Love in the Time of COVID

I am particularly lucky to be able to share my home with people who know and value me as a person, from the soul and heart, and mind. One of them is my partner in life, and the other two are our friends. But friend doesn't begin to describe our relationship. We are a family. We maybe don't look like the nuclear family that was popularized in the media, but we are a family none the less. We take care of each other and talk, and laugh, and play, and comfort each other. We support each other when we are going through the hard stuff, and have learned over the last year of living together how to lean on each other.

To have a household with this kind of connection is really all I have ever wanted I just wanted to live in a home where everyone connected, and cared, and worked together towards a common goal. To have this in a time where everyone is so far from their loved ones seems almost an irresponsible amount of luck. I still miss the people that I had grown accustomed to seeing. I miss working, I miss playing Dungeons and Dragons with my best friends over their dining room table instead of over discord. I miss seeing my friend Brian every Thursday to sit with them while they go through Dialysis.

However, unlike so many people, the struggle with talking to my blood-family has been not such a struggle. In truth, I have spent the majority of my adult life living in a different time zone from almost all of my family, so this isn't so different. I think I might speak to them more now than I did before. Since I have not been working beyond, working on my novel and my podcasts, and learning new and fun things to do with my kitchen, I have had much more time to do things like spend 2 hours on the phone with my grandmother once a week, or text my mom.

It has been nice to have this time, and as much as I miss going to coffee shops, and walking around the many lakes around Seattle, and hiking, and kayaking, and generally being outside the confines of my yard, I have grieved for the passing of the world, and am trying to take my luck as it comes to me.

I need to remember, that not everyone has had time to grieve yet, that some hurts and changes are beyond what we can fathom, and while I am not done grieving, I have passed the parts that hurt the most and can find peace with the circumstance, if not the state of the world. Everything is a process, and we must be ready to adapt to the new paradigm of existence. Millennials in particular I feel are skilled at this type of fundamental shift. The world we were raised to survive in no longer exists. We can't do the things our parents did, we can't go to an arrivals gate to meet loved ones, we can't bring nail clippers on an airplane.

We have adapted as best as we can, and have shepherded in the new with as much grace as we can manage. We are also raising the most adaptable kids, as we know that ideas that we are instilling in them may be proven wrong later. We are more open to criticism, and allow ideas that compete with our own, time to speak so that we can adjust our learning to the most recent science.

Be easy on yourself my friends, take time to grieve and cry and be unproductive, and when you're ready to do things that bring you peace, I hope that you can do so without guilt. The world is new, yes, but it bares the scars of its previous iterations and we must be careful to heal those scars without creating new ones. We must be tender, gentle, and understanding, with ourselves, our world, our families, our friends, and all that we hold dear. There is no other way to be. Stand firm, fight, but do so only so that when the fighting is over, we can love each other more deeply.