagnosed as my aunt very crassly before even looking at my grandmother. And suddenly that overtakes the whole visit. And the next thing you know, my mother who at the time must have been about five and a half, her parents are off to New York City, going from one specialist to the next trying to figure out how to fix their daughter. And I didn't get into this but-- because microcephaly is this condition where your head's tinier. And one specialist they were sent to did the kind of operation that they still do today, which is they open up the skull so that the brain has a chance to grow. But the doctor looked at them and said, "There's nothing I can do. The skull closed because the brain had stopped growing and not the other way around." Her brain was done at eight months and that's why the skull plates closed. That's the reason why. They therefore took this very literal physiological event as some kind of signal that, okay, so that means that she has very limited potential. There's very little in there for her to cultivate. She won't give you any joy. There won't be any fun. It'll be only a drag on your family. It'll be only from this point forward, she'll be a burden and an albatross to have her in your life. And the best thing you can do, Mr. and Mrs. Halperin [sp], is get rid of her and put her in a school for her, for you and for your daughter Runa [sp], who does not have this condition. That's the best thing you can do.
[00:53:43] And so, that's what they did. I mean, who were they to quarrel? The doctors had so much authority and they still do. But I think you're sort of cowed by them if you're-- my grandfather, he went to college on the GI Bill, but he went to like a local-- I don't know where he went. It was like somewhere in Bayonne, I think. It wouldn't have occurred to him to become a doctor or anything. I think they just took this advice. And also the stigma. I mean, let's just discuss. In 1953, I'm sure that plenty of people walked around believing that this was a kind of punishment for some kind of sin if you had a child like that. Or there's something shameful, it's in your genes. And it might have had some kind of added stigma if you're Jewish. I'm now just thinking about we are so close to the Holocaust at that point in 1953, that Jews are in some ways an inferior people. So of course they're going to produce a line of defective people, which is the term they used- defectives.
Sarah [00:54:52] And assimilation was the name of the game post World War Two.
Jennifer Senior [00:54:55] Yes. Thank you. Totally. Absolutely. Imperative to fit in. And, in fact, I should have scribbled in a line about just that. That this was like a real cultural value and very important. And all the neighborhood kids whispering about this. And so my poor mother walking around like, oh, she's got this sister who was sent to reform school. So it turned my mother into this high achieving-- you read this in the piece, but my great grandmother then moved into the bed that was intended for my mother's younger sister. And my great grandmother, who was not a sophisticated person psychologically-- and I wrote in there that she had all of the kind of subtlety of a flyswatter, which was true. But she told my mother when my mother was 13 years old, that she had to be good enough for two.
Sarah [00:55:58] You got to wonder, what's worse? Saying the quiet part out loud in the most harmful way possible or just not saying anything at all. Like, do we have any other choices available to us in the fifties?
Beth [00:56:08] I mean, I feel like what's worse might be believing that too. What kind of self view do you have if you articulate that to a child. There's just so much pain in it.
Jennifer Senior [00:56:19] You're right. And I'm sure she was in some ways looking out for her daughter. This is my great grandmother looking out for my grandmother saying, I just want my child's one parenting experience to count. In some ways that she has to have the most extraordinary daughter possible. She probably thought she was doing something protective in some way.
Sarah [00:56:42] Well, and I just thought what was so incredible that you articulated-- and I don't remember the name of the author you spoke to, but she talks about like when we did that, when we took anyone different and put them someplace else, then we just perpetuated this idea that it's different. But it's not different because every family has this. But if you cannot integrate that and see that as a common human experience, then of course it just compounds and compounds where everybody thinks this is different, this is bad. I recite all the time-- like I love the part in Temple Grandin's biography where her mother said "Different not less. Different not less." That's what she did on a loop. Different not less. And I think it's so powerful.
Jennifer Senior [00:57:30] So now I'm going to get out [inaudible] so what made me cry was film adaptation of that, or the TV adaptation with Claire Danes and Julia Herrmann. Who is the doctor? Was it David Strathairn or somebody who-- a beautiful actor who finally looks at Julia Herrmann and said-- because refrigerator mothers were the kind of what was believed back then. And he finally looked at her and he said, "You haven't been doing everything wrong. You've been doing everything right." And just the relief. And if anybody had just looked at my grandmother had been, like, you're not crazy, something is different about your daughter, but we can help you and we will have supports for you. If that had just been available and if she just hadn't felt so gaslit in some way and so helpless. Which one of you just said that what's worth an environment where nothing is said or that is said. My mom lived in an environment where both were true. Nothing was said, and then that was said to her. That she had to be perfect. My mother was not ever really told what was going on. Was there something that mattered?
