Today’s as-told-to COVID-19 Story is from Sean English. Sean and I had previously worked together in Manhattan; he moved to San Francisco with his partner last year. Sean is back at work in California following the initial economic collapse caused by the ongoing pandemic. We spoke via phone on October 9, 2020.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I had just moved to California. I moved in the middle of October.
I was aware of COVID in February…but I was one of those people who was like, “That’s weird, that sucks that it’s happening. It’s probably going to be like SARS, and I’m never going to have to experience it.” Which is a really fucked up away of looking at it. I did think of it like SARS or Ebola: “This isn’t really affecting me. I feel bad that it’s happening.” …People weren’t really sure how severe it was. I was like, alright whatever.
I did eventually lose my job…around the end of March. Our company furloughed basically everybody. I worked in a very bougie role. I was an Enterprise customer success manager.
I was furloughed and I was like, “What do I do?” I was fortunate. We live in a nice place. My partner, Danielle, got to keep her job, and she worked remotely anyway. I was furloughed so I just had to wait until the company comes back and I’m working again. For the first month, I played Zelda on Switch. I’ve been working forever and now I don’t have to work. Very cool. I did that for three weeks, and I beat the game three times, and I was like, “OK, what is life like now.”
We didn’t get on the Animal Crossing hype. We were playing Stardew Valley. We don’t want to have these interactive games where we have to communicate with people. I just want to be on my own.
I’ve been telling people what I did while sheltering in place and it’s been a lot. I was talking to one of my friends, Rob, and he told me, “You’re not working right now, you’re a creative person, you have all this time,” and I got all the unemployment and all the extra stuff—it was a struggle to get there, it was a two-month struggle that didn’t need to exist—and I was really fortunate to have that time. I really took care of myself on a deep, personal level. On an emotional and a spiritual level [too].
I started watching One Tree Hill. I’m going to start doing commentary on every single season of One Tree Hill on my Instagram handle @highr.education. That’s going to be the first thing I’m going to work on. I’m on season four of One Tree Hill and I have to do my first three synopses. There’s like nine fucking seasons of this shit!
Thanks to Rob, I worked on music and I worked on myself. I did all that, and Dancer is still recording our next release over this period. I’ve been working with a musician here, and he’s bringing back all of our old music, so there’s that too.
I did a couple of live events. I did Give A Shit Show and two events for Creative Surrender, which was really great and I was really grateful to be invited to play.
Because we’ve been doing shelter in place for awhile…we took the last month on a pretty extensive road trip. We did a lot of national parks. We took my Jeep. We camped and every few days we stayed somewhere. When we drove around the northern part of the United States people were totally chill. When we drove around the desert, people were respectful. That was not the case in Montana or Idaho. I couldn’t fathom what was happening in people’s minds.
I started gardening, too! Indoor, but we’re moving outdoor, too. Currently, my garden plants consist of three mojito mint plants, two baby tomato plants, two rosemary plants, and six basil plants. I learned how to propagate. I knew one of our neighbors had a big rosemary bush and… I got some really beautiful heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market and I saved the seeds. …Next year we’ll have a lot of tomatoes.
I tried to take this as a gift and an opportunity. How do you want to take this time? You can take on these opportunities to do what you wanted to do.
On the level of talking about where my emotional state was, it really shifted [dramatically]. I had been reading The Artist’s Way—I read that book once a year and do the activities in it. I didn’t know [George Floyd’s murder] had happened, and Danielle said, “We need to talk about this.” I watched the video, and I don’t know what it is about our generation in particular, but the amount of death that we’ve seen on camera is absurd. It has an effect on you. And I thought, “Obviously, they’re going to arrest those cops,” and the joke’s on me. I think it was this really big moment reflecting on everything.
This pollution of violence is clouding the air and I’m looking at my life and it’s ramped up. Even my awareness of it had ramped up at that moment. Danielle was like, “We need to do something.” I’ve got to give it to her, she’s done a lot of work taking anti-racism classes and she’s allowed me into that world. I’ve done my own level of research and activism. We made a choice to go to two of the protests and I think a lot of my own personal stuff…has altered my relationship with my family. My dad is a Trump supporter.
It became a thing where I saw my family and my network in a different way. Losing my job was one thing, and…you start shedding people. It’s a tremendous release and it’s really tragic. To defend these ideologies…how do you say these things and feel this way?
We really absorbed it. Danielle has always been at the forefront of activism and for me it was, “Why haven’t I been there?” I need to show up. [The protest] was the right way to do that for us.
San Francisco is not necessarily showing up in the ways as other [cities].
It was really intense because there were a lot of people. On the other side of it, as you’re losing people that are literally your family, you become surrounded by people who share your ideologies with you and reconstruct that idea of how you can support each other. It became healing for me at that moment.
For a lot of my clients, at the beginning of March…closed their operations and worked from home. The city depends on these startups. Once that happens, everyone’s fucked. It’s truly sad how it’s affected the smaller businesses in SF. It really altered the course of so many things for so many people.
They think they’re going to do indoor dining in November, but we’ll see. It’s such an incredible privilege to be outside and have the ability to get a drink and hopefully not get anything. I can’t deal with that heightened level of selfishness. I understand it but I have very little compassion for it.
We’ve gone to outdoor dining. We’re willing to do it, we’re going to discuss the COVID awareness. It’s an extra layer of how we’re going to do it. I went to a brewery in Colorado that was serious about it. We had our own picnic bench six or seven feet away from anyone else. We could order multiple beers at a time which was totally chill.
At the end of the day, I’m glad we’re going to vote [President Trump] out. I voted in the primary and the general election—mail-in, absentee.
We’re staying in [for the holidays], we’ll [continue to] shelter in place. We have traditions—we’ll go to [a] pumpkin patch. We want to be good community people when it comes to Halloween. We want to be COVID friendly for the kids, though I don’t think people will let their kids out for Halloween, which makes me sad.
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