Stepping away to step back in
Working through the broken to find my way back to the art that fills me
Hi, friends! I’m not quite ready to come back to writing regularly, but I thought I would share this essay on this day. It’s been four years now since COVID entered our vocabulary and so much has changed. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on burnout and taking a break. Soon, we’ll be taking about emerging from the fog. Hope you’ll join me then.
I would never be so bold as to compare my job during the pandemic to those on what came to be called the front lines - all the workers in hospitals from the doctors to the custodians, people who took care of the elderly in nursing homes and first responders who answered the call to life and death situations in full protective gear and then completely sanitized the entire rig before heading out on another call. It was important work. It was necessary work.
But, my work was necessary, too. And it was important. There were others in similar positions, like IT professionals in schools who had to take entire districts online overnight and truck drivers who kept products moving. I only know what it was like to be a community journalist in those days.
In the collective angst that bemoans anything that falls under the label of “the media,” the public generally has no idea what those first months of the pandemic were like for people whose job was to bring you the news you didn’t want to hear. Not ones gracing the screen on the big television networks or even the ones at storied newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post. I’m talking about the local reporters who, in the before times, would be attending municipal meetings so you don’t have to and letting you know about the new budget’s effect on your water bill or who would write the profiles of the local high school graduate who made it big elsewhere or who chronicled the performance of the high school team in the weekend’s basketball game. The people who - despite any preconceived notions people may hold - work for peanuts because they believe it’s important for the local community to be well informed. If that sounds hokey or a little too “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, so be it.
Like so many others, we had been hearing about the coronavirus, but it blew into our consciousness on Wednesday, March 11, 2020. That was the day the World Health Organization declared the rapidly-spreading virus was indeed a pandemic. Fallout followed swiftly. President Trump announced a ban on European travel that would begin in a mere two days. Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announced they had the virus. The NBA canceled a game when a coronavirus test for one of the players about to take the court came back positive. Then, the entire season was canceled.
—
It’s funny how some moments can be recalled with such clarity. I still see the gray cabinets in the breakroom at the newspaper office and my editor leaning against the counter on Thursday morning. We, like so many others around the country, were trying to figure out what to do with the momentous events of the night before. How would things work if someone on staff contracted the virus? What restrictions do we put in place for reporters going out into public spaces? What will the schools do?
The next day brought the answer. We first heard rumblings about individual schools closing “out of an abundance of caution” - a phrase we would come to hear often in the next few weeks. Then came the announcement from the governor’s office that every single school in the state would close for two weeks.
It was the beginning of two weeks to stop the spread.
I was told to take my work laptop home so that I could work from home for the next two weeks. We’ll play it by ear, my editor told me. Let’s see where we are in two weeks.
In two weeks, 2,218 people in my county had tested positive for the virus. Twenty-two had died.
Twenty-two. In two weeks.
Even now, the numbers are staggering. It became my job over those weeks of lockdown to track the numbers. Daily at noon, the Department of Health would update “the numbers.” Funny that we trained ourselves to think of it that way, as statistics not as the individuals and families facing illness and death because of a virus that no one had any idea what to do with. I would plug the data into my spreadsheets and use it to create graphics to help explain what was happening to our readers - as if any of us knew what was happening.
March to May was a blur. A marathon wrapped in sprint form for anyone trying to report the news. We were working from home but working harder than ever to report the stories of people we couldn’t meet in person. People like the owners of the local distillery who, faced with the forced temporary closure of their restaurant due to the lockdown, began using their equipment to make hand sanitizer instead of whiskey. Or a mom who wanted people to know she had extra food out on her porch for anyone who needed it, especially those who were strapped because their children were home from school.
There were a lot of stories of a community rising up during those days but it was against the constant drumbeat of death and illness. Looking back, I realize that I was probably working longer days during the lockdown than I did before or after those few months. There was a reprieve, of sorts, and a brief return to the office over the summer before the Delta wave sent us all home again until the spring of 2021. By then, vaccines and masks made it safer to be in the office.
Maybe, then, I shouldn’t have been shocked that as the urgency of the pandemic faded so did my love for the work I had been doing for most of my adult life. Something had turned during that time - and not just in me. For my part, I didn’t want to do the basics of my job - the interviews, going to meetings, attending events. But, the atmosphere had changed, too. Fueled by cries of “fake news,” local media began to be regarded with more suspicion. Some readers complained about what we were doing and challenged the facts we brought when they came into conflict with the conspiracy theory du jour. By the end of the year, I managed to find a new job with a nonprofit and I slowly phased out all of my newswriting by the time 2022 came to an end.
People ask if I miss it. I don’t except occasionally when a big news story breaks and I know that in a different time and place I may have been right there watching it happen. Strangely, I miss it on election nights when the company would buy pizza and we would track results coming in, writing stories fast on deadline so they could be in the morning paper.
There may come a day when I miss it, but that day is going to come after I reckon with what the past few years have done. Only recently did I begin to acknowledge that I not-so-simply burned out on my work. That burn-out happened against the backdrop of disillusionment with the church I had grown up in and making the difficult decision to leave. It was also in the wake of losing my grandmother less than two years before the pandemic and my father only months into 2022.
These humble words are a testament to where I was and a hopeful prelude to where I want to be. I want to love writing again. Right at this moment, as I am writing with a playlist from my online community playing in the background, I am more content than I have been in years. But, I know that I have to give it up for a season. Seeing these words appear on the computer screen as they flow from my mind to my hands is showing me how much I have yet to address from the trauma - and, I suppose, that’s what it has been - of the past few years.
I feel like I should end with a plan - not a conclusion, but a way forward. So, my fellow Art of the Essay workshoppers, if you read this, know that the next six months are going to be dedicated to refilling the tank, so to speak. I’m taking a spiritual formation class at church and plan to read promiscuously. Maybe I’ll pick up my guitar again. I’m terrible at it, but maybe what I need right now is a few badly played chords and the truth of a worship song.
All of this will build toward the Refine Retreat at the end of March. It will be a time to reflect on where I’ve been as much as a time to inaugurate a new season of writing or whatever other creative endeavors God puts on my heart.
Because there’s a lot I don’t know right now. There’s a lot I’ve forgotten and lost in the past five years. One thing I know and I know it for certain.
My Creator God created me to reflect him in my own creativity and he will restore all that’s been lost in the brokenness of this world. For now, I need to be quiet and listen.