Last week, I abandoned a blog post in which I’d been trying to explain how I am feeling in this bizarre time. It was a mish-mash narrative of living a life with chronic illnesses, as a risk taker vow-bound not to take as many as is natural, who is also a drowning extrovert. It was 1500 words of confusion, dismay, with a few glimmers of hope, and so it was a little long. But honestly it didn’t work because it was also a piece deeply constrained by nostalgia.
As we all are now, constrained in that same nostalgia. Held fast by our memories of what was, we are unable to see the potential in what might be.
As we approach the second anniversary of the world shutting down, so does our million dead mark in the United States. We’re hovering just under 950,000 right now. That’s about 300,000 more people than died in the 1918 Flu Epidemic over its first two years.
This gives me a little perspective. We might be doing worse by pure numbers, but nearly three times as many people live in the US now as did then, and globally only 6 million have died this time, whereas a hundred years ago, that global disease killed nearly 50 million people.
So I went back to read what I’d written over these last two years, how it started, and how it’s been evolving. To give me a better perspective on myself…
The change in March of 2020, was swift in my house. One of the earliest spikes in the state had happened at one of my husband’s job sites, and he spent the next 15 months working full time out of our living room. We posted a two blog arc immediately, still somewhat functioning as normal I suppose. The first one was a good opening for the time, and the second is the beginning of the message for now, moving forward.
The first post on March 18, 2020, was called “Life in a Time of Fear, The Beginning” and attempted to frame fear as both normal and manageable when faced. It asserted that the fear to watch out for is the creeping fear of uncertainty. This danger is not of doubt, which involves articulating the questions and following them, but rather the shakiness of uncertainty.
I still think everything in this first post is true, and the second on March 26, 2020, will become the platform for several things moving onward. But after writing one more last post marking the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, we shut down. No one at Spirituality Collective posted anything new for a year.
I found a digital journal I started in April, 2020. It is part plea and part despair. Here are some experts from April & May.
Huh. So in retrospect, the first month will be the easy one. … then weeks 5 and 6 happened. A Holy Week full of death and change, which does happen, but alone. A cold, snowy, and isolated Easter. More death.
I broke.
I can’t function or focus. I can’t follow up or forward tasks. I can’t seem to do anything except write. Write and cry and cook.
And so it is.
…
The crossroads where we stand is real, and not just a primary icon of my Southern roots. -it's a bit much to be living metaphors so common in my heart and mind. I thought it was visceral when my mother was dying. This is so much more. Less personal but more overwhelming.
…
And even that shifts quickly. Now that friends have died, it is much more personal. Now that members of my community have broken, it is much more personal. As I feel everything I trust and hold onto crumble, it is very personal.
…
As friends begin to die and lose their own loved ones in other cities, I feel less and less connected to hope. My own region is lifting restrictions before it even gets bad here.
At the end of June, I officiated a funeral basically over Zoom - a few family members in isolated pods were present, unable to even comfort each other outside of a household- and that sort of shut me down for a while again.
Later that summer, I started doing political writing with the news response site The Resistance Prays and the PAC The New Moral Majority. I’d watched protests pass by me for months by then, my own health not stable enough to join any in person. Nor really, was any of it a good idea from an epidemiology standpoint, although I well understand and respect the need to be present in the face of gross injustice.
We had our first in-person church service in August 2020, at a local park. We went back to virtual meeting until everyone was vaccinated the following Spring. I wrote nothing for myself or for the Collective for another 6 months, but the special election or Georgia Senators kept me busy through January 5, 2021.
But honestly, I have almost no memory of that time. None. In my personal life, it just went on in a cycle of coffee runs and grocery trips and teary mornings. I recall a few occasions, like a friend’s dinner with a beautiful woman, and I spoke at a post election rally, and that was my first time in a public space with crowds for a year, but I only remember that because there are pictures.
Obviously, January 6 was another gut punch for a civic empath like me. I feel the currents and waves swirling around us, and I couldn’t even keep that deluge out of my intimate relationships as forewarned as I was. Again, I stopped writing altogether.
Last Spring, The Collective decided to amplify my work under the brand Rev. Jess Abell (you can find me on all the socials @RevJess or @RevJessAbell) and I guess that’s when I began to track time again. I started writing a weekly blog post and a weekly prayer, and that seemed to put me back in a lane of being able to sense myself in my world.
Dave Russell, Buffalo Heart Images
I don’t think I’d known until this whole thing unfolded how deeply and significantly my writing has grounded me over the years. It might be why I’ve gotten so many degrees and am considering another.
But it is these methods of grounding that I want to turn towards with you all here in this space. I will take the ideas from the second March, 2020, blog post, Life in a Time of Fear, Connective Actions, and reframe them for living life in times of tumult and change.
We all need deeper and slower ways to connect. The panic of the past has never served us. If we can take anything away from the last two years, may it be the insight that our small actions affect the larger world in ways we’d never understood, and that slowing down enough to deflect the urgency and see the bigger picture can shift our reality.
May it be so.