What a strange stretch of days it’s been. Looking back in the last few entries — two in a month? — I’m struck by the same-ness of it all: the overwhelmed-by-school-ness, the tough-ness of the kids, the chaos of irregularity in the childcare situation, and the struggle to do anything beyond the most basic thing.
I think that’s only going to continue, but if it can continue with writing involved, I’ll manage.
Coronavirus — COVID-19, officially — is starting to change everything.
March 11, 2020
This project has been pretty neglected since the start of the semester, and all of the above reasons, from more than a year ago, are why.
One of the motives here, in writing about these lesser conjunctions, was to figure out what I record in a diary and what resonances it has a year later. If writing is how I “manage”, what does writing a diary help me “manage”?
The other big question, maybe obviously, is to see where the rhythms of last year, the COVID year, diverged from a regular year (to the extent that this year is that, and not just a second, continuing COVID year). How is “the struggle to do anything beyond the most basic thing” a constant struggle? For me? For anyone? In what ways is that struggle about the external environment (including but not limited to COVID)? In what ways is that struggle about what’s internal (my own expectations, self-sabotage, emotional states, work habits)? What constitutes a “the most basic thing” and how much do I even control it anymore, if I ever did?
Writing, to me, has always been basic, in that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sense of the word: at the bottom, with food, water, warmth, rest. (Something I mis-remembered as “food, clothes, shelter). In my periods of greatest difficulty, I have always noticed a lack of words on paper. The most basic reason for this, I’ve always thought, is practical. In a crisis, when do I find time, privacy, head-space, etc to sit and record every single thing in a form that I can later recover? It’s hard. But I also have thought previously of that poster I must have seen at church, which has, apparently, no actual Biblical root, of the man who sees two sets of footprints at all other points in his life except the most difficult, when he sees one.
He asks God something like, “Why did you abandon me there,” to which God replies, “That’s where I carried you.” The part of God is played by writing and I think that in the moment of crisis, the one I can’t record because I’M DOING SOMETHING, the practices that make up a writing life–narrating, documenting, reflecting, reacting–carry me.
Has that always been true? I’m not sure. It’s mostly been true during COVID but maybe not as much as I think. And I see this even just glancing in old print diaries like the one from 1998, for instance, that starts “Rebecca says I should write things down,” which was at the top of the box next to my desk, the one we moved and haven’t yet put back in a box in a closet. There has to be a reason I keep carrying this with me, and maybe it’s so that my 41-year-old self can recognize in my 18-year-old self that temper that he used to exclusively turn inward. It’s cooled by now, at least partially. Without writing, though, I see how it still fires off, and if the heat is less concentrated, if it’s sent in more directions, it’s still a hazard, and now it’s wounding more people than just me.
So that’s what’s behind the most basic thing: a desire to hurt less.
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