OK so… it’s been a LOT of months since I posted here. I still have work to do in the back end and find the time to fix some of the hiccups that have been here since I migrated from the old blog address and … oiiiiyyy. You’d think that with all the time in lockdown or whatever that was that I’d have done all this work. Except when we transitioned to working from home, all of my work, 100% of it, became keyboard entry. It meant battling bursitis in my shoulder along with the added mental gymnastics of being in constant fight or flight. It meant a lot of stuff I actually wanted to do “when I have time” didn’t get done, despite having time.
Turns out, having time is a small part of getting stuff done, and not the most important part at that. I haven’t tackled my many website issues. I haven’t finished editing my manuscript. I haven’t written the play I was so excited about (oh, I got part of it done but lost interest). I didn’t read much of anything that wasn’t online. I read too much nonsense online.
I spent a lot of the last 18 months staring at screens: countless hours with my phone in hand; dozens of hours of streaming content on my TV; hours of typing and squinting at centry old handwriting; hours of zoom and other platforms, staring at my own face and others in Brady Bunch grids; hours of learning to use new apps — Discord, MarcoPolo, Signal — different but similar ways of reaching out, of connecting.
Now we are opening up again. Vaccinated and wary, we are returning to group settings, to indoor gatherings, to events. In the past month, I have already been back on stage at the VEC, and back on the open mics (but I’ve back-burnered that for other reasons right now), and even got to be on a film set for a music video. I think the weirdest thing to me is that part of my brain is still in fight/flight mode and KNOWS full well we are not nearly out of the woods. And yet most of my brain and body is already out there thinking, “Wow, I missed this. why did we stop?” It’s occasionally very jarring up in my head.
On Stage at the VEC 
On the Open Mic 
On Set for a Video
Is it back to normal? Whatever it is, we are headed back there, ready or not
My gradual return to working on site started last September, when I began going in two mornings a week. Last month that shifted to two full days a week, next week it’ll be three, then four, then we’ll be back onsite together as of September 7th. Over the years I’ve spent time in the library close to alone, whether opening or closing the building, or being there in the week leading up to the December closure as staff dips to skeleton crew and students return home after exams. But this emptiness was different. Even aside from signage and closures – furniture stacked in rooms marked as off limits – there was a different feeling in the space. It felt emptier than usual, as though the echoes I was used to hearing had faded. Footsteps sound weird because there’s no bodies helping to absorb sound.
The last few weeks have seen that shift. In fact last Wednesday, both my coworkers were in the office at the same time as me — we’d been staggering shifts since September — and that was both weird and normal. And I think that’s the thing everywhere, “weird but normal” and it really makes me question what the hell is normal anyway? Whatever it is, we are headed back there, ready or not, regardless of how much or little we accomplished while fighting global trauma from the pandemic, from climate change, from social justice reckonings… it’s been a rough couple of years.
Bottom line is this: we had time, but most of us did not have the motivation or mental bandwidth to cross things off our to do lists, and that’s OK. We are each a little broken in different ways from the way we had to deal with the last year. I’m extremely fortunate to have been able to work from home at all, to have been supported, and to have not lost income or benefits throughout this event (that is still not over). We’ve faced a few false starts and been given false hope and I think many of us are still not sure this is the right time to reopen, or return to whatever is out there, but we’re going back anyway.
All we can do is try to remember to be kind to one another and be kind to ourselves. I know that “Be Kind” has been overstated, but the alternative is not something I’m willing to consider.