four years out

 Yesterday, I realized that it had been exactly four years since lockdown started and the covid madness began. On March 13th it seemed like a temporary pause that would move off over the water. It had been buzzing in the news like a far-off alarm the previous 2-3 weeks, causing enough ruckus that the college decided that Friday to go completely online. We were wrong about the brevity, of course, and it would be months until I returned to the library. Months more until we had the shield of vaccines. Actually, a couple years still until I felt comfortable going out, masked, then eventually unmasked.  

In hindsight, the lockdowns weren't especially effective, and actually an immediate mask mandate probably would have been better. But the knee-jerkers would have also not complied with that, so who knows. We'd have been fucked either way. As such, the pause brought a lot of people full stop. Out of the routines and pressures that life had become in those lead-up years. My situation was particularly strange, since we had reached a critical mass of understaffing and extra work that two people in a department could not hold the door on for much longer. When we returned, the pace was slower and starting to build when I left. Most staff, the librarians, had not even returned, so still much fell on the folks who were on-site. This was another nail in the coffin that was my leaving in addition to lots of excuses on how positions couldn't be filled because of covid shortfalls and pay increases that we were told were now even more impossible. 

When I look back at my journal entries from that period, there is this stunned stillness. It was a while before I could write or really accomplish much. But it came back. That summer, I worked on several projects and did a lot of work-related things like online exhibits, workshops, and presentations over zoom. I was talking to J about this weird time and he mentioned that the lockdown was the first time we got to spend more time together since both of us had slightly freer schedules, already five years into the relationship. It was also riddled with social unrest and curfews that had him coming over earlier to comply. 

By summer's end, I was back at work with shorter weeks and hours, but by fall, we were open the full slate. Sparsely populated, but open. Things began to ramp up as vaccines were issued over the next year, people began to return to masked normal, just as I was closing the door on that chapter of my life. I did not get to see the full return, but by spring of 2022, even I was taking my mask off in movie theaters I now had time to go to. I've had a few colds since early 2023 and isolated plenty each time without testing (which actually, going out, would probably expose more people). They could have been covid, or just as likely could have not been. 

Sometimes, it seems like a bad dream, but really, so many say, bad as it was, that it was wake-up call. That it gave a moment for contemplation and change. A course correction. A metaphorical (and sometimes literal) brush with death that caused you to question how you were living. And all of this is true. Having come out of a tense situation where mortality seemed always to be six feet away, how many people realized that they weren't exactly living the best version of their lives? Or that how they'd been doing things was not how they wanted to be doing them?  I felt this first with art and writing related things, but later with work-related things that ultimately set the wheels of leaving in motion. All of 2021 I kept telling myself that if I decided to stay, it would be because I wanted to, not because I HAD to. When I finally made the plans and put in notice, it was just this enormous rush of relief that I had done the right thing. 

Yesterday, my day was actually not unlike the covid era. I woke up for breakfast and coffee before digging into work at home, where my days are still lots of work, but more leisurely and less stressful with zoom meetings and nonsense. Later, I made fun AI art weirdness and drafted a poem before making fajitas for dinner, a pandemic favorite of mine when I finally had time to cook in my kitchen. While we have been going out quite a bit, this week has been quiet, so I haven't left the apartment in several days and I am okay with this. What is missing is that anxious doomscrolling and perusal of the news (always unsettling, but it feels less fraught to not be following infection and death numbers.)

I'm not sure what life may have looked like without that pause and reconsideration. likely something would have eventually broken things down, but it may have taken longer and I would have been less likely to jump into the maelstrom of freelancing. We all thought maybe the world was ending as we knew it and that, if it wasn't, we'd best be damned living better, doing better, and being kinder to ourselves.