Lessons from loss and love.

Stories of COVID-19
8 min readOct 15, 2020

How I’ve learned to keep going, even in the darkest tunnel.

Photo by Mina Ivankovic on Unsplash

“We can do hard things, like be alive and love deep and lose all, because we do these hard things alongside everyone who has ever walked the Earth with her eyes, arms, and heart wide open.” -Glennon Doyle, Untamed

The weird thing about being alive during COVID is that life seems to go on anyway. Regardless of the state of the world, people are still having babies, getting married, losing jobs, gaining jobs, burying family members, creating, destroying, and celebrating life in whatever ways they know how. Even despite all this mess pressing in on us.

Life goes on.

Sometimes, the beauty of impermanence astounds me.

Today, I walked out onto my back porch to journal for the first time since before the smoke, and I realized I’d forgotten how good the air feels. I forgot how fresh and exquisite it is to feel it coat the inside of my lungs, and brush the outside of my body. I forgot how big and how vast the sky, how big and how vast our world, how big and how vast our choices.

Living inside four walls for so much time, I think, has made us all a bit short-sighted.

These last few months, whenever something goes wrong at work, I will hear my boss say, “Because nothing can go right in 2020.”…

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Stories of COVID-19
Stories of COVID-19

Written by Stories of COVID-19

My name’s Julia. I’m a writer, and these are my COVID-19 weekly letters of encouragement.