March 2020

Beginning in the Midst

As the COVID-19 lock down began in March of 2020, I found myself in the midst of more life changes than I had ever expected to experience at one time. During that month I was:

• coping with my partner moving out in January as we began the slow process of dissolving our four year marriage;

• job hunting - looking for something that would allow me to alleviate the physical, mental, and emotional strain my current position required me to balance;

• trying to continue to care for my own physical body as a Type 2 diabetic, medically classified as in an "uncontrolled" state and obese.

In addition to my own immediate physical, mental, and emotional care - I was trying to connect with my family who lives from the Midwest to the West Coast; working to help my local community stay safe during the pandemic by hosting virtual get-togethers, being in a COVID pod with my 70+ year old friend; and (when the job offer was finalized) selling my house in the town I have called home for the last seven years and moving to the East Coast (to a location I had never visited physically before).

During all of this...I did write and I wrote A LOT! I wrote constantly for my current job (tenured Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Master of Arts in Professional Communication), I wrote to apply for new jobs, I wrote drafts of marriage dissolution documents, I wrote new curriculum structures, I wrote comments on student projects, letters of recommendation, acceptances for students, I wrote job counter offers, and acceptances.

I wrote...and wrote...and wrote... but very little of it was to directly care for myself mentally, emotionally, or physically.

Because what I was writing was mostly in correspondence - with, about, and for - others, all of this productivity was simply piling more on the altar of exhaustion I felt myself being sacrificed on daily. I had developed a pattern of thinking of others first in order to maintain an image of confident, perfection that did not resonate with the internal reality I was existing in.

While I was moving through this time/space and all of these changes and transitions - there were so many days when I honestly didn't know if I was going to make it another day.

Everything was overwhelming, the amount of decisions I had to make daily seemed to weigh me down and there were moments I wondered if I had made the best choice to leave my community, abandon a relationship that wasn't healthy for me (but maybe with more work it might be?), and try to give myself a chance at happiness in life both personally and professionally again. The self-doubt was overwhelming and in many ways created mental and emotional blocks that I wasn't sure how to cope with.

However, I am still here, I am still doing my work, I am still caring for myself - mentally, emotionally, and physically. This seems to indicate that I have indeed survived these changes and this traumatic time so far. As I work on this piece and reflect on HOW I survived...I realized that my best evidence is really in my photo archive. I do A LOT of what a good friend affectionately calls documenting my life with images. So for this project, I had literally hundreds of images to choose from. The photo galleries below show these survival details - the daily, small, incremental, and individual actions I took to be alive each day and work to fight for a new mentally and emotionally healthy state. These galleries are divided chronologically and show the gradual shifts and changes that I may not have noticed if it were not for this habit of documentation and reflection.

The connections between baking, crafting, cooking, and writing didn't become clear to me until I started to reflect on HOW I made it each day and WHY I wanted to do more than just survive. Reflecting back helps me realize how much my belief that writing is a process influences so many other parts of my life. If writing and communicating is an ever improving recursive process - then why can't I frame my life in the same way? Why can't I consider how the acts of making (baking, crafting, cooking, and relationship building) help every part of my life get better over time? DOES life get better over time? Do I make the choices that help improve, construct, and at times remove the every changing cycle of people, experiences, items I consume physically and mentally...will this curation of my day-to-day help me be better? I think this project demonstrates my answer is yes. My daily care of existing and creating - academic texts, foods to consume, relationships to nurture - all of these details helped me to survive.