Like, why was her sister not coming home? She kept asking, and my grandparents must have cooked up this excuse on the fly. No doctor was counseling them. They just said, "One day we're taking Adele to walking school," as if that were a thing. And my six and a half year old mom was like, oh, okay. And for a while thought nothing of it, but then kept saying, "When's Adele coming home?" Because she wanted her baby sister back, because she'd been playing with her. And then at eight she had this full on meltdown saying, how long could it possibly take for her to learn how to walk? Like, what's going on here? And my poor grandparents didn't know how to answer the question. Can you imagine just like having your poor daughter-- it was the only time my grandma started to cry. My mom said that she saw her because she could see the helplessness and frustration in her daughters. I mean, my mother was losing it. My grandmother didn't know how to console her and couldn't bring herself to say the answer is never. Your sister's never coming home. What a terrible thing to have to navigate. And how terrible she had no options.
Sarah [01:00:04] I just think so many people just cordoned it off. And as painful as it was that your grandparents kept going and kept going and trying and go and trying to these institutions where I'm sure the energy was not good and they picked up on that, that's something to me. That is something very powerful in a culture that tells you to close the door and walk away. Even though that they were so quiet at home, I just I still think, God, that must have been so hard. I'm sure there were lots of voices in their head saying just close the door and walk away. Fully.
Jennifer Senior [01:00:38] Thank you for saying that. That is an extremely compassionate and generous thing to say because I do give them so much credit for visiting her every weekend. They were told the best thing for her was to send her away. But my grandparents were, like, but we miss her and we still want to get to know her. And so they went. And as you point out, they could have not done that-- and other families did walk away. Like Arthur Miller, as I discovered, never visited his son Daniel, who got sent away when he was four. And Daniel had Down Syndrome. Which is like if you just think about Down's syndrome, that's so amazing to me now because there's so much to cultivate in a Down Syndrome kid. I mean, adults with Down's can live on their own and or at least live in these kind of only lightly assisted settings.
Sarah [01:01:34] I had no idea. I didn't even know that about Arthur Miller.
Jennifer Senior [01:01:44] Maybe the L.A. Times obit mentioned it. But that was it. His own autobiography in Timebends, he doesn't mention it. Erick Erickson, the very storied psychologist, like a developmental psychologist, told his three kids that their baby (I don't know if it was a brother or sister) died at birth. Immediately put in an institution. And I don't know if they visited, but I'm going to guess, well, if they said that the baby had died-- I don't know.
Sarah [01:02:21] But your family story continues.
Jennifer Senior [01:02:23] Yeah, because we all reconnected with Adele. So my mom was so traumatized by having her sister taken away that she did not see her sister for 40 years. She only went to visit her when my grandfather died, and she knew that it would be hard for my grandma to go alone. But she went twice. It was not comfortable. She was at that point in a kind of home setting with others who had intellectual disabilities. But the home was probably not that great. They were left alone in a room to spend time with Adele. They sort of didn't know how to connect. And I went one time because I was very curious. I was 28 and it didn't quite work. It was really intriguing because my mom got very tender around her and also because my mom was in this crazy needlepointing phase and there were all these needle points marching along the wall in Adele's room. So it was almost like a twin study, like a separated at birth study. And we discovered that Adele could sing. And my mother studied opera and Adele could sing on [inaudible]. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so eerie. Really you can see the family similarities. But then another like 21 years went by and I said to my mom, I was like, "I want to go and see her again."
[01:03:48] And this time I said, "I really want to write about her. And you don't have to come with me. It's totally fine. I get it." And my mom said, "No, she's living in a different place now. Let's go. I've never met them. Let's go do this." And that was the beginning of this crazy journey where we reconnected because this family was amazing and they had all these wonderful in-jokes with her. And Adele just was like a totally different person and had a much larger vocabulary with all these words at her disposal. When we had visited her 21 years prior, all she had was yes and no. And this time there was just this explosion of vocabulary. And the same eerie thing happened. We showed up at the door and my mom was in a bright red sweater, and so was Adele. And they were both in this crazy necklace making phase. They were each wearing chunky beaded necklaces that they had just made. So I have this picture of them in the story of the two of them in these bright red sweaters in their chunky necklaces. It's wild. So, yeah.
