Blame It on COVID

This week on the podcast, we are talking about our experiences living through the COVID pandemic. It’s hard to believe, but it’s actually been two years since the government here in Texas (and pretty much everywhere else)  shut everything down for what we thought would be a few weeks of working from home and limiting our forays out into the world. What the heck happened? No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to get into the politics or debates over COVID and whether it’s real or whatever. The fact is that the last two years have changed us – our health care, our economy, our work, our schools, our travel, our leisure, right down to our everyday lives. So where are we now, and how are we doing in wake of all the drama, misinformation, fear, and confusion? How did we make it through, and where are we headed?

While I do want to talk about all of this on the podcast, I know there isn’t enough time in the world to say everything there is to say on the topic. Rather than repeat the same things over and over, I thought I’d spend some time on the blog today sharing a couple of things I did during the pandemic that I think might have literally saved my life – from more than just COVID.

Before the pandemic, before the lockdowns, facemasks, and toilet paper shortages, I ran a little company called Crafty Neighbor and an off-shoot I named Crafty Neighbor Travel. Between the two, I organized and orchestrated crafting events including classes, crops, retreats, and even scrapbooking cruises. Aside from the cruises (we’ll talk more about that in a future episode!), one of my favorite services was hosting a weekly crafting event (crop) in my home every Thursday. Every week, I would provide a pot of coffee or soft drinks and enough table space for a small handful of crafters to get together and do their thing. Originally hosted through Meetup.com, it was a great way to socialize, learn from each other, and make new friends. And make new friends, I did…I met so many crafters and we had so much fun. Many of those crafters eventually became some of my closest friends.

To say that COVID devastated my business would be an understatement. The cruise industry, my primary field of expertise, was decimated. While the cruise industry was under a CDC No Sail Order for over 15 months, I might have been at home twiddling my thumbs, but instead, I spent 18 months as the primary caregiver to my mother, who has dementia. While other people were still working, albeit, from home, my time was focused on getting my mother the medical care she needed, and making arrangements for her long-term needs. I had no income, and I didn’t even know if it would eventually return because we didn’t know if the cruise industry would ever come back. On top of that, I missed my only source of social activity – my Thursday crop group.

Luckily for me, I am not afraid of technology, and so from the moment I first learned about the lockdown here, I started plotting ways to be with my friends without actually being with my friends. The easy answer was Zoom, and so our Thursday Zoom Crop was born. To say that this weekly virtual gathering was a life-saver would be a massive understatement. I was trapped here in my home with my husband, my college-student niece, my mentally-impaired mother, and two dogs that hated each other – one of which was not housebroken. It was all I could do to make myself get out of bed every day, and more than once I considered the possibility of just getting in my car and driving far, far away. But of course, I didn’t, and I have my Zoom friends to thank for that.

We started as just our usual group of stay-at-home moms and grandmas who usually came together in person for a few hours of crafting on Thursdays. We started at 10 AM and were usually done by 4 PM or so. As the weeks went by, we had new faces join our ranks…friends, friends of friends, and even a few who we knew, but who had never joined us before and now suddenly could because they were working from home. As the group grew larger, the time we were online grew longer. We celebrated National Scrapbook Day with a three-day, non-stop Zoom crop that allowed participants to come and go as they pleased, and had us crafting well into the wee hours of the night. As the months dragged on, we settled into a rhythm that felt as natural as getting together in person had, and it made the few times that we were able to meet in person all the more special.

One of the projects I worked on during that time was my COVID journal. I knew early on that we were living through a historic moment, and I wanted to document it from my own family’s perspective. As a genealogist and scrapbooker/family historian, it was important to me to leave a personal record of our lives, so I came up with the idea of keeping a creative journal in a small traveler’s notebook. I invited my Zoom companions to join me, and we even set a few “prompts”, including a few pulled directly from my 365 Project from a few years back. It was a great way to spend our time in quarantined isolation.

Many of us kept up with the journaling project for several months, adding on more prompts when the original list was completed. Slowly but surely, the others lost interest, but I kept my journal going, adding to it daily for several months and filling up multiple traveler’s notebooks. Eventually, my daily entries dwindled to weekly, and then even less often than that, until finally I only added to it when something important happened. I finally ended it in November of 2021, having filled up 6 travelers' notebooks with stories of our daily lives, shortages, cancellations, business closings, politics, and more. It’s probably one of the longest ongoing projects I’ve ever tackled, and I’m so glad I did it.

Between the Zoom meetings and the journaling project, I had something that held my attention and gave me something to focus on besides the death of my business or the chaos and unpleasantries in my home. The Zoom meetings gave me back my friends, and gave me a safe place to share my frustrations with the status quo, while the journal allowed me to vent, document, and come to terms with what was happening in my life and the world around me. I honestly believe that if I hadn’t been able to utilize those two outlets, I might have cracked.

The Zoom meetings have also allowed me to spend more time with my daughter than I ever could before. In addition to our Thursday crops, Christen and I have been meeting virtually almost every Sunday while we do our weekly setup in our planners. It started because we needed to plan a few family events, but it has become a weekly habit that I love.  We get to spend time together without having to leave our own homes, and it is time I would not have been able to spend with her if we couldn’t do it online. I hope that never stops. I think my friends feel the same. A few months ago, while on our Zoom chat with my crafty friends, several of them mentioned that they hoped the Zooms would continue, even after the fear of COVID was lifted. I was a bit amused by the idea and agreed it might be fun just to keep meeting online indefinitely. 

Even though a lot of good has come from my COVID experience, like many, I have a bit of PTSD, depression, and anxiety because of it, and it’s going to take a long time to heal. Fortunately, the last two years have taught me that I can be flexible, even when I think I’ve come to the end of my rope. Two years of COVID have taught me that nothing is guaranteed and that we have to enjoy and cherish each moment as it happens, because it may never come again. I have learned that there is always more than one way to do things, and sometimes all it takes is a little ingenuity.  We’ve also learned that there is more than one side to every story, and we need to all work on being more tolerant of each other. We’ve learned to live without some of the goods and products we used to take for granted. I know we have all learned that we can work from home, go to school through our computers, and meet with each other in a virtual environment right from the comfort of our own homes. And while we anxiously look forward to more face-to-face meetings with our friends and family, we have learned to incorporate virtual meetings into our lives, too. It has become common…even normal.

What helped you get through the COVID pandemic? How did you change your usual routines to work virtually? Are you still doing those things? We’d love to hear about it. Comment below or join us on our Facebook Group MMC Chat.