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This story first appeared on Civil Eats.
Valarie Mckenzie struggled to control her anger early in her life and was kicked out of her home at 18. She roamed everywhere from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Atlanta, Georgia, but spent most of her time living in downtown Minneapolis, where she slept on public benches and in bus shelters. The city s unrelenting bright lights, which she constantly tried to escape, reminded her of exactly what she lacked: a safe and warm place to sleep at night.
Late last summer, when she was 24, things began to change for Mckenzie. An outreach worker introduced her to Carley Kammerer, the executive director of Wildflyer Coffee, who offered Mckenzie a job that enabled her to secure stable housing. She had worked odd jobs before, but nothing consistent.
There are plenty of things to miss about life outside lockdown, before the pandemic made proximity poisonous. Saying that sometimes it feels like you’re missing the best years of your life seems hyperbolic, but who’s to say it isn’t true? Might this have been the year you met your forever partner or got your dream job? Might you have gone for a long weekend in Barcelona, fallen in love with it and moved to start a new life? What adventures awaited you dancing up close and exchanging perspiration with strangers in cramped nightclubs? We’ll never know – that’s the hard part.
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My Dad was a pilot for Eastern Air Lines for 37 years. When I was six years old, I sat on his lap and manned the controls of the Lockheed L-1011. We were traveling at nearly 600mph, with 300 people on board. It was a different era, for sure.
It was the end of the world as we knew it, and I felt fine. That’s almost exactly what I told my psychiatrist at my March 16 appointment, a few days after our children’s school district extended spring break because of the coronavirus. I said the same at my April 27 appointment, several weeks after our state’s stay-at-home order.
Yes, it was exhausting having a kindergartener and fourth grader doing impromptu distance learning while I was barely keeping up with work. And it was frustrating to be stuck home nonstop, scrambling to get in grocery delivery orders before slots filled up, and tracking down toilet paper. But I was still doing well because I thrive in high-stress emergency situations. It’s exhilarating for my ADHD brain. As just one example, when my husband and I were stranded in Peru during an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands, we walked around with a first aid kit helping who we could and tracking down water and food. Then I went out with my camera to