Beth [01:05:03] I gasped when you talked about her language. And you came back to that talking about a younger child and how developed this child's language was and thinking about what if she had been given this hundredth of a chance? It's not a fair comparison at all, but it made me think so much about the decision my family went through when my grandmother had Alzheimer's, to move her out of her home and going through that thought process of like, well, we genuinely don't know how to care for her. There are genuine risks of us trying to her. But then what's available is so depressing. And just reading about the difference that it made for her to be with this loving family who did know how to care for her, it really took my breath away.
Jennifer Senior [01:05:52] So the inadequacies of memory care of all of these facilities, even the best, it's the luck of the draw. I mean, Adele had lived in one residential home setting that wasn't all that hot. That clearly wasn't great. Because she showed up at her new home, we discovered, with scabies. So that place was clearly kind of neglectful too and depressing. My mother and I found it depressing when we visited. Whereas, as we walk into the Iola [sp] home-- that's the last name of the folks who were caring for her. And they are so loving. And you're pointing out that I got my aunt genetically tested and then found somebody who had her very rare gene mutation, very rare, who live just outside of Kansas City, a seven-year-old girl, and saw all the resources that she got from the state. That she got occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy. And then the local school was obliged to take her in, and they did it with open, enthusiastic arms and gave her an individualized education plan and gave her supplementary tutoring and all of this extra stuff, more speech therapy and more help.
[01:07:14] And then on top of that, perhaps, as you're pointing out, she had a mom who was just willing to give her life over. Her mom was really willing to do that, and her mom was very interested in being a stay at home mom in any event at that point. Would I have done that? I've had to ask myself that very hard question. Pitch my whole career overboard. I may have found somebody who is really skilled and I would have paid for someone to come to our house every day and stimulate my child like that. I probably would have outsourced it and I would have sat there and-- it's hard. It's still kind of a 24/7 deal. And then I'm lucky because I would have had the dough for that. What about all the people who where-- there's some kind of weird in-between spot where they can get by on one income. That family could get by with just the dad working. They were in a not very expensive part of the Kansas City suburbs.
Beth [01:08:31] And the education to research and interpret and integrate all of this into your life. I mean, it's stunning.
Jennifer Senior [01:08:40] Well, Grace, this mother is just amazing.
Sarah [01:08:43] What an appropriate name.
Jennifer Senior [01:08:45] I know. First and last because her last name is Feist. And she's a feistier woman you will not meet. It's like Dickens named her. [Inaudible].
Sarah [01:08:57] I'll tell you that the reason you have a Pulitzer because it's not an easy thing that you did to say, "I'm going to see what might have been." That is very painful. I mean, we're skipping over some of the most difficult parts of this piece where we talk about what institutionalization looked like. It was horrific. With children, babies, it was horrific conditions. And to face that and to say that's not even enough, I want to think about what could have been different. When we talked about Felix's diagnosis, I got emails and I knew I would. Thank you for telling this story. I recognized the signs in my son. And that's the impact of work like this that you will probably never know, is that people will see something, they'll feel differently about the decision, they won't feel as alone. That is the service of a piece like this. This is the service of Adele's life, of her family's decisions. But you cannot have that service if you do not face it openly and bare your heart this way. It doesn't have the same impact. And I just think that it's incredible.
Jennifer Senior [01:10:12] It's very, very kind of you to say. Look, some of the nicest emails I'm getting are from people who say we have a child at home who's physically or intellectually disabled. Thank you for reminding me why I'm going through all this effort on the days when it's really, really hard. Because the alternatives, outsourcing the care can be so risky. The places that are dedicated to this, even with the best of intentions, are people who sometimes are not all that dedicated. And as you say, back when we had larger state institutions, we still have them. They were these gothic palaces of horror. My aunt was in Willowbrook, which was later the subject of an exposé by Geraldo Rivera, of all people.
Sarah [01:11:02] Listen, we all hold multitudes, okay?
Jennifer Senior [01:11:04] Oh, totally. And this was an unambiguous public good that he did when he was a younger reporter. He exposed Willowbrook as being this just medieval torment.
Sarah [01:11:17] Torture.
Jennifer Senior [01:11:17] Yeah, Torture. People rotting in their own diapers and having no stimulation at all and wailing and rocking on the floor with no toys. Two attendants for 80 people on a floor being force fed quickly because they had to get on to the next patient to eat. I mean, it's a horrible horror. It was. And I don't even know what happened to my aunt. She can't even tell me about it. She didn't know the words to convey it. And who knows what kind of PTSD was going on there.
