It’s been roughly 500 days since I’ve seen another person I’m kidding, but it’s almost the end of May, and in my brain, time doesn’t really mean anything anymore. Unless you count the fact that I track my shipments from all the random shit I’ve ordered online recently, then I know what day it is if a package is coming for me.
For much of this time, I kept thinking I’ll get back to writing. That has yet to happen until this very moment. Like many people, when this quarantine initially happened, I was not in a good headspace. I was craving human connection. I’m an introvert, but I wanted my people. I desperately wanted/needed to see my students and couldn’t. It was hard. Yet here we are at the end of May, and I feel like I’m adapting. Maybe even getting my creative flow back. It’s been a while.
The past two years I’ve done a lot. It was overwhelming, and I times I know I lost part of myself but was also recreating part of myself. I was swamped learning new things that I didn’t have time to connect to old things I love, like writing or creating new things. This wasn’t necessarily bad; my master’s degree taught me a lot about education and how to make the education system better. It also taught me a lot about reflecting on who I am as a person and educator and how I can take that self-reflection and create a more equitable education system for my students. This takes up a lot of emotional and mental space, though. I also feel like I went through a strange mourning period for the parts I was losing. Not that changing my mindset about education or equity is a bad thing, but my old ways of thinking had been a part of me for so long I really had to sit with them and let the old ways go correctly. I had to figure out who I was now.
The week of the last class of my master’s degree was supposed to be March 14th. We ended up moving the class online as this was the same week the Coronavirus really started making headlines in the U.S. That was also the week my school closed and decided to go on “extended Spring Break” for two weeks. We closed before I got to say a proper goodbye to my students. We had one more day of school left before Spring Break, and we canceled that day. This was also the same week I found out I was pregnant. To say that week was the biggest roller coaster of emotions would be an understatement.
Needless to say, as many of us, I have been in the midst of a lot of conflicting emotions. I’m grateful for so much, anxious, happy, and very sad all at the same time. So here I am 17 weeks pregnant (growing a human during a pandemic, wtf?), technically on summer break with no more grad school, finally finding my stride with this social distancing thing, and trying to figure out who I am again. I hope to start writing more and figuring out the direction of my blog.
This year has been a blessing and a curse, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next for me.
Flourishing Boldly 