Long Hauling
Long Hauling was a series of essays assembled in 2021 to highlight the stories of “long COVID” survivors. We also wanted to foreground community efforts to use the lessons learned from other viruses to provide care for patients during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak and into the uncertainties of later-pandemic years. As people infected with COVID and as longtime AIDS organizers, our work on this series tried to mark and understand COVID’s temporalities and flows. At the beginning of the pandemic, nothing was known about the disease, and people found each other online to learn, listen, and stay real.
After our initial infection in March 2020, the two of us began to collaboratively craft writing about not getting better. Then we strived to name and understand how to work with long hauling as a political framework for the many pandemics and crises in neoliberal times. With the kind invitation of ArtsEverywhere.com we gathered our first year of thinking onto this beautiful site as a grounding. We then reached out to activists, artists, scholars, and thinkers who could extend the specificities of the COVID long haul that we had been documenting to learn from and connect to other troubles, places, and movements: community efforts in storytelling, archiving, and harm reduction, surviving illness, and organizing steadily over long periods of time. We needed others to imagine through, within, yet also beyond the pandemic. We knew we must use everything from audio archives to zines, op-eds to theory, mutual practices of aid and cohabitation, so as to thrive over the long haul of sustained illness.
Even as ideas and needs from earlier cycles of the pandemic stayed with us in 2022, we found ourselves in yet another new moment of COVID time, with its own rhythms, troubles, and terms. As COVID began year three in March 2022, we wanted to participate in the How We Make It residential research group in order to collectively think about:
Asynchronous Lingering rooted in recalibrations, the slog, new cycles, new gradations.
How do we recalibrate for the chronic and the ongoing?
Disaggregating Disclosure so as to reckon with how COVID disclosure is now social, socially mediated, and culturally sanctioned as social media.
What is the political value of this disclosure?
Not Tellable times when press coverage about long hauling is heartbreaking and politically demoralizing, based in willful obfuscation, identifying people with long COVID as hysterical buzz kills who are not letting people celebrate the pandemic’s end.
What happens when you’re expected to suck it up and hide what’s resonant for you?
COVID as Interspecies Co-existence that requires building solidarities because the long-hauling body is no longer your body; it is a host of larger tectonics of inequities, it is a force within relations.
Who or what else should be part of your network?
