I spent the first long months of the pandemic in suburban Maryland alone and away from my family. The world beyond my door became a stream of timelines, a social media cascade of triumphs and accomplishments. Everyone else, it seemed, was leaping to new feats in baking, in writing, in everything. Meanwhile, the blank page waited for me, cursor blinking. I struggled to kindle a steady writing practice, to find my way through the suffocating pressure to Be Productive.
My days slurred into a routine: I hunched over a laptop, then leashed up my dog and wandered the tree-lined streets for hours, listening to audiobooks in a near-trance, the changing seasons marked in the changing grasses. There seemed so little to anchor myself to. My family tested positive in New York and my partner tested positive in Moscow, and I was supposed to—somehow— go about my days.
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Read More: A Partner With Cancer, a New Baby and a Pandemic: How I Learned to Live in a Tangle of Joy and Pain
As a forgetful, easily distracted person, I have always found comfort in lists. Lists of errands to run, emails to return, books to read. And somewhere, in the depths of my pandemic solitude, I began to list the ways in which other people had helped make space for my writing career. I wrote down my parents, who no matter how financially stretched or busy they were, never denied me a book from the Costco rack or a trip to my local library. A graduate-school mentor who put his faith in me and pitched my work for an exciting new anthology. A local friend who doesn’t write, or buy many books, who came over with a bottle of wine, a marked-up copy of one of my recently published stories, and a list of questions about how it came together.
Whenever I think of someone who’s supported or invested in my writing, in a big or small way, I put them on the list. To my surprise, I’ve never run out of names. The work of logging acts of kindness reminds me of what’s gotten me this far,…
Source : time
