You can see where my Medium writing stopped back in 2020. March 16. Just three days before California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the shelter-in-place order as COVID-19 washed over the world.
I will never forget that moment. I was in the newsroom, gathered around one computer screen with my coworkers as we watched the live press conference. We were normally a rowdy crowd, but that day, we were silent.
What did it mean? When would the order lift? Did he say?
We toggled the video play bar back and forth, trying to find the exact moment we must have missed, when Newsom said the order would end. We realized he never shared that.
I went home to my family that afternoon, and my little girl squeezed me with all her might. She’d heard the news while riding in the car with her dad and thought I was going to be trapped inside the newspaper building until the governor had deemed it safe for society to emerge. She was old enough to understand that something big and scary was happening but little enough to feel the terror of uncertainty and helplessness as only a child can. I squeezed her in return.
No, baby. I’m right here. I would have come home no matter what.
My team and I talked on the phone, collaborating together remotely for the first time on a story we’d publish that night. It was bizarre to have my husband’s help, his voice nearby as I went about my work. It’s now bizarre to think that that was bizarre.
So began my transformation. As many plunged into a jobless existence, sinking deeper into depression, food and drink, I worked more than I ever had in my entire life. Sixteen- to eighteen-hour days on deadline. I, too, unknowingly sank into depression and drink, but the pit of anxiety burning a hole through my stomach didn’t allow me to eat.
What would happen if I took a break and missed some information that someone desperately needed? There was no stopping, no rest. I had gone from reporting on local parades or valedictorian features to watching everything that came out of the county health department with something close to feral attention. My hips became bony points jutting out of my body. I had no idea how nurses were coping. They were probably drinking too.
And I stopped writing on Medium, which was too bad. In my third month writing for the platform, I’d earned over $800 in that month alone and published (at least what I considered) a viral story.
I soon realized I didn’t have the luxury of writing for fun or attempting to make it a full-time gig. My attention had to turn elsewhere, to the job that was paying me certain wages to barely support a family of five. As it would happen, bars are the least essential of businesses, so my husband’s job — and the tips we lived on — were gone. I sent money to my sister, a hairdresser and a single mom. I took my dog for walks to empty parks with grass that hadn’t been mowed in months and let a few tears slide where no one could see me.
At least we still had a toilet paper supply… In our town, the hoarding of goods hadn’t touched the stores yet. I had only heard about it from a former boss, who lived in a wealthy metropolis. The rich had been padding their bunkers, a grabby move that in part played a significant role in the shortages that later rippled out to the ag core. I only realized we weren’t immune when I went grocery shopping and saw the flour dust on empty shelves. There was a quiet panic in the store as people remembered their manners but didn’t speak much as they searched, aisle by aisle.
Then the killing of George Floyd and the protests. The Bay Area, my reporting jurisdiction, was ripe with them. I ventured to my childhood hometown for the first time in years to cover one such protest. Helicopters filled the sky as thousands marched in the street and jostled me around in the crowd. Businesses were boarded up. This place was unrecognizable.
Image by iStockPhoto.com
As I stood in the dying grass of a downtown park and listened to a protester on a bull horn, I glanced behind me at the empty swings. A memory of my high school sweetheart pushing me on those very swings flashed through my mind. I had returned home at last in the midst of chaos as a messy adult to the place where once there was only simple and free childhood love.
And then the Lightning Complex fires rained down and the sky turned to ash, like a picture-perfect apocalypse. And we thought things were bad in 2016 when clowns were on the streets and in the Oval Office…
But even in reporting through the turmoil, beauty would soon shine through the cracks of our broken pieces.
One day, I saw something that made me pull over while driving through the backroads of town as the sun set. The harvesters were gathering bright-red tomatoes, and while they worked under the fading sky, I realized a few of them were there with mariachi instruments to offer music during the labor. A grin spread across my face. Immediately, I called our photographer, Rick. When he arrived, we stepped over rows of raised soil and twisted vines to ask if we could take pictures. As dirt poured into my shoes, I kicked myself for donning the black ballet flats I always wore to work.
Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash
Surprisingly, they agreed to be photographed. Rick captured the musical occasion of those otherwise unseen people who were carving out an existence along the greenbelt, harvesting our food in the midst of a pandemic. He captured their laughter at the end of a strenuous 12- or 14-hour shift, their white hooded coveralls stained with dirt. I felt grateful that they’d welcomed us to be a part of it all.
But one picture in particular — one of an older gentleman with kind eyes and a subtle smile as he leaned over the rail of the harvesting machine — made us all pause when Rick showed it to us back in the newsroom. The man must have been someone’s abuelo, beautifully alive and soulful, with the soil of life caked into the wrinkles of his weathered face. I knew then that he was far more important than Biden or Trump or the politics that divided us all.
He was front-page community news.
It became clear that I had to stop letting fear and anxiety drive me; I needed to stand back a moment to see what I was part of. It was all so much bigger. I had the privilege of writing stories about neighbors bringing food to one another, friends visiting cancer patients’ homes just to wave through the glass, or small-town businesses that turned their liquor supply into free hand sanitizer. Even a simple story about residents placing stuffed animals in windows for children to find on “bear hunts” showcased how united we actually were despite the divisive conversations that swept across social media.
When it was time to go to press, I reviewed my bear hunt article on the page proof. It would have been a puff piece in any other time or place. But as I looked at the paper, pages full of people showing up for each other — the harvesters joyfully toiling away to the tune of an accordion — I felt powerfully moved by my community. Even if they claimed to be divided by parties in a political realm, I was not wholly convinced they were in the places that mattered. It’s what I chose to see in them. It’s what made me start eating and stop drinking and begin to write for me again.
I wrote a headline that sank into me deeper than its simple meaning. It spoke to our human spirit and resilience in a way I assumed only a few would understand I was going for. But it fit perfectly across the four columns I needed to fill, so I wrote it all the same for the ones who would get it:
“Going on a bear hunt: We’re not afraid.”
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Tai’s Captures on Unsplash