A 2020 Day Before Christmas Vacation
My vacation started yesterday and was put on pause today. With two instructors, I agreed to help out their classes with research. I thought everything was set, and they would give me the link.
Assuming turned out to be my big mistake. To be fair, instructors are burnt out, workloads exceeding realistic expectations for online learning. I chalk it up to a mix-up in communication and thought nothing of it. I kept working, making headway with a project but ran into something else, something beyond a ‘personality conflict.’ Today just proved a microcosm of 2020, and I am not angry, although that emotion burned for a little while. Anger, I read somewhere, is information. Part of my job involves evaluating information, and I had a habit of repressing and repressing until one day, I lashed out. It was bad in junior high, a small blast in adulthood, until this year, I had to layout all out: Anger, sadness, and fear.
At the beginning of all this, while adjusting to the lockdown, going back and forth with the nursing home for any communication, one word kept emerging over and over again. Agency. My eyes would open, more early morning light coming through with each successive March day; I would say ‘I have agency’ like it’s a prayer.
Any sense of being in-control for anyone got tossed in the air like flung pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For my brother, it’s action, his version of agency, while I struggled to figure that one out for me. Trying to have a measure of control, to make choices even if people wouldn’t call it a choice, have a version of assertiveness grounded in some belief in a scripted response (‘When you do X, I feel Y.’) For the past few months, I felt like things were out of my control, and I had few options at midlife. On bad days, I would drive to the cemetery to visit my parents, well their plot, and look around at the headstones. Very few do not have artificial flowers, some have extras like angel figurines, stuffed toys, rosaries, and I remember crypt had race medals, all trinkets of the living.
I looked around to see people who may have once had dreams, worried about bills and faced with reconciling their choices at the end, the choice to act or not, the choice to speak up or not, always choices grounded in the sense of agency. Today, nothing went right; while working from home, during a year, I tested out the boundaries of what library service can do within protocols about service shifting according to provincial guidelines. My last day of work went much like 2020 with torn down to the foundations to build back up next time.
