A Year Later

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These days have taken on a surreal aspect. The outlines are familiar, but the edges are blurring, changing; details melting into the background. I'm standing outside of it, looking at a strange, yet familiar landscape.

I've been here before. A half-dozen times when the world was cut out from under me, when everything that had been, no longer was.

Updated: March 20, 2021
I started this post a year ago today.
Wrote it, and never posted it. I looked at it, read it, re-wrote it, re-read it.
I had a hundred reasons for not finishing it, for not posting it.
In large part, it was because I was lucky enough to have been one of the fortunate ones. I haven't lost my job. On March 20, 2020, I was on my way back home from the office with my computer hardware in the front seat of the Miata, taking it home so I could set up my "office" in one of the spare bedrooms, where I have continued to work for the last year. I didn't post this because, after all, what did I have to complain about? It was a change of venue, not a life altering event. Not like in 2010, when I was laid off at the high point (low point?) of the Great Recession and was unemployed for 8 months. There are people who have had it MUCH worse than me. Right about this time in 2010 I was looking at the exhaustion of my UI benefits and wondering what I was going to do. I wouldn't have thought much of someone whining about the loss of their world at that point because they had to work from home.
For the past year though, this unfinished post has been in my thoughts. I thank my good fortune, and I am genuinely concerned about those who have lost so much more than I. I have walked a mile in those shoes, and it would be the height of hypocrisy to pretend that the depression and lack of motivation that have visited themselves daily on me can even begin to compare with what so many people have had to contend with. It's not that my point is invalid - the loss of the known, the routine, the parts of life we take for granted - is difficult and disorienting.
But for too many, it has been destructive, even life-threatening.
Help those you can, even if the only thing you can give is understanding.

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