In hindsight, it seems like people in the SCA have had two different responses to the pandemic. The first one – and the one that’s kept our game alive – has been ALL THE ONLINE THINGS ALL THE TIME. Virtual events, YouTube tutorials, web conferencing for meetings, a high-quality and well-thought-out SCA presence on social media (all things that have been slowly and inconsistently lurching their way into existence over the past decade or two) have really snapped into place in the last year and a half, due to hundreds of people putting tens of thousands of hours into networking, content creation, and behind-the-scenes tech work. It’s been pretty amazing to watch, and humbling, especially as I have fallen solidly into the other camp: pulling the covers over my head and hiding from the world.
To be fair, I was struggling before the pandemic hit. I finished grad school in May 2018 dead exhausted, broke, and severely depressed, and it took a year for me to really pull myself together and start showing up for much of anything. Battlemoor X (taught some classes, hung out at Hannah’s super-cool period glass furnace, commited to a comeback feast) marked when I really started to feel like I was making my way back. I started researching and getting excited about that feast. I was making garb and woodcuts, and I displayed at Kingdom A&S the weekend, literally, the weekend before everything shut down. I cannot put into words how deeply it felt like the rug being pulled out from under me just when I was finding my feet, and I just. could. not. get. up. again. I’m not proud of that, but it is what it is.
I mean, I wasn’t gone. I was just profoundly introverted and internally focused. I took a couple of stabs at 100 Days of A&S, and although I never successfully completed a round because I couldn’t keep up with the postings, I was doing A&S, in some form, probably every single day. I was reading and learning. I was sewing, mostly on Spanish garb; I completed two fully blackworked garments, a mantilla and a partlet. I was doing woodcuts. I completed three big woodcut projects: a reproduction of a period woodcut of the Cuenca monastery in December; the Hagembach Toledo alphabet this past May; and a reproduction of the 1605 Lisbon edition Don Quixote title page illustration just last week. At the same time and on the side, I’ve been working on a series of reproduction Fustat textile printing blocks, which is a project I’ve wanted to get my teeth into for, no shit, twenty years. I’ve been chipping away at the Motiño translation. More recently, I’ve been doing quite a bit of bookbinding. So I’ve been working. I just could not, somehow, manage to participate. And I was ashamed of that, and the shame and the anxiety and the feeling of being out of the social loop just spiraled in a vicious spiral of awfulness that fed upon itself and grew out of control.
What pulled me back was the weirdest and most random of things: our baronial online event, 1066: The Battle of Tastings. I did a lot of the background research for that event – the use/do not use ingredients lists for cooks, as well as a couple of recipes – which took me down the rabbithole of comparative Norman/Old English food cultures in the 11th century (an area of food history I’d never explored before), which veered off on on some really fascinating literary tangents (Ælfric Bata!), which somehow led me back to book history; I have a copy of The St Cuthbert Gospel by Claire Breay in my to-read pile right now, and I’m diving deep into that mysterious period of book technology proliferation that falls into the darkness between the papyrus codices of late antiquity and the emergence of the Carolignian codex, and suddenly I feel like I have things to say, and so here I am writing my first blog entry in sixteen months.
I went to Caerthe Investiture with a great deal of trepidation and was met by a wave of love and welcome that brought me to tears. I’m excited about Crown Tourney in October. I’m taking scribal assignments again. I’m still struggling terribly with anxiety and isolation, but the fact that so many other people also are – and that the culture around talking about it has changed dramatically in the last year and a half – strangely helps. We’re all in this together, trying to piece together a world that got blown apart, and I feel like I am and can be a part of that endeavour, in a way that I have not felt a part of the SCA in an awfully long time.
Liepa Jonaite's SCA pages 