The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 98

The New Normal is Nothing But.

This pandemic has done a number on our work lives. I can't speak as to what it is like to be an essential worker through all of this, because I am not one. I haven't lived that, and I wouldn't want to pretend that I understood what that has been like through all of these months. But I have lived working from home and I've watched people I love go back to work and none of this is easy.

For me, personally, teaching from home took on a whole new level of stress and I was even worse (if that is possible) at putting it away at the end of the day. Although I cut the content of I would have been teaching by 75%, just creating and explaining and troubleshooting lessons took forever. And the emails. Oh, god, the emails. Literally, thousands of emails to parents and students, trying to encourage them to participate. And then the daily emails from students asking me to explain an assignment that I had explained in a screencast that they clearly hadn't watched. And then there were emails asking for extensions and emails asking for alternate assignments and finally, at the end, a couple of emails of thanks, thanking me for sticking it out all along and answering all of the questions and working so hard to make it meaningful. Even now, two weeks after school is done, my gut twists a bit and my heart-rate goes up if I open my work email account.

Now that I am on summer break, I find myself putting in 10 hour days, sitting at my "desk" in my front yard, working on various projects. Each day starts with a 4 hour Zoom meeting with CRWP's Remote Learning Literacy Institute, where I attempt to balance facilitating video conversations, text message troubleshooting, Voxer group messages, and a backchannel chat simultaneously. When we finally end the meeting I am so mentally exhausted I can barely string words together. And then, I work on writing projects all afternoon, slowly building a catalog of projects. The "teachers have summers off" thing has always been a myth to me, and this summer is no different. Except that it is. I think it is easier to meet in person, to facilitate in person, to collaborate in person. The addition of keyboards and screens and videos and multiple backchannel conversations all happening at once is emotionally and physically exhausting.

And then I talk to a salon owner, who has just started back after all these months off, and I realize that I don't know the half of it. I don't know what emotional and physical exhaustion really feel like. I don't know at all what it is like to go back to work and try to keep the world I live in safe. I don't know how incredibly stressful it is to try to figure out how to make sure that the chair and every handle and every surface is disinfected. I don't know how emotionally draining it is to try to listen and support all of the various clients coming in, people that I care about, some who I vehemently disagree with. I don't know what it's like when I can't walk away from someone who insists that everything our Governor has done is wrong and all this COVID stuff is just the lamestream media. And I don't know how it feels when I can't convince the person who is afraid, but desperately wants a hair cut, that she will be safe in my chair.  I will never really know what it feels like, in this moment, when I can't please the people who are angry, I can't console the people who are sad, and I can't calm the fears of the people who are afraid.

Photo by jasper benning on Unsplash

I can't truly understand what that is like. I only know my own experiences. But I know that we have to move in this world with all of the compassion that we can find within ourselves. We have to find ways to lift each other up and take care of each other. We have to think about more than our own comfort and discomfort. Because the people around us, providing us services and helping us get on with our lives: they are absorbing all of this emotion, all of this energy, all of this exhaustion, too.