I’ve been working from home almost exclusively since mid-march. For the last two months I’ve been logging in on my work laptop, sitting on my couch and sending emails, writing up documents, attending meetings on Zoom and Teams (muted of course, because I have a toddler who has no interest in letting me work without her input). When I worked onsite I feel like I rarely called or emailed IT for my own technical issues– I often sent in a ticket for other people, or for my office as a group, but I just don’t do a whole lot that needs troubleshooting.

Now that I’m at home, I am emailing them at least once a week to help me figure out why my computer is acting up AGAIN. The most recent issue arose when for some reason my documents weren’t syncing to OneDrive (anyone else using OneDrive for work? You know what I’m talking about). This had me suddenly obsessively looking at all my documents to see if they had synced or were still “pending”. I have hundreds of documents on my computer, many of them current, but certainly not all. As I was doing this obsessive search I found some of my own personal writings from many many years ago. I don’t know why they were even there, I think I just needed a spot to have them stashed until I could print them or email them to myself or put them on Google Drive where all the rest of my personal writing is.

I opened up the doc and started reading. I have to be honest, I didn’t immediately recognize the writing as my own. Not because I can’t remember writing what was on the page, but because what I read was…. kind of good. This particular document houses some of my older poetry, from late high school, early college. When I talk about my writing from that time, I usually talk about it as my “awesomely bad poetry phase”. I was not particularly confident in my poetry writing, I took ONE poetry class in college and I felt like I was often missing the nuances of poetry. Maybe it was just too complicated for my simple brain. Poetry seemed to be for the creative elites, the people who could see more, understand more, than the average person. So I wrote my poetry mostly for myself. I worried that if people read it they would think it was too simple, or too flowery, or too fake.

So when I read the first poem (which was actually a ritual prayer from my 100% Pagan days), I thought damn, where did these words come from? I could see someone saying them during an autumn ritual without laughing uncontrollably. Maybe with time the words have become more relevant, more meaningful to me than when I wrote them. I could say them out loud without cringing. After all this time I felt something when I read them.

I think that’s encouraging. I think I want to keep writing, even though I find it really difficult to sit down and put words to paper (or… onto the screen, whatever). And who knows, maybe I’ll share some of my “kinda good” poetry on here sometime.