The Brink (Petrone)

It’s probably too easy and way too obvious to title this post “The Brink” simply because I’m thinking and writing about being one of millions on the brink of losing my unemployment benefits but also being one of the fortunate few on the brink of starting a new job in the middle of a pandemic, and also writing about having been pushed to the brink of my emotional and mental capacity to get up every morning and face another day of uncertainty, but every rational adult has spent most of 2020 poised on that same jagged emotional edge, so there isn’t anything new to say about that, and, as a writer, I ‘m supposed to eschew the easy and the obvious in my writing but my God, standing on edge for months at a time can make you really, really tired.

If something has a brink, it has a measurable boundary. The word implies structure, parameters. The pandemic has no structure and no foreseeable resolution. The pandemic is an open-ended question asking us how we wish to spend our precious time. It’s pushed us to internal edges we didn’t know we had, and here we all are dancing along metaphysical cliffs, wondering when and where and how and if it will end.

For me, the first phase of the pandemic ends next week, when I start a new full-time job. I will be training remotely and working from home at least through 2021. Probably longer. My days will have a structure the previous six months have lacked. I lost my job at the beginning of February, so I had a head start on the whole wandering-through-the-house-looking-for-snacks-and-wondering-if-I-should-shower-or-dress thing. It’s kind of like having been on an extended summer vacation. When I was a kid, summer vacation was this glorious, amoeba-like period with no structure, no commitments or summer reading or school or organized anything. You woke up every day and went snooping around outside looking for something to do. But because you knew summer would eventually end, and you would go back to school, there was a desire to make each day count. There have been a few lovely moments during the pandemic when I felt that same tingle of excitement on the brink of a new day.

There’s that brink again.

I’m trying to get my head around the idea that I will be working full-time from home. Honestly, I’m a little nervous. There’s the normal self-doubt and questioning that bubbles up when you start a new job—Will I do well? Will I like it? Will I hate it? Working from home during the pandemic adds a bigger question: Will I lose my mind? Most of my family and friends (the ones who aren’t unemployed) have been working from home since sometime in March, so they have the head start in this regard. I’ve watched them all struggle through daily Zoom meetings and conference calls and know this isn’t going to be easy. Crossing over the brink from unemployed to employed just brings you closer to a different brink.

I am supremely grateful and fortunate to be starting work again. The only members of our household who would disagree are our two dogs. Dogs are, objectively speaking, the beings whose lives have been most improved due to the pandemic. The pack (i.e., my husband, daughter, and me) is home with them all the time. Everyone is together and there is much wagging of tails and rubbing of fluffy bellies. I haven’t had a job or schoolwork to occupy me, so my procrastination around writing my next novel involved walking the dogs. Rough estimate: I will have walked them approximately 500 miles from the day we began sheltering in place on March 13 to the day I start work. We all have tremendous quads.

I’m part of the first group of employees at my new company who will be training entirely remotely. It’s almost certain that I won’t meet my supervisor or co-workers in person until sometime next year. Next year.

I used to think that the world would go back to normal when I found a new job, but we are not going back to anything, we are merely adjusting. The biggest adjustment is accepting that everything has changed, that working from home and wearing a mask when you leave the house and not having parties and not going out to hear live music or see a play and only seeing one or two people at a time is normal and there is no boundary or parameter for when this will change. There is no brink; there is just the place where we are right now.

Susan Petrone’s novels include The Heebie-Jeebie Girl (2020,) The Super Ladies (2018), Throw Like a Woman (2015), and A Body at Rest (2009). Her work has been published in such diverse venues as Glimmer Train, ESPN.com, Belt magazine, and CoolCleveland. She is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY 2020 and is one of the co-founders and former president of Literary Cleveland (litcleveland.org).