A Sea Of COVID-19: Suggestions On Navigating A New Normal From A Survivor Of A Storm.

So, it’s a new normal now. The coronavirus pandemic has all of us in different routines and different anxieties and different opportunities to showcase community, together — apart. It’s just weird. So, I thought I might share some of what I experienced the last time my world was rocked with something similar.

While it is true that a global pandemic isn’t anything we’ve seen in a century, there are some paralells to other natural disasters and life changing sudden shifts in daily life as we know it. A few years back, hurricane season moved with force upon our country. We watched Harvey flood Houston and we watched Maria devastate Puerto Rico and we watched Irma crawl up the entire state of Florida. I was living in Lee County at that time, along with my boy — who was then five years old. Irma rocked me and our community hard. I learned a lot of lessons real quick.

Denial Will Hurt

Probably the first lesson was how incredibly difficult it was to wrap my mind around the fact that a massive storm was about to make land fall where I lived when the sun was shining bright all around us. It was extremely hard to mentally prepare for a hurricane, even though we knew it was coming. Satellite images battled with what my own eyes could see. So I can appreciate…