Sarah [01:11:50] That was one of the most powerful part of your article. Because I was following your train of thought, I was with you. Like, oh, both your mother and your aunt have this tight sense of control of their boundaries. Isn't that interesting? And it's like the needle point they share. And then somebody says they both experienced the trauma. And I'm like, oh my God, of course. Of course, they did. Of course, that would be a natural response to the trauma that they experienced. And I was embarrassed that I-- and like seeing your aunt through that lens and made that connection.
Jennifer Senior [01:12:22] Same. So what you're referring to is a moment when I point out that I had always assumed that my mom's deep need for control was because, of course, what I discovered about Adele is like, she's very fastidious, she's very meticulous. You can't put anything in the wrong place in the kitchen. My mother won't even let me load the dishwasher. She's the exact same way. Like you try and help in the kitchen and forget it. You're like shooed out of the room. And my mother (this is a great metaphor) when she was a lawyer, she would keep like a bag of M&Ms at her desk and have one M&M per day. Yeah. That's the kind of the control that she had.
Sarah [01:13:05] That's like Obama with the seven almonds, man.
Jennifer Senior [01:13:07] Obama and the seven almonds, right. And they're shaped the same. They're super lean. They look like they're baseball bats. I do not have a baseball bat figure. [Inaudible] like the Oscar Madison to her feeling, very different. I thought, okay, my mom is trying to control her environment because she lost so much control as a little girl that her sister was sort of sent away. I looked at Adele and my first thought was, oh, no, it's just in the genes. They just both have whatever kind of weird complex things that make people slightly [inaudible]. And then it was the daughter of the Iolas [sp], the home where she was living, who knew Adele very well, and she who said to me, "Well, I don't know, maybe Adele is really controlling in response to trauma that she experienced when she lived in Willowbrook." When I think about the ways that she could have been physically abused, she could have been sexually abused, we're never going to know. She doesn't have the words.
Beth [01:14:25] I was reading this piece thinking about the fact that the same person wrote it, who wrote the Steve Bannon profile that I still think about like weekly. I think all the time about the accountant whose funeral online is this grand fantastical moments, and his funeral in real life would be hardly attended. And to me the thread of all of this is you just keep coming back and saying, "God, people are carrying around a lot in our bodies, in our families stories, things we haven't even unearthed yet, but our bodies know them."
Jennifer Senior [01:15:02] Thank you for bringing up that part of the story.
Sarah [01:15:04] We talk about that part all the time.
Jennifer Senior [01:15:06] It was very poignant and it does explain a lot of the estrangement that Americans feel and the things they carry. That's exactly right.
Sarah [01:15:15] And do I carry a chip on my shoulder for being such a fan before everyone else? I do. Thank you. And everybody's like that [inaudible] Senior piece, and I'm like, "I've been reading her for decades. Get out of here."
Jennifer Senior [01:15:25] I love you for that. Can I tell you what people are saying to me, like, "Wow, you've really flourished at the Atlantic." It's like you just weren't reading me at New York magazine.
Sarah [01:15:33] I was.
Jennifer Senior [01:15:35] Thank you. It's like, what do you think? I woke up at 51 and became decent at my job. Does that happen? Like, yeah, overnight stardom at 51 because I was just eating bonbons and watching reality television. That's what [inaudible] I've been doing [inaudible] my books. So thank you.
Beth [01:15:57] That's amazing.
Sarah [01:15:57] I love it so much.
Beth [01:15:59] Thank you.
Sarah [01:16:00] You're welcome back here any time. Obviously, we love having you.
Jennifer Senior [01:16:03] Love you guys. Really, thank you.
Sarah [01:16:06] Thank you for joining us. Thank you to Jennifer Senior. We hope today's show helped you reflect on how your COVID experience shaped you and where you feel good about your choices and where you wish you would have done things differently. That's a valuable exercise. It's not a judgment of who you are as a person, it's just a valuable, self-reflective exercise. Reminder, tickets for our show in Paducah are on sale now. We will be back on Friday to talk about (wait for it) UFOs. Yeah, that's right. That's right, y'all. That's right. Don't miss it. And until then, keep it nuanced, y'all.
[01:16:35] Music Interlude
Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.
Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement.
Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.
Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.
Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tawni Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Danny Ozment. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. The Lebo Family.
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