Journaling Can Process the Pandemic For Ourselves and Those to Come
Might I suggest keeping a journal (if you don’t already). I mean specifically a written one, electronic is okay but a tangible paper one would have a different staying power. This is something that will be remembered long after we’ve gone. Writing will also help you process things and may even help curb some anxiety. Be someone’s future primary source.
James Burnes, March 14, 2020
It was the most useful thing I saw on social media during that final week of near-normalcy. The U.S. COVID-19 case count barely numbered 2,000 and the death count remained, at least by official accounts, in the double digits. But a storm was coming, and James Burnes, a friend and anthropologist who works as exhibition coordinator at University of Oklahoma Libraries, knew that. If you were paying attention, you could almost feel the stillness, like the gathering of clouds just before all hell breaks loose.
He also knew that one day the storm would be over, that everyone who lived through it would be gone one day. The only thing left, other than the newspaper articles and aging TV footage, archived social media posts and the second-hand stories, would be our written accounts of it.
Four days later, I opened up a hardback journal with a spattering of entries more than a year old. I wasn’t writing for history, necessarily. I was writing for my children. And something more.
Life can change in an instant. Of course, I knew this. But I could not have imagined this. Not in my lifetime. A novel disease. The coronavirus, first discovered in China on the last day of 2019, has made its way around the world and changed everything. In just the last six days, public schools, universities and restaurants have closed. All major sports have canceled their seasons. Broadway has gone dark. Theme parks are shuttered, concerts indefinitely postponed. Grocery store shelves stand empty. The stock market has collapsed. I have nothing to measure this against. No context. I try not to panic. But how naïve I was to believe this was nothing more serious than the flu, that pandemics were the stuff of history and Hollywood.
Kristin Davis, March 19, 2020
Burnes has been journaling since junior high, he recently told me, long before he began poring over people’s handwritten accounts to study the past. He didn’t write to remember, he wrote because he felt compelled to write. I could relate to that. My grandmother gave me my first diary at age 8, and I loved that it held my private thoughts as well as a tiny lock and universal key possibly could. The beginning of my journaling also coincided with my parents’ divorce, and there on those small pages I scribbled out what I would much later come to recognize as grief.
“Some people journal as catharsis. You see it a ton in Civil War journals. For me, writing is a way of thinking. It’s the first time you’ve written something out of your head,” Burnes said.
Journaling “is not just a moment of reflection,” said Adrienne Parks, a history teacher in Warren, Texas, who has kept journals on and off much of her life. “You can argue that there is a mental health component. It’s a way to process.”
I slept all day yesterday. I don’t know if it is my mind’s way of dealing with all of this. I don’t know what I am most afraid of. Yes, I do. I am afraid that life as I know it – as I have always known it – will change forever. I am afraid I will lose my security and, by extension, my independence, that thing I have worked my whole life for.
Kristin Davis, March 22, 2020
Carol Atmar still remembers the gift she received from her father the Christmas she was in fourth grade. The small, five-year diary that came in a cedar box sparked a lifetime of journaling and a love of history and teaching.
“I have never forgotten the preface in that little book: ‘Five years of your life in written form will be your reward for keeping this little book faithfully and accurately,” said Atmar, a retired professor of history from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.
She required students to know three terms: primary source, secondary source and presentism. “The first two are the tools we use to discover the past; the third is a difficult but necessary key to understanding the nature of living many years ago, to be able to separate their time from ours and not to judge the past by the present.”
I went to the grocery store today. Sparse, empty, picked-over shelves. Limits on bread (four of any kind); milk (two gallons); eggs (one carton). I took in $50 in cash, planning to get only what we needed. Determined not to buy too much, not to stock up for the impending collapse of life as we know it, because then it is real. But the shelves – the shelves had a physical effect on me. I could feel something in me rising. Anxiety. Panic. It is a new world.
Kristin Davis, March 23, 2020
Newspapers provide historical accounts. But what they don’t give us, Burnes said, is the stories of those people who are reading the newspaper. “Unless you find a journal or letter.”
“What were we doing in lockdown with a 2-year-old? We were growing sunflowers. We were doing it to make sense of whatever is going on, or for fun. These are not facts with numbers of cases,” he said.
