Pandemic: What is Giving You Hope & Encouragement?

Posted by David Duhr in CoronaVirus      12 comments

Apr
12

Discussion question: We asked a few WriteByNighters what is giving them hope and encouragement during this COVID-19 pandemic. Their answers, with relevant links, are below. What’s giving you a boost these days? Let us know in the comments, and include links to any videos or articles you mention.

Many of us these days are finding plenty of reasons to cry, but we’re also looking for laughter anywhere we can find it. Some WriteByNighters have shared their experiences with us in related discussion posts, “What’s Making You Smile & Laugh” and “What’s Making You Cry, Happy & Sad.”

In this one, we want to find out what is providing you all with just a little bit of hope and encouragement today. A few have already shared some responses, which I’m posting below. (Not everybody has managed yet to find any; I think it’s important to share their replies too. You should feel free to share yours too, if you’re in the same boat.)

We’d love to hear from you, too: What is giving you a boost of hope and encouragement these days? Let us know in the comments, and include any relevant links.

All the helpers!  Everything from the Americans of Conscience checklist to new sites like While at Home, a clearinghouse for getting medical and other supplies to where they’re needed. The site includes a link to a relief fund, which itself includes links to organizations helping those in need.

— Elissa Malcohn

Seeing how everyone I know is weathering this moment, the different, creative, often heartbreaking ways they’re confronting their fears and worries. It’s a nice reminder that my life is full of wonderful, thoughtful people.

— Aaron Block, Yak Babies host

Not a lot, these days. Nobody I know is sick, so that’s reassuring.

— Jerry Schwartz

What gives me hope–remembering another hopeless time:

In 2003, I was named NY educational envoy to Korea. Along with visiting schools and museums, I was taken to the DMZ on what happened to be the morning after the 1st shooting event in 25 years. As if the barbed wire fencing wasn’t dreary enough, fat dark clouds sunk low above us. In the absence of people for over a half century, the DMZ had become a wetlands sanctuary. Pushing off a bed of reeds, a lone crane began his flight, first to the North then circling to the South. I remember thinking that if a crane was free to travel from one half of Korea to the other and back, eventually, people would too. Now, I walk along the near empty streets of COVID-ravaged Queens snapping photos of the Bradford pear trees lush with blooms. I listen as silver mourning doves croon love songs to their mates while jays argue over territories and I think, if spring can return, surely, so will we.

— Adrienne Leslie

The helpers I described, and the hope that collectively we can emerge from this with some greater sense of how we want to live, what truly matters, and what we’re willing to put up with in our larger social order. I see so many people reconnecting with different parts of themselves they didn’t have time to nurture in The Old Days, people taking up new hobbies, learning new things, finding new forms of self-expression. I hope we can hold on to that and not get lost in the endless grind that seemed inescapable before.

— Cecily Sailer, WBN coach/consultant

The stories of people helping each other in any small or big way.

— Adriana Cloud, WBN coach/consultant

Despite the utter failure of leadership on the national level in this country, the beautiful, amazing, sometimes totally unbelievable ways people are showing up for each other on the ground gives me hope and encouragement, whether it’s small kindnesses like bringing each other food or larger, more concerted efforts like these.

— Tom Andes, WBN coach/consultant

Shut-in by the shut-down. Demanded by executive order and peer pressure, we venture out-of-doors only by absolute necessity, keep several arm’s lengths away from fellow humans, and wear surgical masks lest our breaths prove lethal. Most people seem to see this as sharing the sacrifice for the sake of the common good. Pulling together, they say, we’ll endure until we beat this pandemic and life returns to normal.

But I don’t see it that way. Life will never return to “normal.”

Now this is a blog about writing, and so I won’t get into arguments over why I believe this COVID-19 event to be a pseudo-pandemic. I only mention it to offer why I am especially disturbed by what’s happening, over and above the presence of any virus.

This “pandemic” has been called “9-11 part II.” I believe that is true, and this current distress is an extension of that earlier watershed event. Indeed, this is the slow strangling of human freedom. The total-surveillance, police state envisioned by Mr. Orwell is leaving the shadows. In a bad flu season, it offers us a protective embrace sure to tighten until we suffocate.

For me, seeing this adds broken morale on top of quarantine, masks, and social distancing. If you want to begin to see why I feel this way, let me point you to this article written by economist and geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig.

Encouragement comes from feeling safe in the bosom of my family, where we can together endure the storm, at least for now. I thank the spirits that I earned enough over my working life to have retired early when I had to. We can live, and I am able to write.

On the writing side, I have learned enough and progressed enough that I can legitimately see the end of my WIP and anticipate the next ones. That is a reason for personal hope. And little extra projects, like this blog post, also help very much. All this represents the continuance of that self-expression an artist is compelled to make. I see it in my writers group. It is a joy in the way that taking a deep, clean breath is a joy.

— Ray Foy

I’m not encouraged in any way at this moment. The [Wisconsin primary] election was held today, face-to-face despite that the governor postponed it until June. The Republican Judges shot that down. They didn’t care that a lot of people will die because of their decision. We voted absentee, just in time, but a lot of people who applied for absentee ballots didn’t get them in time because polling places were short staffed, they couldn’t keep up with the sudden influx, and didn’t send them out.

I’ve been spending too much time obsessing on the virus; the infection numbers and the deaths. It kind of freaks me out that there is only one recovery in Wisconsin, and most states and most countries have none.

I’m so angry all the time from watching too much Facebook and all the politics and posturing while people die from the pandemic.

— David Lemke

Thank you for reading and contributing. We hope you’re staying healthy and staying safe.

This post is part of a series collecting the experiences of WriteByNighters during the COVID-19 outbreak. Here are links to the rest of these discussion posts:

What’s making you smile and laugh

What’s making you cry, happy & sad

What are you reading?

What are you writing?

How are you writing?

General discussion

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer and co-host of the Yak Babies podcast, and has written about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.

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