And then there was a pandemic

It's March 19, 2020, the Vernal Equinox. I was scheduled at DreamBank - Madison to present the talk I had arranged with Madeleine Martini in September 2019 called, "Loneliness is Not an Option: You are Not Alone".

I had been pondering that issue back then, I never knew how important it would become. Maddie, of course, had to cancel the event Madison being shut down due to the virus on the 16th.

She called a couple of weeks later and asked if I'd try something new. Dream Bank was going to attempt using Facebook as a platform for their events. How commonplace this is now and yet then, she asked me not to plan for any PowerPoint slides since they didn't know how to use them. We've come a long way since thinking this was hard.

On April 2, I was sitting in our backroom breathing “I can do this”.

None of the norms for speaking were available. No audience for energy or feedback, no presenter’s screen to show me my next thought. I decided to pretend it was a fireside chat and just talk to folks about loneliness. I think it went well and so far; it’s been my largest crowd of 1400 folks.

After I finished speaking, I was still concerned that the topic of loneliness was an essential one to talk about. I had my speech…gosh I had it for months. I decided to make it into a book and publish it so that I could give it away.

I went to Canva and started taking my words and learned how to make pages. I learned how to use KDP (Amazon’s publishing system) and indeed the book was made. Feel free to take a look on Amazon today. https://tinyurl.com/ybzef4lh

I was an author again, and a publisher on April 5, 2020.