History is full of crises. Yet they pass. How much it must have seemed like the end of the world in 1918. In 1944. In 1970. How much they must have felt it was all collapsing around them. Just as we do now. But time. It went on. There is so much hope in perspective. We are not alone. We were never alone. Each generation faces its own crisis. The shattering of the world they knew. And yet they adapt. They get through it. What other choice do we have?
Kristin Davis, March 27, 2020
“The value of diaries as primary sources is the heartbeat of historical research,” said Atmar, the retired history professor, told me in an email. “Keepers of journals include Albert Einstein, who wrote many travel records; Charles Darwin, in his search for scientific explanations of life’s development; Marie Curie, whose notebooks are still radioactive; Meriwether Lewis as he explored the Louisiana Purchase Territory and recorded in eight field journals everything he could to send back to President Thomas Jefferson; and Harry Truman, who wrote in his notebooks throughout the day.”
Records kept by slaves provide “stories of a people subjected to the cruel treatment that was, for so many, just a part of daily living. Their records, so few in number, still provide firsthand information that opens their time to us,” Atmar wrote.
Here are some of the things we can’t do. We can’t go to a theater. We can’t go to a wedding or a funeral. We cannot go out to dinner at a restaurant or to the beach or to a museum. We cannot sit in a salon chair or have our nails done. We cannot have birthday parties for our children. We cannot walk to a shop or gather in a park or go to a gym. Among the dead: Actors. Journalists. A princess. A country singer. Among the infected: A prime minister and a CNN news anchor.
Kristin Davis, March 31, 2020
“When we go to break down a pandemic in 100 years, journals will tell us how it affected the structure of families, how Americans view themselves and their rights,” Parks told me.
Historians will glean from journals 150 years from now why we flattened the curve in April 2020, Burnes said. Likewise, they will understand why the curve took an upward turn later in the year.
“We know the score going back. But we’re looking for what happened to create that score,” he said.
I went to the grocery store today for the first time in six weeks. The bare shelves, the social distancing stickers on the floor, the masked shoppers, the Plexiglas at the registers no longer feel eerie. Which proves it is true: A person can get used to anything. Except a rock in their shoe. After a while, you stop looking at the local daily case count. The national death toll. The masks become almost normal. You stop forgetting to leave one in your car, or to stuff one in your purse. The smell of the hand sanitizer becomes familiar, the empty toilet paper aisle expected.
Kristin Davis, May 29, 2020
Handwriting – the missives found in letters and diaries and journals – “are a touchstone of the human soul,” Atmar said.
She tells a story of a cousin whose beloved father died. The woman managed to hold it together for two full days during the funeral. “But when her mother brought out some personal financial papers … she saw her father’s signature on a document and began to cry.”
It was her soul, Atmar told her cousin, “brought out by the human touch of his hand on that piece of paper.”
To keep a journal or diary is to set down part of yourself in print, Atmar said.
“Perhaps there is an innate desire to share, to leave behind a near-living memory of themselves that someone might someday read and by that be better improved in their own living, or more aware of the true life story that is written there. Often, people reveal in journals much they have never shared during their lifetimes. Perhaps some might even express personal thoughts, a message to loved ones they simply could not voice in any other way.”
I wondered how it would all end. The fact is it may never end. Covid-19 will become a part of our life. My children, 3 and 4 years old, won’t remember that the world changed. It will always be just a part of their lives. There will be no before and after. I am grateful for that.
Kristin Davis, May 30, 2020
TAKE ACTION: Be someone’s future primary source.
Step 1: Identify your purpose. Why are you writing ? Do you want your grandchildren to have a record of life during the 2020 pandemic? Are you trying to process the enormity of today’s events? Journal or diary? A journal chronicles events. (I bought chickens today. I planted a garden.) A diary is often more personal.
When Adrienne Parks decided to journal, she thought of her children, ages 6 and 4. The pandemic, she said, “will shape their world. This is a major cultural shift. It’s chronicling that shift.”
Step 2: Establish a writing place. Do you prefer a spiral notebook? A composition book or a journal with a hardcover? Maybe you just take notes on scraps of paper. All are fine. Just make sure you have a box to keep those scraps of paper.
Parks tells how her great-grandmother kept notes stuck in her Bible. “I’m so thankful she did that.”
Step 3: Start writing. Some people may feel weird sitting down and writing, particularly to themselves, Parks says. “Write a letter or an email to your Great Aunt Elaine you haven’t seen in two months. Establish a correspondence of value.”
Just write.