It was my sixth year as a committed project manager at a non-governmental organization in Brussels. Our core mission was educating, promoting, and conducting research from a feminist and intersectional perspective. My small group of female colleagues lived and breathed this work, passionately tracking grassroots organizations across Belgium. We followed every piece of news concerning discrimination against women and marginalized immigrant groups. And we monitored all the alleged extreme-right techniques that were used to infiltrate social media accounts, among other places on the internet, in order to manipulate the political landscape.
Then the COVID era hit us and, in the Spring of 2020, we shifted to working online. We barely saw each other, and carried on with our work from the comfort of our homes. Life continued this way until lockdowns were lifted in early 2021, allowing us to return once a week to the office. It was a new kind of normal, where we shared fragments of how each of us had been navigating the everyday life, while also facing the growing challenges of the disadvantaged groups we served.
By the Summer of 2021, it seemed like life and work were going to be okay, not all that different from what we had had before Covid.
When I returned from my summer holiday in 2021, though, I was shocked to discover how much had shifted. I had gone away just as vaccination was rolling out, and in less than a month, the social pressure had infiltrated every area of life. Suddenly, even the most progressive socialist festival, which took place every September and which we regularly attended as an organization, was requiring either a vaccination passport or a COVID test on-site. Either a vax passport or Covid test would be required to participate in political debates, lectures, live performances, sports, the book market, and more.
My progressive coworkers had lined up, one by one, to receive their vaccine. One of them posted in our work chat that she felt a bit scared hearing about all the cases of myocarditis in young people, but the group’s silent agreement was to get the injection. Everyone agreed except me.
From the early days after the virus was announced, I immersed myself in the available literature, and attended clandestine conferences with brilliant experts.
I found myself being part of a spontaneous group of parents from my son’s school who were also not agreeing to blindly follow the narrative. And in an unstructured way, we were sharing news, thoughts, breakdowns, underground gatherings, and more. I clearly remember one day when we organized a last-minute kids’ play date at the house of one of my best friends. While the children played downstairs in the backyard, we sat together in the attic, listening to the testimony of an acquaintance of theirs.
This lady was part of a group that was self-organizing to share alternative treatments for COVID, but also to build a network to support each other if things got messier. It was a secretive circle. We even chose our own secret group’s name! We could agree to be part of this network, organize ourselves, and do whatever activity we found convenient for the collective. There were no big rules. All the other cells that were forming could share their activities, if they desired to do that, via a secure email address, under pseudonyms to let the rest know what was going on.
This felt like a beacon of heaven amid the storm.
That’s how my family and I ended up going to intimate concerts, sitting around fire pits, and attending conferences. I watched every interview I could find and read everything within reach, with the same rigor I had spent years training myself in. I saw and nodded to every word Mathias Desmet shared in a coffee place just 4 km from our door. I learned via this community about Sam Brokken’s and Geert Vanden Bossche’s point of view in the Belgian arena. From there I jumped and read what the French front was doing, through the work of Christian Vélot, at that time member of CRIIGEN. This thread brought me to the Latin American group, guided and informed by Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, PhD in Immunogenetics from the University of Cambridge and holder of a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a veterinarian, god forbid. And from there to many more…
I also endlessly absorbed many interviews and testimonies from doctors and close friends who were general practitioners. I was in shock to discover an alternative world, in which information was freely available.
This alternative world stood in contrast to an imposed and manipulated narrative. This alternative world was gradually being systematically erased.
My work place was firmly in the world of the manipulated narrative.
Text messages flooded our work group. Everyone should sacrifice themselves to save the elderly, and to save our future as a society. Even the great Noam Chomsky had suggested that unvaccinated people should be isolated and sent to live apart on an island. Wasn’t this the right thing to do? Mustn’t we exercise our privilege as first-world citizens for the benefit of others, and champion free distribution in all developing countries as soon as possible?
My colleagues’ agitated conviction had the same fervor I had seen when the topic was immigrant women’s rights. Witnessing that, I remained silent out of fear. I did not share with my colleagues that my family had decided to forgo vaccination. Soon, my helplessness and psychological angst turned into a bloated belly and panic attacks that became my daily reality.
I remember an online meeting the following Spring, in 2022. We needed to organize our annual conference on intersectionality for beginners, and everyone agreed that the right thing to do was to require a vaccination passport from everyone who wanted to participate. When our Zoom call ended, I couldn’t breathe. I was trembling. Why had everyone assumed we were all going to get vaccinated? How was I supposed to stand at the door welcoming participants to our conference and demanding their passport when I fundamentally disagreed with that requirement?
I called the director of our organization. I told her that I wasn’t vaccinated and that there was sufficient evidence against the shots to support that choice. I asked her to examine the science critically, as we always did with reports and statements in our field.
She told me that everything I was saying was misinformation. She also told me that she had attended a closed-door meeting with members of the Socialist party, in which they planned to push for a mandatory vaccine for the whole of Belgium.
How, she asked me, could I not see that vaccinating the world was the solution to our crisis? We would have so much work addressing all the inequalities that would worsen in the coming years, this was an easy and obvious first step.
I responded in turn: How could she not see that the same techniques employed by right-wing groups had also become the everyday tactics of left-wing propaganda? Where had our marching slogan, “My body, my choice,” gone? What were we becoming? To myself, I wondered what we had been all along.
In the eyes of my colleagues, I had transformed into a conservative conspiracy theorist, utterly indifferent to the wellbeing of others. Stunned, I asked myself how many times I had done exactly the same thing: having become convinced of my truth, I would impose it on others, stereotyping and marginalizing anyone who didn’t see the world through my own lens.
I quit that same day.
I chose not to return to the social sector because I now saw little difference between its daily practices and the very structures we had long criticized, despite its claims of working toward a better world. I started reading and listening to much of what I never thought I would read or hear, trying to understand other sides. I lost all faith in ‘science,’ in ideological struggles, and in many other battles.
I healed. Or at least, I landed in a softer and stronger place to move through life.
I took some distance and gradually shifted toward my work as an illustrator, allowing myself to build a new professional life around two long-held dreams: working as a book researcher, and writing and illustrating children’s books, learning my way through the ups and downs of both. I learned that we do have a choice, even when we’re in the row for the end of our lives, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. It all seems so far away but actually this whole new chapter of my life started then, thanks to my trembling body and my confronting choice.
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