Day #347 Writing Through COVID-19: Countdown

The one-year mark feels like the right time to wrap up this chapter of blogging.

I have 19 days to go.

My COVID blogging project has given me purpose during a time that has otherwise often felt like treading water. 

We all put classes, weddings, concerts, travel, holidays, and funerals on hold, while elevating the ordinary motions of shopping and dental appointments to stressful, planning-heavy challenges. 

Yet because I was blogging, I was able to coat the day's difficulties (and ennui) with a dusting of opportunity: Yes, it wasn't good; but I could write about it.
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Now, on the cusp of March 2021, I'm tired of seeing Day #---- Writing Through COVID-19: at the head of every post.

I'm ready to move on.
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My Writing-Through-Covid project re-taught me the regimen of daily writing. When I returned to teaching 17 years ago, my writing dropped off precipitously. I excused myself by claiming that lesson-design drained my creative energy. 

It's true, planning lessons is composition, and it does demand creative energy. But this project reminded me that creativity is not a finite commodity. Using it does not consume some limited allotment. It can, in fact, feed itself.

Furthermore, this project gave me permission to explore small moments of joy while blowing bubbles and of frustration when confronted by maskless Covid-deniers in public spaces
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Writing invites me (and you) to experience life twice: first by living it, then by making sense of it in words. I can understand that people may wish they hadn't had to endure 2020 once, let alone twice. But for me, coming to the page to reflect and talk about my day has given me permission to distill 24 hours of uncertainty into 600 words of...words. That's something.

Thank you for keeping me company during this uncertain, terrifying, boring, frustrating, liberating, paralyzing time. In these next three weeks, I'll keep my focus on the virus. 

But come March 18, 2021, I'll say 

Enough.

Be well.
Write.

Allison

William Wolf Hoegh, 7 1/2 months