I haven’t written anything in a long, long time.

It’s easy to blame being busy (like, super busy), or to justify how I started (and stopped) keeping daily paper journal entries while I was working down in Spokane, or practice apologetics about how the chaos of the last few months (years) has completely obliterated my words. But the real cold, hard truth is none of those things. I have been lazy.

Growing up among religious acolytes, I was trained to believe that depression is essentially the 6th of the 7 Deadly Sins - sloth. It is self-indulgence in it’s ugliest capacity, or really, incapacity. I’ve struggled with depression on and off throughout my life and usually oust myself out of the depth by my bootstraps, self-chastisement and some hard-bought discipline. I have, during seasons, relied upon other sources of help, including counseling and pharmacology. Lately the monster has reared his ugly head again and I know that one of the best therapies that I have found to work for me is getting my mother-effing words out and forcing myself to write. On the regular.

2020 has ushered in more unexpected stress and mayhem than any of us could have predicted. What started out innocently enough as a new decade full of hope and promise went belly-up inside of two months and most of us are still reeling.

When rumors of the COVID pandemic began swirling in late February, like anybody else, I listened to the news with some concern. I launched a local Facebook page to help people find things like toilet paper and babysitting as the world got turned over on it’s head. It’s one way that I have seen communities come together to support each other and it’s something I know how to do. I don’t have many marketable skills, but I can set up a Facebook page like a champ. It’s a control thing that I have, needing to be able to do SOMETHING when crisis hits.

The “work at home” idea started to float around and man, I got excited. I have worked most of my life at either high-action, , high-intensity, high-demand jobs like waitressing and pushing carts and firefighting stuff, and the cubicle life has been… a challenge for me. I’m learning to embrace the “business casual” atmosphere and what feels like a much slower pace of work, surrounded by items of environmental comfort, like an essential oil diffuser and a nespresso machine, among others. But I get antsy, always feeling like I should be doing more layers of “work” and wearing less restrictive clothing. I was down with going to work on my couch where I could multitask in sweatpants, surrounded by dogs and snacks and piles of laundry to fold. As fate would have it, I pretty much missed that boat.

A few days before our Governor issued his “stay home, stay healthy” order that would have sent me directly to sweat-pants heaven, a local fire chief reached out to ask if I was available to help out with public information for the county emergency management pandemic response. My boss said yes, I said yes, and I packed up all of the wrong fire-related clothing and equipment and headed south, indefinitely.

I assumed that I was going to be helping the Public Information Officer who worked for the county answer phone calls. When I walked in, the Emergency Manager and the County Sheriff asked me to establish a Joint Information Center. In the fire world, a Joint Info Center connects information officers from different cooperating agencies to develop common messaging. In this case, city and county officials had decided that everybody doing their own pandemic messaging was turning into a disaster of it’s own, so the need to pull together the health district, law enforcement, city and county government, emergency responders and medical care providers to get on the same page was imperative. Apparently the Emergency Manager had tasked her PIO with establishing the JIC but he had been unsuccessful thus far, and here I was.

The first info officer that was thrown into the fray with me worked for the Sheriff. This Corporal ended up being, among many other members of the JIC, an invaluable resource, a reliable voice of reason, and months later, a good friend. He helped me cold call information officers from all of the other groups and agencies and we called a meeting that afternoon. A directive from up the food chain brought them all to the table that day, but it was clear to me, if no one else, that I was in WAY over my head with people more highly qualified, who had more at stake and BIG political issues compelling them. The learning curve was steep.

That first week was one of the most stressful of my life to date. It might be at the top of the list. I was yelled at, repeatedly by different PIOs, government officials, the press and of course, well-meaning members of the public. I made decisions right out of the gate when I was struggling to get a buy in from other PIOS that forced them to play along, and they didn’t like it. I don’t blame them. If I had it to do over again, I am still not sure how I could have done it more effectively.

Within two weeks I had learned to walk head-on into conflict and not dodge it like I always want to. I learned to save my tears for bathroom stalls or my car after dark, since the parking lot was a constant flurry of comings and goings. I had multiple panic attacks but no time to humor them so I ducked in the bathroom, dropped my head down for a few seconds between my knees and splashed cold water on my face before I went back in and tackled whichever crisis had most recently arisen. Everyone was stressed. No one knew the answers. I learned, watching community leaders and doctors in the JIC, that even the most well-trained and highly-educated aren’t always prepared. I watched them make the best decisions possible at the time, together, in some level of humility and mutual respect. It was actually an awesome thing for awhile.

Later, they would be publicly castigated for decisions made under pressure, as I was early on in the JIC, but the critics were outside voices who had done nothing to contribute to problem solving. I learned, not quickly, but thoroughly, to quit listening to the outside voices. To sift through and hone in on the larger, collective hum of support and vulnerable discovery that we were all a part of.

While I was working at the JIC for two and a half months, there was a sense of meaning in what we were doing, searching out answers and problem solving an unsolvable problem. If the pandemic was as deadly as we feared, how could we save lives AND the economy? How could we navigate living life while virus exposure was still a threat. All day every day we looked for answers to give to thousands of people asking the questions. Most days we got the answers wrong. Some days we got some things right. Our best hope was that we would look back and say that we overreacted. This would mean that fewer lives were lost. That the pandemic wasn’t as deadly as we feared. We HOPED to be wrong in our projections.

Decisions were made at the state level that made our messaging job miserable. The combined message of a JIC only works if everyone in the room can agree on what is being said. As the chasm between economic survival and surviving the coronavirus grew ever wider, so did the differences in our messages. A county health officer’s main mission is to protect AT ALL COST, the health of citizens. The mission of law enforcement is different, as is the mission for local government. As the divergence in mission and message grew, I knew my extrication point was getting closer. After more than 2 months, things in the JIC went from a smooth and steady operating pace to a rocky and tumultuous discord.

My job was to referee the debates, to help the professional communicators I was working with to settle on something that made everyone happy. That became impossible before long and players began to leave the table. I probably should have quit while I was ahead instead of walking away, feeling defeated and beaten down. The organization that had once been a source of pride in the hard-bought cooperation had devolved to backbiting and watching the rug get pulled out from underneath of us.

I came back home just as the county was beginning to reopen. I could go back to my cubicle. No “work from home” required. Just my luck. I am fortunate to have a forward thinking boss who has allowed me to work at home as much as possible anyway, though, and for that, I am grateful. Especially since none of my pants fit after sitting in the JIC for 12 hours a day and eating my feelings.

Thinking about the JIC now makes me kind of sad. I hope that with time, the good parts, the successful team we built, the powerful memories will come back, but right now, I feel disappointed in the ugliness of people and the blatant and petty politics that leaders can play even (and especially) in the midst of turmoil. Let no good crisis go to waste, they say.

I was away from home for two and a half months. When I got back, most of my kids had taken over my house like vines in an Central American jungle. It took me awhile to reclaim my turf and restore order both at home and in my “day job” that I had abandoned. Things are starting to settle out, just in time for fire season to take off. I’ll admit that I am dreading trying to fit into my nomex right now…