032020: a photo essay
It’s been over 4 years of COVID-19. This is the first pandemic anniversary where March 2020 doesn’t feel like yesterday, where the emotions aren’t as visceral and present. My therapist says it’s part of the healing process, feeling some distance from the suffering. And there’s comfort in the resilience that made achieving that distance possible.
But before I make this about me, it feels important to acknowledge that the COVID pandemic has been a mass disabling event. Over 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID since March 2020, and an estimated 17.6 million Americans are experiencing “long COVID.”
I invite you to sit with those numbers for a moment. Because those numbers are big, and scary. And in March 2020, I was scared, more scared than I had ever been in my life.
At the same time, I was so naively optimistic. I thought, this is what will bring people together. This is the great equalizer - viral bacteria doesn’t care about race or class or color. This is what will bring broad American support for a real social safety net. This is where we give the earth a chance to breathe. I was hopeful this destruction of life as I had known it would, at the very least, mete out a net positive societal change.
And now, here we are.
I took a lot of photos in March 2020 out of a near-compulsive need to document. The collection of moments that were those 31 days felt singular and immense in a way no other event in my life had, or has. I wanted to capture it, even if I couldn’t make sense of it at the time.
I’m still not sure if I can make sense of it now, but I will try my best:
march began in the desert
I surprised my partner with a trip to Joshua Tree for Christmas. We spent the first weekend of March there camping in the park and hiking and climbing and having a magical time.
We brought our laptops home with us that Wednesday because a few offices had announced they were closing for 3 weeks, and we thought, why not, just in case.
That Sunday flight back from LAX was the last time I unmasked on a plane.
We worked from home on Monday since we had been traveling, just as a precaution.
We never went back to the office.
I learned the term “social distancing”. The beach was empty for a sunny spring day.
Ben Gibbard did daily at-home live streams for 2 weeks that I watched every day.
I went on many aimless 5+ mile neighborhood walks, and noticed so much that I had missed on previous runs and bike rides.
I found solace in art. Specifically, making collages with an old September issue of Vogue and Patagonia catalogs, copying Rilke and Mary Oliver poems onto the back, cutting them up into puzzles, and mailing them to loved ones. It was all I did for days.
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and throughout that march, I marveled at how nature continued to mark time, as though it was above it all.
good things on the internet
Jude Doyle’s and Sara Petersen’s takes on Priscilla have me adding it to my to-watch list asap🎀
Can we bring back the chatelaine please I beg 🧵
Kacey Musgrave’s new album aesthetic and her title track that embodies those so well 💖
currently reading
The Loss of Tatas by Tareq Baconi (The Baffler): “Witnessing the conclusiveness of death threw into question all that I held certain in life. What return, what liberation, are we as Palestinians still fighting for, am I still fighting for, when our loved ones are buried in strange lands? What is a homeland, when our graveyards have no home, and when we immortalize our expulsion on our own tombs? What happens when our rootlessness roots itself in exile?”
When the nonstop urgency of climate work makes you an “accidental capitalist” (Gen Dread): “There's a mismatch between what we preach and the way we work. We tend to exempt ourselves from the same principles we’re promoting. So, we talk about slow living. We talk about not taking too much from the Earth. We talk about staying within planetary boundaries and needing to transition to regenerative societies and economies. Yet we’re treating ourselves like expendable resources.”
This V.E. Schwab quote from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: “March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”
this week’s jam
I heard this on KEXP’s Music Heals mental health playlist a couple weeks ago. I have to agree with the YouTube commenter that described it as “the happiest gut-wrenching song ever written.”
photo of my cats
