On a Year of This

I don’t think I’ll ever fully forget a year ago when, within two hours, my entire plan for the next few months collapsed. We entered class discussing Spring Break, and left it unsure if we’d ever see each other again. We didn’t. 

I took a picture of campus on my walk to my car that day, carrying that eerie feeling that I wouldn’t be back here for who knows how long. 

I haven’t been back since. 

It was raining, which just made the whole thing even more alien and bizarre as my white Toms soaked in the gray moisture. They’d become this dark, muddy gray I wouldn’t wash off until several months later. 

A few days before I’d been on the phone with a family friend. We were planning to join her in D.C. and we were sure it’d be no big deal, really. I always hated it when people worry over something they can’t control. That probably won’t be that big of a deal. 

I mentally questioned the guy who wrote “COVID-19” as what he was afraid of on the big poster we had up at the IV tent. 

A tent I haven’t seen in 12 months now. 

A tent where I left my blue, flower-covered travel coffee mug that day, a vessel I used every single day for coffee and even lattes from the library coffee shop. I haven’t seen or really needed it since. I’ve honestly almost forgotten that it was something I used. Something I’d search for and wash- to make sure it was ready for the next morning when I’d get up, pour in coffee, and rush off to campus. 

And that’s mainly what my brain did after that Thursday. It forgot. It forgot I had plans or routines or structures or anything. It said change and then it did. And it didn’t think about campus or before or the past again. It was another time entirely. Alien and unknown and like talking about middle school, gone and passed now. 

My brain didn’t begin to fathom after-COVID until a month ago. When it realized that all the things I was doing didn’t come from nowhere- and were going to have to shift when one day we did return to… whatever we return to. It won’t be normal, that’s for sure. 

Almost everyone I saw on a regular basis before COVID, I don’t anymore. 

And almost everyone I see now I’ve never met in person. 

The other day I was planning to meet some of the people from the Workshop Downtown- and I joked that I’ll finally get to see their legs. These are people and voices and names who have cheered me on and pulled me forward and launched me onto a road that I’d like to be driving the rest of my life- and I’ve never seen them outside of a Zoom screen or a Instagram post. 

Thinking about who I was a year ago is almost traumatic, if I’m being honest with you. Not that she was terrible or terrifying or anything, but it requires me to realize and name what happened. What had to change. What all she awakened to during the great pause of Spring 2020. 

I no longer wonder who I’d have been in a historical catastrophe. I know. 

I’d be hyper-present, my brain consumed by only the simplest and most mundane of measures. I wouldn’t even wonder about the big, bad world because I can’t. I just- I can’t. I’ll wake up, pray through my Psalm, make two eggs and leftovers, drink my coffee with two sugars, write until my walk at six, and slowly but surely put the pieces together of what life will look like now- in the after. I couldn’t and wouldn’t carry the world- only my small patch of it. And that’s all. 

My world didn’t open until Ahmaud Arbery was murdered. Then injustice swept me. 

My sense of action and mission didn’t come back to me until I knew I had to do something- put on my dresses, my pj’s, and just show up, even if it was DMing people over $2 donations to Dressember. 

This year has been this bizarrely diverse yet communal experience. A year where we asked so many questions we hadn’t before. We were too busy, too mobile, too full, too sure then. A year where “how are you?” had to become deeper, or it was pointless. Where we had to listen, or had to build tall walls to avoid it. Where we had to acknowledge that others’ experiences are radically different from our own- and respect that- or nearly implode in the caverns of our own minds. Where so many of us discovered, “Oh, that’s who I am.” 

In all honesty, what this year cost me turned out to be a lot different than anyone may have expected. What I lost was not a year of college or a bunch of opportunities or catalogs of travel photos or hugs with friends, though maybe to some degree. What I really lost is all the gunk that was clogging my sense of self. I lost my ability to pretend something was different than it was, my hazy glasses that kept repeating that everything was fine and I had bigger things to do anyway. I’ve talked a bit about that before, but the wildfire that cleared my life of long-dead and dry foliage last summer and fall- all of that was a part of the last year for me. And it’s still something that I see echoed in the ash marks around my own mind, as sometimes I wander through and realize, “Oh that burned too? Okay. I… didn’t know it would.” 

But, for me anyway, painfully unexpected things were a small price for the incredible unexpected things. I’ve written in letter after letter the question, “In a year full of unexpecteds, what’s been a good unexpected thing?” 

Good unexpecteds of this year go anywhere from enjoying my backyard to seeing more sunsets to sending that one text that eventually blossomed into so many amazing unexpecteds. I found my passions, groups to join, a new direction to go in, certainty and clarity in my no’s- and in my yes’s- and discovered the intensity and richness of Love inside of me already. How life is full of vapor and expiration dates, and to fear them is to water down the beauty of truly loving what already is. Yes, anything can change. Yes, we don’t know. But also, anything can change- and we don’t know. It’s a door that swings both ways with often equal strength if we’d simply pay attention to it. All the good things we were wrong about, all the sweetness that unexpectedly turned up, all the glory in the unknowns that sprung up like wildflowers in a field. All the beauty that can come from ashes if we first acknowledge that something burned- and has been for longer than we’d like to admit. 

I’ve explored before what my year might have looked like without the pandemic. Some things would have changed radically, while others maybe not. Maybe I still would have heard the directions and voice inside of me either way. Maybe what happened in June of 2020 would have happened whether I was in the church office or at a kids camp in Kentucky. Maybe all the places I changed directions would have happened either way- and honestly, likely would have. I still would’ve realized all the areas where I had to change eventually. But, I can’t know. I can’t know where the timeline would’ve moved up or back or been an entirely different course of events. 

But some things would have been completely different. I wouldn’t have texted my freshman boyfriend. I likely wouldn’t have joined Workshop Downtown or Yellow Co., because their current systems wouldn’t have existed without COVID-19 making them go digital. It may have taken far longer for me to leave my job at church. I wouldn’t have started a business or developed as a designer or writer. 

I won’t play the game of what if’s- because I know this has been a long, hard, yet unexpectedly beautiful year. I won’t say I’m grateful, because gratitude for a pandemic that has stolen hundreds of thousands of lives and disrupted or destroyed millions and billions of them seems out of place. I’m not grateful, but I’m aware. I’m aware of what this historical year meant and created and inspired and wrecked. I’m aware of what was made possible by it- and what ended because of it. 

I don’t know what this year has been for you. But I encourage you to reflect on it, no matter how painful or mundane it feels. As Emily P. Freeman reminds me often, we don’t learn through experience, we learn by reflecting on our experiences- and this, this year, was certainly an experience.