We're still in this story.

Looking in a door to a small avocado-green room with a wooden table and press-back chair pulled out. There is a laptop open and writing materials spread around the table.

The other day I was clicking through old newsletters and I found one from right after lockdown started in Toronto.

It announced — in what felt like a VERY cautious tone — that the studio would be closed for two weeks.

Do you remember that time? The initial rush of intensity, held in the effortless expectation that familiarity was about two weeks away?

We’ve aged since then, haven’t we?

We have different muscles and soft spots, fears and routines, topics of conversation. We sail through our days using technologies we didn’t even know existed before this year.

We have new words — super spreader, Zoom headache, touch hunger.

We rise out of bed in the morning into challenges we’d never conceptualized before this year. Sometimes we forget that they are challenges at all.

I remember how, those early days, the stories would spring out of people like snap peas waiting to burst.

You’d ask, “How are you” and words would be everywhere. We were all trying to locate ourselves in this huge unknown, to find its edges and its centre.

When did that change? These days “How are you” feels both boring and impossible. Sameness and confinement have dampened that surge. The desire to describe has gone soft.

But we’re still in this story.

We’re still our own protagonists, rising out of bed, clearing paths around new challenges, making sense of these shadows. Working so damn hard. You are working so damn hard.

Today’s story may not be banging on the door of your heart to get out, but it’s still here, still asking to be seen, speaking to you from that central human need: Tell me, tell me, tell me.

This all matters to me because telling our stories makes us kinder.

That’s another thing I remember from those early-COVID days, the tremendous kindness. The offers for care on social media, the checking in on neighbours, the food banks flush with donations. I miss that feeling of being part of that sudden awareness of our shared fragility. I know it’s still in us. Let’s stay connected as the winter finds its ground.

In it with you,