I see it’s been over a year since my last blog post. If you follow me on Facebook, I’ve kept up with the world a bit better there.
What happened to 2020? Are we all asking ourselves that, to one degree or another? My husband said at lunch today that he can’t quite believe it’s 2021. Will we think of these pandemic days as lost time? I hope not. For me, the past year has been fruitful, if not quite in the way I anticipated or would have planned.
Let me catch you up.
What I Learned About Life
I found out shortly before Christmas 2019 that I was pregnant with my second child. I had an easy time of it with my daughter, so I hoped for a repeat of last time. But for a variety of reasons, the first half of my pregnancy was a very scary time both physically and mentally. I’m happy to say everything turned out beautifully, but I feel like I went to hell and back several times in the first quarter of the year.
I also went to England in February, just before everything shut down. Lucky for us, we’d planned our trip early in the year, thanks to the pregnancy. It’s the last place I remember the world feeling normal. Hampshire—otherwise known as “Jane Austen Country” (it’s on the signs) will forever have my heart thanks to that.
My pregnancy stabilized around the time the lockdowns began at the end of March, and I think that’s part of the reason I’ve coped rather well with the pandemic. After what I went through early in the year, nothing else could seem so very bad. I learned quickly that if you have your health and your family and a roof over your head and food to eat, you can survive just about anything else.
I finished the second draft of my novel-in-progress in June. My husband was supposed to read it for me, but when I handed him the manuscript, he asked, “Is this book a downer?”
“I like to think of it as ultimately hopeful,” I answered (diplomatically). “But it’s set before and during the Civil War, so sad things do happen,” I said (honestly).
He has not read it yet. (And while I know husbands do not generally make great beta readers, mine happens to be great at working out sticky plot points.)
My baby boy was born in August, eleven days after the sudden death of my beloved dog. She had been with me for ten years, so she was at least eleven, but it’s always too soon to lose someone you love. I miss her most in the moments like the one I am living right now—alone in my office, writing. For ten years, she was my most constant companion and friend. It’s been six months, and I still look for her, still imagine I hear her somewhere just out of sight. Maybe I do.
What I Learned About Writing
I have learned a lot about the fragility of life in the past year and am making some changes to my writing life on the strength of that.
For the time being, I am setting aside the novel. I will come back to it one day, when the world and my own mind are more settled, when I once again have long stretches of time to ruminate and revise. I learned from Jane Austen that one does not have to write every day to be a writer. One can spend years not writing and come back to a novel abandoned decades ago and still turn out Pride and Prejudice. I’ve decided that the insistence on writing every day is terrible, terrible advice. Very few people can write every day. If nothing else, people get sick, or tired, or go on vacation or binge watch a show, all of which are important human being things to do.
I’ve given up the timeline, the need for speed, the immense stress of churning out something that will hit the unpredictable market in just the right way. Life is unpredictable. The idea that we could be in charge was always an illusion. My goals for my writing now are for it to be an authentic expression of my heart and to put something good and beautiful and useful into the world.
If you know me very well, you know that thus far I have found my career to be a bit of a disappointment, which has affected my self-esteem very poorly. I expected more of myself, and I believed others expected more of me. Shouldn’t I have found greater success by now?
I have learned over the past year to look not for my career, but for my purpose. My life’s work, I have come to believe, is to serve others through the written word, whether that means I write something that speaks to someone’s heart or recommend the words of another writer or help people to bring their own words to the page.
Last March, I responded to the National Women’s History Museum’s call for diarists to keep journals during the pandemic. While my entries have been less frequent since my son was born, I’ve written over 40,000 words, about half the length of a standard novel. I’m in it for the duration.
Since the last time I blogged, I have published in three Chicken Soup for the Soul books.
“Apparently,” I told my husband, “I’m good at writing short, encouraging things.”
“Well, what does the world need more right now?” he asked.
I like to think I’m helping, in my own small way.
I enjoyed writing those pieces. I enjoy writing essays and poetry and nonfiction and creative nonfiction and even, sometimes, novels.
My main criterion for the projects I take on now is joy. Does the thought of writing it bring me joy, does the work itself bring joy, and will the finished project bring joy to someone else? So often we are trained to think of joy, cheerfulness, happiness as shallow qualities, but I think of joy as a serious, deep condition of living in the world with hope.
Living in the world with hope right now is important. It’s how we’ll get through. If you are not able to hope, may you lean on someone else’s until you find your own. You can lean on mine.
One more thing about my work, going forward. For too long, perhaps my whole life, I have been possessed by that old American demon, productivity. Watching as the goal of productivity rather than survival has been elevated repeatedly in the middle of a collective trauma such as a global pandemic has finally exorcised it. A life is not built by an assembly line so that our obituaries can say we ticked all the boxes. Perhaps I have finally learned that my worth is not measured by my last grade, or my word count, or how much I have published. There is nothing wrong with rest. We need seasons where we stop for a time to determine where to go next. Rest is good and right. Sometimes people say that God doesn’t rest, but it’s right there in Genesis that God does too.
What I Learned About the World
I’ve read so many articles about the negative impacts of the pandemic, and while I regret them, while I have experienced some, though by no means the worst of them, all I can think is Yes. This is a global crisis of historic proportions. Were any of us going to get through unscathed? Don’t blame yourself for the ways the pandemic has affected your life, and I won’t either. Thoughtless things people share on social media aside, not everything that happens to us is our choice.
I think there is hope in understanding that we weren’t singled out for this. Every generation must fight its battles. Some are harder than others. One thing I’ve learned from history is that when you’re in the middle of the fight, you fight like it’s your job. Because it is. It’s okay to set other things aside. It’s okay if all you do is survive—so many won’t that survival itself is a gift that can bring us a deep sense of gratitude.
That’s what this year has taught me. I’ve been freed from many of the made-up rules I thought I had to follow.
As my mother likes to say of things like white shoes after Labor Day, “Somebody made that rule up.”
Remind me of these things when I forget, and I will remind you.
Thanks for sharing your journey, Courtney. I’m so glad all worked out well for your son and send condolences on the loss of your dog. It’s been a tough year in so many ways–I’m glad it’s brought you new insights. I think it has for many of us. In fact, on our TeachingAuthors blog, we started the year with a series of posts on “What did I learn in 2020 that will help me in 2021.” For several of us, it’s been that we’re more resilient than we realized. 🙂
I completely agree when you say: “I think there is hope in understanding that we weren’t singled out for this. Every generation must fight its battles.” In fact, that thought has really helped me through these difficult times. I look back on how my parents survived the deprivations of WW II when their town was occupied by German soldiers, and how my husband’s grandparents got through the Great Depression. They all got through their challenges–we can too.
Hugs to you!
Thank you on all counts, Carmela.
I have found such reserves of strength in thinking about what people went through before me. Even when I thought I might have to give birth without my husband due to restrictions at the hospital, I thought about how many babies (most of them, I would guess) in history were born without their fathers in the room and was able to feel grateful that my husband was HERE rather than halfway across the world. Luckily, by August the medical community had realized that having a birth partner was too important to restrict.
As terrible as this time has been, it’s helpful to be able to draw good things and useful lessons from it, too. I even learned to cut my own hair!
Haha. I now cut my husband’s hair. But not my own. 🙂