I’m someone who needs to get lost in a task or project. I need time to mull, to drift, to dig in and forget about everything else in my life. I put on music, fix myself some tea, and get in the zone. This is particularly true when I write. Once I had kids, this became challenging, to say the least. Now that we’re in a full-blown pandemic, forget about it.
That’s not to say that I never write now, but it’s pretty rare. Working from home while trying to nurture, educate, and entertain young children, while being at home essentially 24/7, even with a supportive partner, is not conducive to losing yourself in a writing project.
We all know someone who is learning a new skill or writing the great American novel during this time, but I suspect that most of us don’t want to hear from that person. Don’t worry—it isn’t me. I think about my manuscripts, the files moldering on my hard drive, neglected, save for a few ideas scribbled in a fraying notebook, but I don’t open them.
There’s no way to know when we’ll find a new path forward, one in which we can all go out and enjoy the world, return to our support networks, and get some room in our lives beyond what just feels like survival tactics, both literally and figuratively. (Notice I didn’t say, “Return to normal”, because what we’ve been doing all along never was, but that’s another blog for another time.)
I worry about what this time means for women and non-binary writers as a whole. I’ve seen people noting on Twitter that the majority of the books that come out in the fall are going to be by men, and honestly, they’re not wrong. So many of us who were already juggling far too much are now drowning in additional caregiving and emotional labor, while a number of our male counterparts are shut up in their offices, churning out pages. The pandemic is laying our gendered imbalances bare and widening the gap in achievement between the sexes.
I don’t know what the answer is or if or when we’ll find our way, but I ordered myself a new notebook, so I can continue to write down my ideas, and hopefully one day soon find a way to use them.
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