Three days before the shutdown in March 2020, we all felt the impending doom coming as more and more Covid cases were advancing into the US. We started cleaning our equipment at S2 rapidly, washing our hands all the time, but we really didn't know exactly what was going to unfold and that was scary.
On that night, we had a few athletes in to train and we had started to pass out equipment in case they needed to work out at home "for a couple of days". A daughter and her dad were pitching and the dad exclaimed out of nowhere "does any of this even matter?!" It was abrupt, but truly articulated how we were all feeling at the moment.
Fast forward 2 years, a three month shut down, a rapidly growing business, and athletes who have been impacted greatly for a large chunk of their developing life, and here we are all still trying to navigate our way through an ongoing pandemic and all of the social changes and stressors that have come with it.
The past two years have fundamentally changed me and acknowledging that has been crucial for me to navigate where to go from here personally, in work, in my family. I understand where the concept of the "Great Resignation" stems from - even jobs we may have once loved have been called into question because cultures have shifted or our own tolerance for a certain way of life has shifted.
For me, I have the privilege of doing the job I feel called to do every day. But, the challenges of the pandemic, navigating it with my two toddlers, watching my husband transition into a work-from-home lifestyle, watching the impact on the kids I work with every day, all of that changed my direction at S2. It made me determined to find the place at work that fueled me to make an impact and allowed me to set the boundaries needed for my own mental health and my family life. In the past, I've found myself often falling into the head down, blinders on approach to life and work. But the pandemic took that away, for the better. I've found myself craving and checking that every part of my life is making me a better person and more capable of actually experiencing my life instead. This pandemic has taught me to ask myself "does any of this even matter?" and to make sure the answer to anything I have in my life is a resounding yes!