I just got out of a meeting with a team of leadership direct reports which always starts with a breakout room of themed round robin share sessions (I know, I know…blame California, maybe?). Today’s theme: to share something we are looking forward to professionally, something personally, and how we are feeling starting a new year with those topics/goals/thoughts in mind. A coworker of mine, who has always been the human embodiment of happiness and…dare I say…joy?…in the workplace, fully broke down, confessing how hard it is to be staring down yet more pandemic, to be backsliding into deepened mask mandates and testing scarcity and isolation when we all hoped for a brighter 2021 this time last year, never considering 2022 could dawn with the ceremony of Groundhog Day. I found myself trying to hide that I was straight-up weeping along with her as she stated “I just have so much pandemic fatigue, I don’t even know how to handle this anymore.” Woman, me too.
It’s been an insanely long 22 months of this, a full 16 of which I have gone radio-silent here (not that the preceding six months were prolific from a writing standpoint). In that time, I spent ten months quarantining in Minnesota with my parents; returned to Silicon Valley to grit my teeth through the last three months of my lease; relocated officially to the Twin Cities with the full support of my employer…and found that somehow, moving away for four and a half years meant both everything and nothing had changed in Minneapolis.
I’m tired.
And I don’t even know if I can blame the COVID pandemic for my exhaustion. I think that I somehow blocked out just how frigid Minnesota can be in January - the harsh brilliance of a subzero sun obfuscating just how intolerably bitter the world outside my window is. Today is the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, and democracy feels perilously divisive. Last summer, wildfires raged less than 500 miles from my Midwest idyll and Minnesota suffered its driest summer in decades - forcing climate change down our throats along with the hazy smog from the fires’ far-flung smoke. My beloved hometown became an epicenter (and, dare I say, a national embarrassment?) for racially-fueled dialogue, heartbreak, and despair. And today, after nearly a year of vaccine-fueled optimism, the Twin Cities reintroduced a sweeping mask mandate after hitting multiple days of record highs for COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
This meandering laundry list of complaints is not how I planned to return to this space. In fact, just yesterday I downloaded a full archive of the site, with plans to take it offline permanently - thinking that the era of flinging my words into the digital ether had come to an end. Then I cried my way through a Zoom meeting and realized that maybe I’m not quite done after all. It feels kind of appropriate, actually, that now that I’m back in Minneapolis, it’s time for Minneapoliz to enjoy yet another renaissance. TBD - potentially more to come - but until then, holy shitballs on toast, hang in there, campers.