Page 102 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
funny photos, images and articles via instant messages from friends on Facebook. I received text messages, voice mails, e-mails and other messages thanking me for taking the time to share what, to be perfectly honest, were silly posts – dad jokes, wry observations, bad puns, exploiting classic memes – for giving them a break from the stress and frustration COVID-19 imposed on all of us. It didn’t seem like much – posting funny things on Facebook – but for some it was just enough, and that “just enough” was the “just enough” I needed to deal with the pandemic. Sometimes the best way to help yourself is to help others.
On LinkedIn, I have three categories of posts. First, I share tips for young lawyers and law firms on pretrial and trial practice, leadership, marketing, writing, public speaking, training, mentoring and diversity. Second, I share personal thoughts, ideas and experiences that I hope inspire and motivate young lawyers. Third, I share links to articles and books I’ve written, videos I’ve done or podcasts I’ve participated in. Before COVID, I was posting once a day on one of these topics. After COVID, I started posting several times a day, and many of my posts became COVID-centric, advising young lawyers how to manage COVID in their practices and lives and encouraging them through the stress, anxiety and even depression brought on by COVID. These posts led to a lot of calls, text messages and instant messages from young lawyers and law students struggling with and through the pandemic. Some couldn’t find jobs. Some had been laid off from their jobs. Some wondered if they could land jobs. I didn’t have many answers. I listened, made suggestions and empathized. Mostly, they were just looking for empathy.
Social media let me communicate with lawyers and law students from around the world. A whole world of us going through a pandemic together, focusing on what makes us the same – our wants and needs, our fears and dreams, our worries and hopes. Though the pandemic isolated us, it paradoxically, brought us together. We had this shared experience, and in some ways, in many ways actually, we went through it together and helped each other and supported one another through it.
Social media has its pros and cons. It can isolate us. It can marry us to our phones and laptops. It can make us believe others’ lives are more glamorous, more exciting, more fun than ours. It takes our personal data, predicts what we want and then tries to sell us our fantasies. But there’s a reason so many of us use it. It can serve us, and help us serve others. And so many of us came to rely upon social media during the pandemic to stay close with those online that we could no longer see in person. Yes, it’s preferable to meet someone in person for coffee and talk and laugh and reminisce. But since we couldn’t do that, social media provided us an alternative to love and laugh, to share and give, to cry and empathize.
Since some of you didn’t follow me on Facebook, and weren’t exposed to my humor, let me share with you the text of some of my posts and remember that the posts
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