Dear Comrade…

This is a creative piece of writing that invites folks into thinking about the ongoingness of the Covid-19 pandemic [and the denial of this ongoingness]. In my research and personal experience I have found a lot of movement spaces do not want to think about Covid, and want to go ‘back to normal’ as the rest of society has. This piece aims to encourage our movements in responding collectively to the pandemic as well as to centre disability justice in our work and to trouble what ‘normal’ means on the left. 

I frame this as a conversation through a letter drawing on a transformative justice lens to resist polarisation, and understand that what I write is troubling, but that it has also been deeply troubling to see the ways our movements continue to marginalise disabled and clinically vulnerable folks. One of the strengths of our movements for liberation is in turning towards the trouble, not away. The writing isn’t perfect – it is tentative, sometimes perhaps too much so – there is no template for transformative justice. I’ve been motivated by the deep desire to invite folks into conversation and towards action – of the importance of collectivising our response to Covid. I hope this letter will enable this, and spark ways in which we can strengthen the capacity of our movements to respond to our current moment. 

Dear Comrade,

How is your heart? 

Mine is heavy, but hopeful, the times are difficult, discombobulating. I’m reaching out to you to ask if you will sit alongside me and listen with curiosity to some of the wonderings I’ve been having. Some of this might be difficult, but I deeply believe that our relationship can sustain that and also deepen through it. 

As the polycrisis [a term to describe multiple, intersecting crises and disasters that impact on one another] escalates I have been reflecting on how adaptable we are as humans as our conditions change and worsen. However I wonder how we might adapt too well, and how this might be leveraged towards normalising and simply adapting to worsening conditions rather than challenging the systemic forces and structures which produce these conditions. 

These are intensely difficult times, and I wonder how we are encouraged towards blocking out, numbing and denying what we know about the conditions we live under and their significance or impact. And what this means for our movements and futures. 

Can we ‘back to normal’ our way through crisis when the crises keep coming?

Despite our deepest commitments to witness and end suffering, I am wondering how systemic denial of suffering shapes our movements. How might we stay attuned to the ways we are re-couped into the status quo and the parameters of the normative? 

I have been sitting with some questions, maybe you’d like to reflect on them too?

• What is being kept on the margins of our awareness? 
• What are we not attending to? 
• What do we know but cannot currently acknowledge?
• What would it mean for us to turn towards what we don’t want to name?
  • And if we do this, how do we tend to ourselves and each other?

Take some time here to think about the things that our movements have moved to the margins, or moved out of awareness. How might this denial have kept us safe? How has it helped us survive? How has it threatened our survival?

I want to talk to you about our movements and Covid. We are in Year 6 of an ongoing pandemic. I’m wondering what you feel when I say that? 

• What do you feel when I name Covid? 
• Can you feel this in your body? If so, where? If not, what other sensations are arising for you?
• Whether you can feel this is in your body or not, what wisdom is your body sharing with you?
• Is there something here that is finding it difficult to hear me name Covid?
  • What is it? 
  • And what is that taking care of within you? 
  • What does this part of you need? 

I want to welcome with compassion what you are feeling as I name Covid and the pandemic. These times are more than any one individual can bear and this is why I want to talk to you and invite us to be alongside each other. There may be grief, denial, numbness, overwhelm, a desire to turn away, detachment.

I think it is a deeply human response to experience these emotions in relation to the pandemic. However, it is also the deepest commitment of our movements to practice community safety, everyday accountability and be vigilant to the ways in which we might reproduce harm. 

How can we collectively shift denial of the ongoing, significant impacts Covid has on our movements and communities? How can we be brave and look at the ways in which we have abandoned disabled folks, the clinically vulnerable, and ourselves, to go along with the ease of ‘normal’? A normal that most of us, in principle, thoroughly reject. How has this been shaped by the long histories of marginalising disabled folks in our movements?

We know that harm doesn’t exist in a vacuum, or that one person enacts harm out of nowhere. In our movements we understand we must collectively challenge structures of power which produce harm, and resist the ways we are collectively encouraged to collude in this harm. How could we collectivise responsibility and accountability for Covid? How can we collectivise responsibility for keeping folks in our communities and movements safe during an ongoing pandemic? 

This might feel scary, confusing or burdensome, but what if we were transformed by this process? What if there is something more generative and expansive on the other side? Could this help our movements to build their capacity for responding to polycrisis and our changing world? 

The world has been cripped – how can we centre this in our movements?

• Through centring disability justice and covid justice 
• Embracing the inherent vulnerability of our own fleshy and finite bodyminds – whether we are currently abled or not.
• Be in solidarity with those who have been abandoned, discarded, designated as surplus AND learn from them with humility.

How might we honour the dignity of all of our lives, and build the capacity of our movements to respond to our changing contexts?

Will you join me? All we have is each other.

In deepest solidarity, 

Xo

Dr Stephanie Davis

07/04/2026