Hi everyone.

This is half letter, half rant, half diary entry. Yes, that’s 1.5 posts. I know. Don’t worry, it’s not THAT long.

All my posts through February and March were pre-written and scheduled in January. I haven’t written anything new since I found out there was such a thing as Covid-19.

All my great plans to be posting about Ireland and Spain while breezing through my Spring Semester classes that I’d worked SO HARD to prep into good shape last year specifically so they would be a breeze and leave me tons of free time to write and work on my PhD application are…. fucked.

As far as I can tell, everyone in the world is to a greater or lesser degree similarly fucked. I thought for a long time about what I could say here and every time I thought I knew, something changed.

Outside of China, it hit Korea hardest early on. When it started in Daegu I was still in Spain, and I figured I’d deal with it when my holidays were over. Then I got to the airport in Paris to discover that not only had my flight been cancelled but no one bothered to tell me or put me on a different flight. I had a pretty good idea that it was changed because Air France announced the cancelling of all flights through China, but when I checked the flight matrix, it looked like my flight was just changed to a direct flight – Paris to Seoul.

I thought about telling you about the 9 hour airport drama of getting on a new flight, but it seems trivial now that people are delayed days without news, or even completely blocked from returning home.

Then I got here (Korea) and I stayed in my apartment for 14 days. Quarantine wasn’t mandatory yet, but my University asked us not to come to the campus for 14 days, and the weather was bitterly cold, no good for going out, plus all my plans to visit other cities seemed unwise as our case count climbed higher and higher every day. Public schools and universities were all delaying the start of the school year (normally March 1 in Korea).

I read constantly. Trying to understand this new and strange thing. I thought at first it might be like SARS or MERS and I held of on writing anything because I wanted to see what the resolution would be. By the time my 14 days was over, it was painfully obvious the resolution was a long long way off. However, I still couldn’t write here because by then I had permission to return to campus and the school had finally decided on an online class platform.

A week of total insanity where we all tried to figure out what this was, how to use it, being horribly frustrated with everything. The school trying to tell us all “it’s only for 2 weeks” and I kept trying to convince everyone it would be at least the whole spring semester and possibly longer.

I thought about regaling you all with the horrors of teaching with a language barrier in a platform designed for meetings (not training sessions or classrooms) and totally inadequate technology, but by now there are hundreds of such tales from teachers of every level around the world. The Korean public k-12 schools will start their online classes this week and then there will be even more stories out there.

I got sick for about a week. It was only a little sick. I had a horrible non-stop headache and horrible sore throat that I thought were the result of the new online class format. I got a little cough, and a lot of fatigue, and I learned how to teach class from my bed in my pajamas. I don’t have a desk in my apartment. I’m feeling much better now. I don’t think it was Covid, but I didn’t ask to be tested, I just self quarantined until I was symptom free for over 72 hours. I tried to buy a thermometer, but I can’t get one, so I have no idea if I had a fever.

And now I’m allowed back on campus. I have energy again. I am more informed. I feel like an amateur epidemiologist. I’ve done a 4 week intensive online crash course. I thought, “I should write something.”, but I still don’t know what say.

Korea is doing better, but in many ways only because so many Western countries are doing SO MUCH WORSE. I hate the way the President and PM and schools and everyone in charge has been handing out information one/two weeks at a time. The understanding from the WHO and top scientists that this is a long-term project, that a flat curve lasts longer than a tall curve, has been public for what feels like AGES and yet in Korea, they keep acting like it will all be over any minute now. Just another week …. maybe two. Then when the time is up, they say it again.

While everyone in the West is still worried about mass graves seen from space or ice-rink morgues, I’m worried about idiots who can’t go one spring without looking at cherry blossoms ruining all the hard work we did in March and starting a second wave.

