Growth from the unknown
By: Katharine Thomas
Tags: Inequity, Politics, Change, Reflections

Since March 2020, I have been trying to convince myself to write. When my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia was ripped out from under me, so was my habit of daily journaling along with regularly published updates for family and friends. In this absence of a creative outlet I have felt almost incapable of processing my emotions; my emotions towards having to leave my host community months early, or moving back to my hometown, or having my graduate school plans uprooted and flipped upside down.

Many of us have had our whole lives uprooted by this pandemic. Lost loved ones, lost touch with friends, maybe even lost touch with ourselves. During this time I convinced myself that my voice didn’t matter. My voice even didn’t matter enough for even my own personal journal. I am extremely fortunate that this was one of my greatest losses.

We go by every day now with greetings of, “Can’t wait to get back to the new normal!” and “I just want this all to be over!”. These exclamations seem not to come from a place of hope, but rather desperation to return to comfort and what is ‘known’. But what if what we really need is unknown?

In January 1, 2020 I would never have guessed that in the course of the year I would (1) get into one of my dream graduate school programs, only to not attend, (2) be evacuated from Zambia 6 months early, (3) return to my hometown for 5 months, (4) start a graduate program at Duke and move to North Carolina, and finally (5) be brutally dumped. I saw my move to Zambia as embracing the unknown, but in reality this year and return to the U.S. has been the most unknown time of my life.

It has not been easy. There were countless days this year I snapped at loved ones out of personal frustration over the loss of control over my life. And I have not handled it all well. Hell, I still don’t handle it well. But — at the end of the year — I am finally learning to put name to my emotions. I am learning how to speak up for my needs. I am slowly learning that I do not need to apologize for who I am and the space that I take up.

This year has been full of growing pains for me. Most things, I haven’t handled well. But here I am in the end of December, feeling that this adversity has taught me to know myself better than I started this year. And I am back to writing.

My point is this: What if we stopped trying to “get back to normal”? What if we, collectively, decided to lean in to the inevitable change that will come from this year of challenge and social upheaval? We need to stop denying the fact that change is necessary for growth. The United States is a country in crisis, with around 3,000 COVID deaths per day, increasing income inequality, and the police having killed 1,066 people in 2020 of which 28% were Black (who only represent 13% of the U.S. population).

I am hopeful that peaceful protests and the move towards more open discussions about race, inequities, mental health issues, and other issues that we have seen in the past months are here to stay. Positive change is slowly happening, but it seems half the population is actively pushing against it. Change is too difficult, or too unknown. Half the population hangs on to this idea that life before COVID is the ideal, when COVID has shown us the ugly reality of pre-existing inequity in this country.

Change is never easy, but none of the inequities we currently face will go away if we do not have sustainable societal and cultural shifts towards empathy. If we truly cared for our neighbors, COVID-19 would be not be at the highest rate of infection it has been all year. If we truly cared for our neighbors, we would not stand for the gross inequities that capitalism produces. We are a country (and a people) in desperate need of some empathy and action for the collective, rather than individual, good.

I can only imagine that if we choose the path towards growth, we will start seeing positive changes — just as I have experienced.