CHANGE

It’s funny how change creeps up on you in waves.

For reasons I’ve not yet been able to name, I decided to clean up my work inbox. I don’t know about you, but the only regular sorting I do is deleting unnecessary / spam emails. Occasionally, I will create the odd folder for a project but generally everything sits in my main inbox and this week it bugged the hell out of me so, I sorted the emails by date so the oldest were now up top.

12 Nov 2018.

That’s the date of the oldest email in my inbox - three days before I officially started as a Marketing & Communications Assistant at the Exchange. What a pivotal moment in my twenties (it feels so cool to be able to say that now I’ve hopped out of that decade!). I shoved every email I received before 17 Mar 2020 into a folder called ‘Pre-COVID’, occasionally reading the odd email here and there when the subject line or sender reminded me of a time I had forgotten for a while. And that’s when it started I think, my descent into a well of sadness.

A lovely bunch of preserved flowers I got for my birthday

Seeing so clearly my innocence, my not knowing what was coming round the corner - the change that threatened to alter our ways of life and delivered - slowly chipped away at the wall I had built to get to this point. Emails I received from 17 Mar - 30 Sep are in a folder called COVID, with sub-folders illustrating how I went from dealing with cancelled performances with the hope we may reopen in a few months to being an Employee Rep during the Exchange’s redundancy process. Reliving those moments, sorting emails from colleagues I haven’t seen since March whose roles have now been redundant, cancelling reoccurring team meetings because the team no longer exists ripped open a wound I convinced myself had healed.

1 Oct 2020.

That’s the date I started my new role at the Exchange - a day that showed just how much had changed from when I first joined the theatre. And although I had braced myself for that Thursday, I was reminded yet again of the difference between knowing what’s to come and living it; you can prepare as much as you want but the mutation, be it positive or negative or a mixture of both will always hit different to what you imagine.

My inbox is now scarily organised (to me) and although I don’t know how long it will last, it is yet another marker of change. The kind of emails I’m getting are already different but there’s still an echo of what was and for that I’m grateful because I don’t want to forget it.