Julie A. Linder

I just left a 5 hour zoom meeting. In that meeting, I experienced many ups and downs. I was nervous to speak, then I finally spoke, then I wondered if I spoke too much, then I didn’t speak for fear others had not spoken.

In the course of today’s meeting, I was shown a lot of institutional data that very clearly articulated the impact of the pandemic on our college. It showed a shifting of habits. Even after we emerged from the pandemic, students were slow to let go of their online learning habits, though broadly, they are more successful when they show up. I imagine that distance learning is good for business (imagine facility management before and after the pandemic!) and so also difficult for the institution to give up. The fact that this symposium was delivered on a platform thats existence in my life is by and large owed to our shared world-wide tragedy is vexing. Yet I didn’t have to sit in spirit deflating traffic to get there.

I keep finding myself with a desire, actually a yearning, to uncover and investigate the communal trauma of the pandemic. I find, generally speaking, that folks are eager to move on. When I say “that was when we were leaving our mail outside….when there were no tests or vaccines,” people get a dreamy look and mutter “oh, yeah” like its been completely forgotten. Actors and musicians are eager to get back in the hall, but are they eager to produce art that helps us understand this shared pain? I decided recently to perform a piece meant to be played in an empty hall – written when halls across America were closed. I revisited a spoken word piece my husband created in the height of the pandemic, and it brought me back viscerally to the quiet beauty and deafening pain of those days at home. Surely there is so much to plumb there.

For my part, moving on looks like this: my mantra these days; the words I live by: radical showing up. I want to remember the powerful feeling of gathering and sharing an experience, talking about it, building a community and extending my heart to others. A thing I once took for granted, it’s all the more powerful to me now that it’s been lost. I see memes of people celebrating when plans are canceled, and how they just want to stay home, and want to ask: why are we here if not to connect with our one human family?

This is my mission. We are failing to acknowledge the painful truth of what created these habits of isolation and how that isolation is perpetuating more pain. It’s time to reconnect. It’s time to show up.