A Pandemic Year

Time, during this pandemic, has ceased nearly all meaning. Minutes, days, months, seasons all speed up and slow down simultaneously; it drags its feet as it’s also slipping through my fingers. Time is measured between visits with my brother and his family, and George, as those are just about the only in-person human contact that I have.

This was my office, five weeks into the lockdown. The office building was a ghost town, people’s snacks and jackets still where they last left them.

It’s been exactly one year today since it happened. I was sitting at my desk, working as a Programmer Writer for AWS when our manager told us late on a Thursday afternoon that, due to the new COVID-19 pandemic that had found it’s way to Seattle (one of the first places to hit hard in the United States), that we should work from home the next day. I actually went home fairly gleeful as I enjoyed working from home often. But a Friday turned into a couple of weeks and then, unceremoniously, the entire city went into lockdown. After that, the country, and the world, went into a multi-month quarantine. As the weeks and months wore on, it became clear that we were not going to be coming back to work anytime soon. Or partake in any other activities either.

In February, before the quarantine began, I had interviewed for a different company (Oracle Cloud), but when I hadn’t gotten an offer after the lockdown started, I assumed that nothing was going to happen during COVID. It took several weeks, but they did eventually made me a great offer and so I took it. I was one of the last people to get hired before they instigated a hiring freeze. Leaving my old job in late April 2020, it was very anticlimactic and surreal to say farewell to my Amazon team over a remote Zoom chat. I never got to have a farewell happy hour which made things more bitter than sweet.

Many other things never happened either. Travel and road trips got cancelled. Weddings I was supposed to photograph got cancelled. Concerts I had tickets for got postponed or cancelled altogether. Birthday celebrations were postponed. Trainings and mentorships got severely delayed or postponed indefinitely. And on it goes. An entire year has gone by and I still find it all completely surreal and frankly unbelievable. Not even Yi, my nearly-96-year-old grandfather, has seen anything like this in his long life.

While it has been bad–and not just the plethora of deaths around the world, the strain on the economy, the millions out of work, the isolation, and so on–there have also been some bright spots, and sometimes just simply interesting times.

My medium is words. If I could sum up my year in a few descriptive words, I’d say this time of my life has been:

Introspective. Since there was little to be outwardly focused on, I had a lot of time to ponder life, my place in it, and realign my priorities. At the end of the day, what means more than anything to me is family, close friendships, a cozy and happy home, multiple creative projects to work on, my pets, connection to friends and strangers alike (whether IRL or online), a stable career, and personal goals.
Creative. I was at an all-time high for creativity in the last year, simply because doing things kept the anxiety at bay. I did a lot of cooking and baking, acrylic painting, working with resin and molds, creative writing, sewing and quilting, leatherworking, video capturing, a small amount of photography (not as much as I would have liked), and I designed a wonderful book which included choice pictures my trip to Israel and Jordan. I also started blogging here on this site.
Isolated. During March – May 2020, I barely saw another soul. I live alone and, with the exception of occasionally seeing a friend who lived on the floor in my building, I didn’t see anyone. Not even family or George. (In fact, there was a 4.5-month stretch where I didn’t see him at all.) The rest of the year has been better, and I have been able to travel and see my boyfriend every couple of months on average, and my brother and I started enjoying weekly Taco Tuesday dinners together. And I’ve gotten to see Veronica for a short bit a couple times this year. So, the complete isolation is behind me. (Fingers crossed.) I’m thankful that I live in the age of Zoom and FaceTime, social media and chat apps, that George and I are able to travel to see each other, and that I have two cats who love having me home all the time.
Empowering. I got a new and amazing job in the midst of a pandemic, made way more money than I ever have before, learned new skills, bought a car with cash, improved my credit score, and did some major growing and adulting. This was really the first time in my life that I felt I really should learn to do things myself. And man, did I ever. I taught myself so many things, and whenever I could, I watched educational content on YouTube and elsewhere. I learned a bunch of things about my new car, fixed malfunctioning items around the apartment, sewed a plethora of things I needed around the house (as well as a bunch of Christmas presents). My year has been all about DIY!

What I miss dearly:

Hugs
Going out without a mask and being able to see other people’s faces
Live music and other shows and events
Photography
My extended friends and family
Feeling carefree without any worries
A bustling downtown space
Everyday walks across town to my workplace
Travel, big or small
A workplace to go to
Eating in restaurants

Plans for when the pandemic, or at least the overall issues surrounding it, is over:

Live shows!
A trip to the once-every-five-years dokumeta exhibit in Kassel, Germany in 2022; I was at the last one in 2017 and promised friends I would try and return every five years
A long-overdue visit to Canada to visit friends
White Sands National Park, as well as other places around AZ and NM, with George (hopefully September 2021); this was one of my cancelled trips from 2020
Rockport, TX to photograph a wedding in Fall 2021 (this was also a cancelled trip from 2020)
Spending a lot of time with family, getting lots of hugs
Eating in restaurants
Going into the office to see my teammates

Here are a few images of typical pandemic experiences in the last year.