Quarantine Hangover
Around Bay Saint Louis, there are signs everywhere of people and businesses returning to normal. I walked into Claiborne Hills yesterday and didn’t see anyone wearing a mask. As much as grocery shopping used to be meditative to me, I have only gone a handful of times in the past two months and each time was stressful.
I’m on a Facebook thread of merchants here and over the past two weeks, each post about reopening ranged from the gleeful to the cautiously optimistic. People are wanting to return to normal.
Each city, county, and state is posting new rules, new criteria, new ways to return to normal. Restaurants can open but only with pick up, casinos still cannot open open despite the large one down the street’s blinking “Opening Very Soon” marquis.
On Instagram, there is a BBC ad for a contact tracing app and how it works. The post said, “You might be asked to download a contact tracing app” to monitor movements and alert you if someone has been in close proximity to a person who has Covid-19.
This year – 2020 – was supposed to be a BIG year for me and many of my artist friends, who could feel in their bones that finally our day had come – recognition, revenue, respect – for the work we have been doing. Instead, on March 13th, the day I kept Tin home from school before the quarantine had officially begun, 2020 seemed disguised as a giant pause button.
PAUSE what you are doing, and then we will resume.
Only now that the quarantine is easing, and the masses are biting through their invisible bits, I look around for normal, and think it has left the house.
The nonprofit I was building – a place to gather, commune, and heal – must be reimagined. My BIG year must be reimagined. I would have told you two months ago I was putting in place many intertwined expressions of my life’s work.
2020 at 100 Men Hall would yield a mix of fantastic music, beautiful cultural celebrations, and a roof to commemorate all life events. For me personally, 2020 would push my writing and my community further along.
Now I see the button doesn’t read PAUSE but instead STOP!
STOP what you are doing, it needs to be reimagined, it needs to yield different results, it needs to bring out something else in you – not what was readily available. There is something else waiting to be born.
As people begin hanging their OPEN signs on their doors, mine is staying closed. However I am supposed to be in the world is unclear once again, and until the mist clears, I’m not coming out. I see normal has changed, why don’t they?
