The Covid-19 Pandemic Turns 4. Blogging.

[canyonwalker]

I heard on the radio today as I was going out for lunch that today is the 4th anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, on this day, March 11, in 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Covid-19 outbreak to be a global pandemic.

The radio program I was listening to on NPR was actually about journaling about the pandemic and how critical it is to helping people remember things.

"Hey!" I thought, "I journaled about the Covid pandemic. I journaled a lot about it!" In fact in the month of March 2020 my 61 journal entries beat my previous record that had stood for over 2 years.

But does all that blogging serve as a record of what was happening? Does it also help me remember how I felt? It turns out the answers are Yes and Yes.

First of all, yes, in fact I even blogged on 11 March, 2020 about the WHO's pandemic declaration. That, along with the wealth of over Coronavirus-related blogs I posted that month (link: my March 2020 table of contents), shows how much the developing worldwide crisis commanded my attention.

Secondly, yes, the blogs also capture how I felt. In particular they reflect the range of feelings I felt.

There was optimism, such as when I wrote about the "Flatten the Curve" idea, hoping if maybe we could all just pull together for a few weeks and put this thing quickly into the rear view mirror.

I can also see how I remained sanguine even as I saw the reasons for optimism all disappear. There were days I kept a focus on things I could be thankful for.

I shared thoughts about helping neighbors as well as sympathy for strangers in situations unlike my own.

And I always looked for the humorous side of Covid-19 even as I expressed outrage at the transparently dishonest Covid-is-a-hoax nonsense increasingly being repeated by President Trump and the political right.

And interspersed with all that were plenty of facts. I recorded facts, both things I read in national or global news as well as things I saw in my own town or even on my own street. There's an old saying that journalism is the first draft of history. This blog was my first draft of history.

Comments

[sorcyress]

My 'actually serious' streak on the site 750words started in December of 2018 (although I've been dabbling in the site since 2010) which means that I was well established with my writing habit by the time the pandemic rolled around. One of the clearest things from the journal is that there was a lot of stuff that was actually _good_ for me. It's the only time in my life I've had flexibility in my working hours, and the period where *everyone* was locking down (or at least trying to) was actually really creative and interesting as we all tried to connect with each other.

Big heaps of it were horrible, but I look back and am sad to see what we briefly had and then lost again --the flexibility, the compassion, the community.

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

The first year of the pandemic era was in no sense good for me, though compared to what a lot of other people experienced, it didn't suck too badly. I knew that at the time and have remained mindful of it.

- I was already working remotely, so that wasn't a change positive or negative.

- My partner and I both had continuous employment, so that was good relatively speaking, though I did suffer a 10% pay decrease for several months.

- Nobody in my immediate family was hospitalized or died due to Covid. In my extended family two people, an elderly aunt and a niece in her late teens, had severe cases requiring hospitals. Both recovered.

- The biggest minus for me— other than learning to live with a major new threat in the environment constantly— was losing the ability to travel. I had a lot of travel planned in 2020, and almost all of went up in smoke.

See also my year-end retrospective, Looking Back on 2020.