Nothing to Say

 

It will take a very long time before I will be able to articulate what I make of 2020.

I have witnessed a global standstill caused by an invisible force that creeped up on us all.

 

I have seen the devastating effect this has had on family members who will take years to recover from the damage caused.

 

This year I have lived in four different accommodations to date and am just about to be relocating again.

 

My nursing career has started early due to being placed on the emergency Covid-19 response register.

 

Consequently, in a time when most people are losing money I have lived with the gratitude and faint guilt that I am an earner.

 

Perversely, whilst my job acts as damage control to human suffering I know that simultaneously means I am a profeter when people get sick.

 

I’m reading more than I ever have in years but I am retaining less.

 

I wouldn’t say I feel happy but I am not sad either.

 

The absence of a nagging background sadness is actually terrific progress for me- and that makes me kind of happy.

 

In a time when nobody has been able to socialize, I have made some gorgeous new friends.

 

I have graduated from university.

 

Yeah, it’s been a weird year. I have no idea what to make of it. 

And this poses a challenge to me as I enter the second half of 2020. The year will soon be at an end and there will be lessons expected to have been learned.

 

I do not feel smart enough to feel confident in concluding anything decisively about the questions on life this year has raised. That is a shame because I have a play to write this month and knowing something with confidence would be a great foundation to work around. I don't feel my cognitive abilities have stagnated during covid, I think the bombardment of continuous change and incomplete information has actually regressed my ability to approach life logically and with wisdom. It is probably a temporary state so I am not too worried by it. I am more interested in it than anything, but of course my brain is in no position to analyse this phenomenon with the intellectual rigour it deserves.

So I’ve decided I am going to write a play based on a thinker who can’t think and the frustration but also mental relief that causes.

 

The details are yet to form but I think this will work.

Kate Barr

Kate is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2019-2020