Grief

buddhism and big mouth on pandemic grief

BY WILL SALKELD

There was a post floating around the Instagram story-sphere during the sad boy hours of the first lockdown which talked about the invisible grief young people faced during the pandemic. It was one of those Tumblr-like text posts which said something along the lines of:

…The trip abroad during uni break, our graduations, 21st birthdays and all rites of passages have disappeared overnight. We have lost them, and we are grieving. We are unable to verbalise this grief because it seems insignificant in the scale of suffering we’re seeing in the world.

Fuck. The post made perfect sense and expressed how myself and my friends were feeling at the time. A pandemic stripping away the privileges of adventures and moments that define your youth does have a way of getting you down. With this grief laid down on the table you have to pick your next move.

The easy and enticing option is to enter a validation circle of despair and pessimism. Why not send that video of that European festival that you and your friends had bought tickets for to the group chat and watch the wallowing unfold? It feels nice to know others are feeling the same despair you are. But this nihilistic validation is like a drug. Even if it provides a short-term fix, it eventually becomes the source of your suffering.

As the lockdown months wore on, I felt weirdly… happy. Content. Yes, of course it was nice to spend time with family, but I had done that for eighteen years of my life without the sense of clarity and ease I was now experiencing during lockdown. What had changed? I credit two main sources for my contentment: Buddhist philosophy and Big Mouth. Let’s start with the former.

Siddhartha Gautama, known by his street name The Buddha, came to the realisation that we are all bound to suffer. This is known as one of his Four Noble Truths. Another one of these truthbombs is that suffering is caused by impermanence. When we crave and desire experiences and material possessions that are impermanent, we will suffer.

This suffering mirrors the unspoken grief the Instagram post was talking about. We have desired and craved the backpacking journeys, epic road trips and freedom of youth since we were trading fruit roll-ups in primary school. The pandemic shoved in our faces the impermanence of world order and the ‘normality’ of youth. We cannot rely on the external world to meet our expectations. As soon as borders closed and homemade sourdough production soared, we were bound for suffering.

Here is where Buddhist philosophy becomes less nihilistic. Once we accept why we are suffering – because we are craving things that are impermanent – we can begin to erase our grief. There are ways to do this – Buddhist and nonBuddhist. The sheer number of Headspace hours I clocked up during the lockdown period shows what method I chose. Yet meditating isn’t for everyone, and I believe there is a far more convincing source of wisdom than the Buddha: the ‘Gratitoad’ from Big Mouth Season 4.

Big Mouth is like a fever dream of a sex-ed documentary where pubescent middle-schoolers deal with a personified cast of hormone monsters and anxiety mosquitoes. Its humour makes Chris Lilley seem prudish, whether it be a giant tampon soaking up an entire lake, or a 12-year-old helping his best friend give birth to a summer’s worth of shit. Yet amongst the depravity we meet the Gratitoad, a southern-twanged Toad who advises Jesse to navigate her depression and anxiety by expressing gratitude.

Anyone who has spent time meandering through the ‘positive psychology’ wormhole of TedTalks would have come across the benefits of expressing gratitude for your headspace. It is not a new idea, yet it is one rarely engaged in by our generation. We tend to focus on what we are missing in our lives – which is a great survival mechanism – but is arbitrary in a world where most of our basic needs are (generally) met.

Gratitude forces us to cringe. Whenever I used to get asked to state “three things I’m grateful for”, I would react as if I had just been asked to tattoo “live, love, laugh” on my forehead. Yet I found that gratitude can be a simple tool to navigate the chaotic world around us.

Just because it is simple does not mean it is easy. We post dank memes, nihilism and disillusionment become the norm, and social media becomes an echo chamber of grief, leaving little room for gratitude in our online worlds. So, I would wake up and think about what I was grateful for. My gratitude ranged from big picture stuff like my health and my family to the mundanity of the smell of my morning freeze-dried coffee. When I was expressing gratitude, it was hard to feel grief for my situation during the height of the pandemic. I am grateful for that.

The lesson we can learn from the grief many of us are still going through is that nothing in this world is permanent. We can never know what to expect and relying on the chaos around us to produce our precise desires won’t do us any good. That is okay. We don’t need to study the Buddha to figure this out. Our gratefulness and source of contentment can come from anywhere, including a talking toad from an adult-rated animation.