The Time We Left

This marks my first post in over two years. It’s been wild to see how much the pandemic has consumed, and continues to consume, so much of my energy and focus. It’s been harder to read, harder to write, harder to engage. During a work meeting a couple of months ago, a group of us was asked “What are you excited about?” and I was stumped. The fact that I couldn’t answer the question on the spot really gnawed at me, so I thought about it for a while and talked about it with some colleagues, and eventually landed on this answer:

I’m not excited about things, but I am hopeful. 

The past two years have been devastating. So many plans have been dashed. So many things I thought possible never came to fruition. And sometimes in the foreground, always in the background, has been the constant hum of loss. Lost friends, lost family members, lost jobs. It’s fully been two years, and I don’t really know where we are anymore. It’s hard to be excited.

Still, I remain hopeful. There are glimmers, here and there, that it might not always be like this. I’m fairly certain that we’ll never get to the “post-pandemic” life we were promised, but I do know that it can’t stay like this forever. Some things will get better. I don’t know exactly what and I don’t know exactly how, but there’s no way we could have gone through these years and not learned anything.

With that in mind, my plan is to start posting semi-regularly again. I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of years, though I haven’t always realized it at the moment. I’m hopeful that by reflecting on what’s happened, writing it down, and sending it out into the world will help me gain a better sense of where I am. And, in the process, maybe it’ll connect with what some other people have been thinking and feeling.