A Letter to Those Who Aren't Bored
Log onto social media at the moment, and you’re flooded with pictures and videos of people doing hilarious, crazy or impressive things with all their spare quarantine time. They’re making backyard ski lifts, training as yoga teachers and singing opera from their couches.
We’re also seeing lots of heartwarming posts, thanking frontline workers - doctors, nurses, grocery store workers and the like. These people are doing a hugely important job, at risk to their personal health and that of their family - they warrant our gratitude.
But there is an invisible group of people who aren’t being recognized. Who are working intensely to keep the world turning, to make sure that those on the frontlines have the support they need and those at home have something to go back to when we get to the other side of this. They are the people who aren’t bored right now, and desperately wish they could be.
This is a letter to those people.
Who are you? You’re the HR teams working 80 hour weeks to start workforce planning from scratch, redeploying team members, examining the legal and equitable ramifications of reducing staff hours, trying to think of something, anything, to preserve jobs. You’re the CEOs of charities, writing new budgets so you can keep helping the world with funding that has evaporated overnight. You're accountants and bankers, restructuring finances and debt to help small businesses stay afloat. You’re trade managers, negotiating frantically to get hand sanitizer and face masks into the country. You’re consultants supporting clients through massive change, unsure if you’ll get paid for your work when it’s all over, but doing it anyway because it matters. You’re hospital administators, running payroll for the nurse that just clocked 30 hours of overtime. You’re communicators, trying to find the words to explain a crisis the likes of which has never been seen, to your organization’s staff and the community.
You are trying to do this while home-schooling your kids, with babies that won’t stop crying during conference calls, while feeling anxious about elderly parents in nursing homes. You’re lonely and scared too, and so very, very tired because you simply can’t switch off right now. You’re dreaming about work constantly, but sometimes there are zombies in your dreams too.
You don’t say anything about how you’re feeling because you know you’re privileged to have a job at all. It would be so insensitive to complain. You feel the responsibility of sustaining as much normalcy as you possibly can, trying to keep companies running and people around you employed. You can’t take a break, you don’t know when you might be able to stop at all, but you feel like you’re failing at being the parent you should be, the devoted friends and children you wish you could be, because you have four hours of conference calls today but Lily needs a snack and when was it you last called your mom? Your face is missing from those group chat screen shots that everyone is taking and you wonder how your friends are doing.
Your inbox! I see inside your inbox. It is flooded with ‘suggestions’ for things to do during this time. Make a bird feeder! Meditate more! Start running! Create a time capsule with your kids! The emails slip unread into the mounting other digital demands that tug relentlessly at your sleeve. Meeting request! Please review urgently! Sorry to chase you, but…!
You feel that nothing is really under control and one day soon, something really big and important is going to slip because it got lost under the Girl Guides email about selling cookies in isolation, and all you want to do when you see another craft idea is scream “FUCK OFFF!!!”
I want to say to you, I see you. I am you. I value what you do and we are in this together. Maybe no one is putting signs in their window for accountants and administrators, but what you do matters, because you are holding a place for the world to return to normal.
Your kids will go back to school and one day, a qualified person will teach them long division, even if it’s a few months later than when they should have learned it. The world won’t end if you don’t make a bird feeder today and you choose to eat chocolate and drink wine instead of taking a live yoga class on Instagram. Your baby won’t always cry, and you will, god willing, hug your parents again.
You aren’t invisible.