It's been three years since lockdown. I remember the afternoon I left a meeting in the West Loop, met my husband and said: "I think we need to go grocery shopping and then work from home for a long time." We went straight from work to an Aldi and stocked up on essentials with what felt like all of Chicago. I grew up in a family that used a calculator to buy groceries, the stings of food insecurity run deep. When the city was set to lock down, all I could think about was getting a dry pantry set up to ride it out.
Much of that year is a blur already. My husband and I settled into our new routines. We made good use of our tiny condo and considered ourselves lucky that we could piece together a living from home. I feared the worst financially. The arts are always the first thing to get cut in the budget. I already rode out the 9/11 and the 2008 housing crash; it bankrupted me. I was just starting to make progress. I took deep breaths and focused on abundance.
I got to work on a pandemic project. I collected letters to the future and sent them to the Smithsonian to document the times. I was grateful to our internet lifeline that kept us sane. I lost a lot of jobs. They canceled, rescheduled and canceled again. As an LLC, I relied on PUA and small business grants to make it. Without them, I'd have been in real trouble. I was shocked when I received help financially. That was the first time in my adult life that I felt what it would be like to not struggle during a crisis. Like many, I wondered where this kind of societal support was all along.
Poetry Submission from NYC; created during lockdown.
I got smart and did my best to pivot to online virtual events. They kept me busy and I was grateful for that. Virtual productions were a bandaid but I learned so much from having to direct and teach people through zoom. I learned that my value was not in my tools. My most expensive lenses didn't matter when it was dangerous to be in production. It was my creativity, my ability to adapt and my hard earned skills that mattered.
I was able to step off the cycle of grind culture and got a real taste of what it would be like to not work 18 hour days for little pay. I started recording voice-overs for books, ghost writing freelance and was able to take back my time.
Photo submission from Letters From The Pandemic: “This is the watch of a dead man. He died of Covid-19 a few days ago. My team and I spent multiple hours in sweaty plastic isolation gear trying in vain to save him. I took care of him in ICU for three nights before that. Nothing we did worked, and he slowly suffocated over a week.”
Now, as the world races back to pre-pandemic paces. It feels like humanity has learned nothing. We've all gone blurry on the trauma we endured together. How much we needed each other. The pace of life was not sustainable before but we've emerged at what feels like a faster pace. I am fighting hard to maintain that balance.
In much of the letters submitted to my project, every single one talked about this. How important it would be to take what we've learned and apply it on the other side. I am still waiting for that collective consciousness to emerge into action.