I never wanted to live through historic times. I’ve read too much history to think that works out well for people. The fact is, this pandemic will be a major historical event studied in the future. Like it or not, this is our current reality.
Do you know what historians love? First person accounts of events. Not just the important people, either. Average people, all over. The more we have of those, the better a picture the future has. You don’t need to be a very good writer, either. Can’t figure out what to write? Just log your day.
Woke up, 7am. Had breakfast, oatmeal again. Washed dishes. Watched tv until lunch. Had can of soup. Washed bowl and spoon. Walked around backyard for an hour for exercise. Surfed internet for a while, posted a bit on social media. Had dinner, chicken and rice. Washed dishes. Watched tv some more, brushed teeth, went to bed around 10pm.
You see that ‘boring’ passage? You write that out for a month straight, a historian will LOVE YOU some day. Maybe not immediately after all of this, maybe even not in your lifetime. But a hundred years from now, when people aren’t quite sure what a normal day for us looked like? Two hundred? Five hundred? That sort of log is gold for future historians trying to understand what daily life really, actually looked like.
Right there, in just that passage, you’ve indicated how long your day was. That you ate three meals, and were bored by the variety. This boredom implies that you still have access to sufficient food to not be starving, but are limited in your ability to acquire the variety that you might be used to. If you’ve been listing stuff like this over the course of a month, they can even study to see what the variety looked like to get an idea of what a normal person’s diet might have looked like during this time. They can see that you have access to water, given how many times you mentioned washing dishes. That you have a single person home, given that you walked in the backyard. That you have electricity and internet and that there was tv broadcasting then. That cleaning your teeth was part of your daily hygiene routine. You never mentioned another person or animal, implying you live alone without pets and didn’t interact with anyone. That the day was normal, boring, and nothing of note happened.
I’m not sure I can properly explain how very, very happy a historian would be to have 200 logs like that from a single geographic area to look at in 500 years, but let me just be clear: It doesn’t matter how ‘bad’ your writing style is, historians really want first person sources. Even better is people who ramble about the small, boring details, which have sometimes ended up being the only mention of common daily things centuries later.
I’m not exactly a history expert. I’ve got a bachelor’s minor in history, which basically means I just know that I really, really do not know much. But some of the things I read that stuck with me most were first person accounts of normal things. A mother writing to her son about how to take care of children. How to rock a cradle, the importance of showing your children love by spending time with them, how to be firm and fair in punishments and never punish twice for a single mistake. She wasn’t anyone important as I recall, and neither was her son. Just an experienced mother, writing about daily life for her son since his wife had just had their first child. I don’t remember as many of the names and dates and events I memorized, but first hand letters and journals have a way of drawing you in.
If you can write about your feelings right now, keep a more traditional sort of journal or diary? Those are wonderful. You might not feel like it is groundbreaking, but who knows what might survive the decades? It could be that hundreds of years from now, perhaps a scrap of your journal survives, a scrap of another, and schoolkids read about you in an anthology of daily lives of average people in this time. Or perhaps it will just help you to get your feelings out, give you a chance to vent. Perhaps your children or grandchildren will come across your journal from this time, and read it, and talk about what it helped them understand about you and this time, the way we talk about the stories we heard from our relatives about life during WWII or the Great Depression. We’ve even got a bit of an advantage in that paper isn’t rationed or scarce or out of our budget right now.
Digital is nice and all, but computers crash, storage degrades, and hosting sites close down. Grab a pen or pencil, some paper, and write things down. Or type, if that is easier for you, but print it out later. Hey, get fancy and find a little vanity publisher later to make a copy for you and another for your local historical society, or one for each kid/grandkid as a sort of time capsule to pass on. Or lock it away, to be released only after your passing. Just write.
So many people have mentioned that their relative lived through a major event, but never talked about it after. We stitch together bits and pieces and guesses to figure out what may have happened, but so many first hand stories will never be told. We may end up doing the same thing after this, just wanting to put it aside and move on. And we see things differently in hindsight. We forget things, or see them in different ways, or don’t mention things. Don’t let our experiences be lost.
We’re living through history right now. Let’s leave some first person sources for the future to learn from.