Actually, I’m worried about a lot of things. Mostly my family in America where it appears that life is well and truly fucked. My parents, my sister, and her two kids live over there. I’ve heard so many stories from drive up veterinarian offices (they don’t want people to come in, but still want to treat urgent pet health care issues) to race arguments about whether black people can catch it (spoiler, they can, but that’s not stopping people on Twitter spreading lies). It’s a patchwork mess, and everyone I know who is in a different county or city, let alone state, is experiencing something else. Schools are cancelling the remainder of the school year, so many people are out of work that the unemployment graph actually broke. Many of my friends are either part of that spike or stuck in “essential” jobs that put their health at risk every day, and since most of them also have underlying health conditions, I’m basically expecting people I love to die before this ends, and those who survive to be financially crippled for years if not forever.

I am very full of emotions.

I distract myself with school and mindless TV as much as I can because if I think too hard about what is going on in the world, I cry.  Like, now.

I’m reassured by a multitude of therapists and psychiatrists that this is normal. That what we are experiencing is so big and so terrible that our poor little brains are just totally unequipped to handle it. The amygdala is in overdrive trying to decide what fear response to use for this unseen threat – fight? flight? freeze? WHAT? cycling us through an endless, relentless roller-coaster of emotions that we may not even recognize as related to the pandemic if we don’t listen carefully to ourselves. Grief is present. Grief for lost opportunities, lost jobs, futures… that’s a real thing. Anticipatory grief is a real thing too. Mostly people go through that when a loved one has a terminal illness. I’m grieving the loss of my life plan and I have some anticipatory grief because I am pretty sure I’ll loose someone I love and almost 100% sure I will lose someone I know. Then there’s depression, anxiety, dissociation, mania. There’s also a collective trauma being built that we will all own the aftereffects of for the rest of our lives. You don’t heal from grief and trauma, you just learn to let it take less space and cause less pain gradually over time, and we are nowhere near the part of this where we can even START to do that.

I’m trying hard to let myself feel my feelings, but also not to let them drown me, and not to forget to be grateful for good things, not forget to enjoy things even while I worry and fear and hurt. It’s hard.

My job is something I can focus on. I work to remake lesson plans into the ill-equipped web format I’ve been ordered to use. I read a lot of advice from other educators online. I spend a lot of time trying to remember my students are so young and so ill-equipped to handle what is happening in their lives right now that I have to be calm, and gracious, and forgiving and encouraging, but I feel like I’m not getting enough of that for myself.

I think my friends/family are trying, but we’re all so scared and unsure that no one can really be “the adult” who listens and supports and comforts. I don’t want a therapist for this (yet), I just want someone to listen to me rant and then tell me comforting things. It’s not easy. No one is unaffected by this. The ring theory does not work when everyone is in the same ring!

I also started an art project before my winter holidays, another paper sea creature. It’s incredibly intricate and I spend at least one day a week happily cutting tiny pieces of paper and checking colors and patterns until I’m happy with one. It’s coming along nicely. Some people paint, draw, or use coloring books. Some people are cooking, or making music, or writing, or making videos, or holding virtual karaoke rooms. Art helps.

Another thing I can focus on is my hobby of travel and photography. I can’t travel right now, but I can dream about it and remember it. I started an Instagram challenge to post a landscape photo every day from a different place in alphabetical order. I call it the #alphabetlandscapechallenge and it’s really excessive, but I needed something complex and detailed to focus on.

I met a lady from Malaysia on Insta the other day and we talked about travel plans for like an hour. At the end she said she felt guilty for dreaming about travel while so many people in the world were worried about COVID, their health and employment.

Someone, somewhere is always suffering in the world. Even before COVID there were people in fear of their health, dying for want of medicine, unable to feed their children, unable to find a job or working for slave wages. I believe it is important never to forget these things, but also to not let them destroy us. I don’t usually go in for quoting religions of any kind, but even Jesus agrees with me on this one, guys.

Now more than ever we need beautiful, creative things. We need dreams of what will come after that are better than what came before. So, maybe that’s what I want to say.

If you take anything away from this rambling letter, then take these 3 things:

Everyone is in this together.
It’s ok to not be ok.
It’s important to keep dreaming.

Now, #staythefuckhome and #flattenthecurve.