How Zoom Changed My Life

As I write, my mother is in the other room on a Zoom call with a group of longtime friends in Ontario. They know each other from a Burlington YMCA morning fitness class; when the pandemic hit, they moved the class to Zoom, and when Mom moved east to PEI, they just kept on going. They still work out together on Zoom, all these years later, but they spend just as much time chatting. Three mornings a week, it’s 40 minutes of social connection that Mom’s been able to maintain.

When, three months after Catherine died, in January of 2020, COVID hit, regular in-person grief support groups had no way of meeting. Fortunately, the need outweighed any resistance to embracing moving online, and I was able to join the monthly grief support group hosted by the Palliative Care Centre and Hospice PEI.

Through the same period, with my immediate family bunkered down at homes in California, Ontario, and Quebec, we instituted Friday Family Zoom: every Friday night we’d all gather on Zoom and play charades or pictionary, or make a craft together, or do a scavanger hunt. During the darkest loniliness it was a powerful weekly antidote.

Throughout all of this, I was continuing to work remotely with Yankee Publishing in New Hampshire every day, and Zoom was our way of collaborating at a distance. We had a Friday afternoon scrum every week, and, on top of any work utility, that too was an important social anchor for me.

A year later, when I was starting to feel like I needed help at the intersection of grief and loneliness, I got a reference from a social worker to Your Life Design, a PEI-based, online-only counselling service. I found myself a counsellor, and our work together, on Zoom, was transformative.

A few months after that, when Olivia came out, I needed support, and found my way to Transforming Family, an LA-based family support group. After an intake call with a fellow parent of a trans child, I started attending Zoom meetings—TF, like Mom’s fitness class, had also pivoted to Zoom—and, some months later, I became the facilitator of a monthly support group for the parents of neurodiverse trans children, a group I host still.

This past Saturday, Lisa and I joined 400-odd other people from around the world for a Zoom art class with Danny Gregory. In recent years I’ve attended several similar Zoom classes, on topics like letterpress printing in the round.

I’ve attended Zoom folk music concerts, co-hosted a Zoom unconference, set up Zoom fountain pen meetings, given  a Zoom lecture at UPEI, and attended a Zoom Publications Committee meeting while walking around the Experimental Farm.

Somewhere in there, we all got “Zoom fatigue,” to the point where, for many, the very hint that something would happen “on Zoom” was anathema. For L., and my distance niblings, “Zoom School” was an unmitigated disaster, and that only served to strengthen the general resistance.

But Zoom changed the world. As a low-barrier-to-entry, cross-platform, free (for 40 minutes) videoconferencing app that, almost all the time, just works, Zoom was one of the (few) lasting gifts that COVID gave us. 

Let’s not forget that.