United States
March 2023

It’s the transitional seasons of spring and autumn that remind us of the potential of new direction. Moving on from boiling humidity or frigid gusts, looking forward to the next inflection of late sunsets or serene hibernation. And yet spring has been muted for the three years before this one. In March 2020 I had sent a WhatsApp message to a Venezuelan doctor living in Barcelona. We met by chance on Mallorca just days before the world began talking of closures and cancellations, and on short notice he graciously brought me into his flat. With his two flatmates, we commenced a discordant season of rebirth defined by brief walks outside at the designated hour and applauding for healthcare workers at sunset, occasionally singing songs or eating dinner together to bring sanity to a bewildering time warp conundrum in those early days of COVID, wrought by the amount of time inside, if nothing else. I originally intended to continue on through Italy once borders opened ("only a few more days"...remember that feeling?). But eventually I accepted that my already heavily revised Mediterranean bicycle journey was, for the moment, done.

Writing about the jarring days of returning to the US got caught in a brainfog and couldn't be parsed - diseases, precautions, mixed messages. And just as they began to settle, they were scattered alongside protests against the killing of George Floyd, where others could say more eloquently what I sought to express. And the presidential election, too, brought countless thoughts, but rarely more than trite unproductive exasperations. Frustration and confusion mounted as month-by-month I shuffled through what to do next. Uncertainty slouched on. For years. Even 2022 didn't feel normal. As late as last summer, I regularly carried rapid test kits in my daily backpack and wore a mask in practically all public spaces, and I wasn’t alone. So, yes, it's been a while. It would be all-to-easy to slip into an exhausting litany of complaints and angry rants, but we fill time in the beginning of the year with optimistic catharsis about growth and goals while reflecting on the cheerful anecdotes of the prior months, packaging and storing hardship in a finite way to be, hopefully, forgotten. But 2022 simply wasn't very good, and I'm embarrassed about what I failed to do. Like most of us, I gave the two prior years a pass, knowing full well I was one in a society lurching from one variant to another peering toward the future of new normality unarrived. 2022 was supposed to be about stabilizing, balancing, wrapping up the recovery and reestablishing.

Not that there weren't glimmers of joy reconnecting with the full faces of friends unseen since masks and distances became unexpected accessories and discourse. Some of our intersections last occurred on continents far away. But the forward steps of renewal and growth in a period so ideally made for progress - while pausing life for a pandemic - were stalled. All despite reflecting more on my career - and applying to more jobs - since 2020 than perhaps ever before. The result was sliding even further away from opportunity, from potential, from possibility, living temporarily here and there, income temporarily here and there, as wanderers do. 2022 brought fewer interviews than 2021, and each resulted in swifter silence and darker dismissal. Even social enrichment was rarer despite a world open in ways not known just months prior. It was not the year I wanted, COVID or not.

So my resolution is to give myself grace. I seethe in frustration at how little this limbo has offered to a vagabond in situ, fully aware that mimicking others’ judgment, internalizing their derision even as I attempt to understand my shortcomings, is ultimately self-sabotage. But lacking agency may be the most confounding emotion. In the end I always owe myself more than the callous external fools, an optimist of multitudes, aware of my worth, aware that the field to go forward unapologetically remains fertile. Somewhere. Good riddance to the prudent detractors. Onward with the yeasayers, wherever they are.

COVID was something new. And in the way it reset the world, I took a chance to try something new. The middle of a pandemic when everyone's (non white-collar, non essential) careers were flatlining turned out to a be a great time to test out other kinds of work, a vagabond approach to the world that has served me well; the opportunity cost was basically zero. So I was an online telephone pollster. I cycled to a small tourist town to pour wine and wash dishes. I scored distance learning exams while I applied for "real" jobs (as I’ve done off-and-on for a decade), then worked supporting vaccination sites. When that work diminished, I started collecting data for a contractor to a Big Tech name we all know, both by driving and on foot. I can't say it hasn't been without strife and frustration moving between motels and housesitting and guest bedrooms, but stretching my mind in new ways soothed some of the blow of multiple interview rejections and the malaise of confusing days.

Confusion hasn’t left - far from it, in fact - but I still owe COVID a strange thank you. In a way, it affirmed the resilience and optimism I have within and allowed me more chances to express it. In a time when many - most perhaps - were afraid, I concocted a cheerful precautionary confidence. I aim to keep sharing it. It’s true that I remain more convinced than ever that I don’t belong Stateside, and like so many of us it squarely interrupted my grander ideas and relationships. But those, too, I will reaffirm and recultivate. Little by little, gracias a COVID.