Apology
It’s been a long time since my last post. Even though I have “all the time” for creativity with my telecommuting arrangement and sparse social calendar, I haven’t been using the time productively. I understand productivity looks different during a pandemic, but I’m one of the many finding it hard – hard to focus, hard to sleep, hard to see my tasks through to completion. Luckily, my cabin fever hasn’t manifested as anything worse than binge-watching TV shows about hoarders, but it certainly isn’t helping my writing. Things aren’t going to change unless I make them change, so a start is actually using some time to write in this blog.
Summer 2020
I really feel for students right now.
My professional background is in education, so I’ve always thought about students a lot – how they learn, what they learn, and who they are. During this pandemic, though, I’ve been thinking specifically about this year’s graduating high school seniors – who they were going to be before the pandemic and how the pandemic will change who they become.
Losing things like prom and a traditional graduation ceremony create a certain gap between expectations and reality, but it’s all the other things that aren’t so sensationalized and celebrated I wonder about. Those moments that aren’t grand on the surface but are so critical, the type we writers would pose as defining experiences to plan entire stories around, may not have happened for today’s real life characters or might not happen at all. They never made it to the wrong place at the wrong time. They weren’t part of the happy accident. They didn’t hear the argument that brought clarity to everything. “That” relationship never started. No one ever gave them the proof that changed the game. They couldn’t show off. They didn’t get the scrapes from stumbling and falling.
And this summer, the summer before whatever’s Next, doesn’t have the same power it had in previous years. Instead of being transformative, it’s a lot of the same. Same faces, same places. And for students attending college next month, many will be “going away” through computer clicks. This summer reminds me of writing out a bunch of detail that doesn’t do anything for the plot – not because it’s needed but because no one else has a better idea of what to do.
In a story, this would look like some bad writing. We’ve been following these characters for years, waiting for that turn-around, that A-hah!, and…
We get days at home. We watch stretches of time with no glorious way to fill them. Parents are sharing teen work space. Parents aren’t working at all. Teenage workers have essential jobs. There are uneasy hangouts. There are no hangouts. There’s Tik-Tok.
I know we’re progressing in our shared story, so we’re not at stand-still. We’re finally really looking at how we’re either being served or underserved by racism (and attempting to DO SOMETHING about it) and understanding sickness and death. For some, this shared story is the individual story, and it’s enough – or even too much.
But what individual story arcs are we missing? What could this summer have been if it wasn’t the Summer That Wasn’t?
Just to clarify, I’m not touting a return to physical classrooms for anyone. But I wonder, without them, and all the experiences that happen around them, how will individual stories change? Who are the students who were removed from their high schools and are going to remote college or full-day masked jobs?
Are who they will become the people they would have been anyway?
I think about myself as a high school senior and how my story would be different if my last months of high school were – gone. The secrets, the upsets, the successes – the foundation I built the rest of my story on – would be different. I can’t tell if I’d be better or worse off (because that’s too subjective), but I’m imagining I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I’m thinking a J. D. from that timeline never went to college, or if she did, she went into something medical. Would she write? If so, what would she be passionate about?
I know, even outside the adolescent years, this pandemic is shaping all of us in critical ways. For me, it’s definitely changed who I relate to and how I relate to people.
How is the pandemic changing your story?