Looking back, I’m still shocked at how much the COVID pandemic and lockdowns escalated my personal growth.
I would equate my pre-pandemic maturity process to treading water, every once in a while, I would get pulled under the water. It’s discombobulating at first but after the initial shock, I would start to fight my way up to the surface. But I’d start to drown, just when it seems hopeless I’d find a piece of driftwood then float yet again. I’d make a change to avoid getting pulled under the same way again and grow from the experience until something else drags me down to the depths.
But I guess the pandemic decided that wasn’t fast enough, so it started going 90 mph in 30 seconds. This new growth process felt less like being guided to the bottom of the ocean but rather, being stuck in place while being aggressively waterboarded in the shower with no way of catching my breath.
It was a constant beat down, one after the other with zero breathing breaks, but I don’t have to tell you that. You went through the same thing, we all did, in a way.
It seemed that it couldn’t get much worse than this: being a sophomore in college with an autoimmune disease experiencing extreme social isolation in my parents’ house and coping with the situation by eating everything in sight.
May 25th: George Floyd was killed 20 minutes away from my house and everyone started getting pulled under water.
It was never a matter of figuring out my opinion on the situation. Growing up watching the Hunger Games and reading Divergent, I had already developed a bit of a tortured revolutionary complex. I wanted a rebellion, I didn’t care which one of my ideologies would be the straw that broke the camel’s back and usher in the revolution. All I knew was that I was desperate for it.
But those dystopian stories I constantly fantasized about could never prepare me for the reality.
May 26th: Protests began, feeling threatened the police unloading rubber bullets on the citizens they swore to protect. Tear gas turned my city into a smoky wasteland, cars were tipped over and businesses burned to rubble.
A friend of mine’s girlfriend was shot by one of the bullets near her eye and spent the next few days in the hospital
I believed it was my duty as a journalist and a resident of Minnesota to be there, to capture the history that was happening. That meant not only walking into this unrecognizable anarchic version of Minneapolis but exposing myself to a mysterious illness that could potentially eradicate my crappy immune system in a matter of days if contracted.
I was terrified but I also wanted to prove to myself that I was who I thought I was, someone who doesn’t sit back when witnessing injustice. So, I made my decision.
May 28th: Our governor mobilized the National Guard. I attended my first protest on May 31st. They called it “Justice for George Floyd” rally at the State Capitol in Saint Paul.
Hundreds of protestors sat across the lawn, clinging to shade in the 90-degree weather. I can still feel the outline of sweat under my mask.
The National Guard was deployed to “prevent an unlawful assembly” but my guess was that their main purpose was an intimidation tactic, but that didn’t mean they were the bad guys in this story.
They were following orders, many of the guards even passed out water to the protestors, I even recognized one of the guards who – I knew as a kid – joined the military after high school. We hadn’t spoken since we graduated but I knew he recognized me when our eyes met, it was a bit of an epiphany or maybe I just have a habit of attributing meaning to coincidence. I couldn’t shake that funny feeling, that feeling you get when you and a friend happen to be fighting on opposite sides of the war.
May 28th: The Minneapolis Police Station was burned to the ground.
I attended a few more protests after the rally at the capitol, it had lit a fire underneath me and I wanted to be there, I wanted to be a part of history. But more than that, I wanted forgiveness.
Forgiveness for not noticing the discrimination for so long for being blind and never once thinking to open my eyes. I had always been aware that racism existed but as a white woman, I never and will never fully comprehend the extent. I remember telling a Black friend of mine, Marcus Keller, that “I thought it had gotten better.”
“It’s never been better, you just never thought to look closer until now,” he responded with a facial expression I could only recognize as exhaustion mixed with hopelessness.
Experiences and tragedies are inevitable, all living things feel this, most animals experience it and move on, continuing to survive. Humans are the only species that attribute meanings or purposes to experiences. It is what allows us to create art and to grow as people, but it is also what hurts us so deeply. Our undying need to make sense out of a senseless world.
George Floyd’s death was senseless. In the grand scheme of the universe; his family, friends and we – the people – assigned a meaning to his death. We made it stand for something. He became a martyr, the catalyst for change. The “meaning” of his death means something different for everyone. For me was the eradication of ignorance, it was getting waterboarded with reality and it was a jump start of maturity, if he hadn’t died the way he did, I don’t think many of us would be the people we are today.
Because of him I was able to find out what kind of person I really was, something I could only have realized because of the people I met in the wake of his death and the events I experienced at protests and rallies.
To have a death that has meaning to those left behind is to have an impact, it is to be immortalized.
