Pandemic Reflections
A Year Later, the Fact That We’re Here at All Is a Miracle
Last March, I was about to head into a new phase of my life. Turns out we all were.
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Before the world as I understood it was flipped on its head one year ago, I thought I was heading toward a different phase of my life. Things weren’t perfect by any stretch, but I could feel a shift on the horizon. I was preparing to move. My student loans, the bane of my existence and the subject of a solid chunk of my writing, were still annoying but no longer totally diminishing my quality of life. In fact, I was beginning to pay some of those loans off. (That doesn’t change the fact that my student loan lenders and oppressors can still die under the weight of widespread debt cancellation.)
For the first time, it felt like things weren’t going to be as hard, volatile, and stressful as I’d always known them to be. That I was finally going to escape many of the personal and financial burdens that were more reflective of conditions I was born into rather than ones I’d created. That as grateful I was for the life I already had, I was about to be able to live life a lot more freely — the…
