I agree! I wanted to contribute to this project in some way to be a part of the time capsule. Hopefully we won’t be dealing with these societal restrictions again anytime soon. x
What stays with me is that you found one image doing three jobs at once, the Window of Tolerance, the video-call window, the windows of the family home, and let them rhyme.
That is not decoration. It is the form discovering its own argument. A window is already a frame that holds inside and outside at the same time, which is exactly what prose struggles with: it has to take the inside and the outside in turn, one line after another, while the pandemic delivered them simultaneously.
And the rhyme is doing something precise about boundaries. The Window of Tolerance is a psychological edge; the video window is a barrier that also connects; the home window separates private from professional. What the pandemic collapsed was the distance between those three, and only a form that can hold several windows on a single page can show a boundary being held, breached, and redrawn at once, rather than narrated after the fact. A window of tolerance is spatial and moving by nature; it asks to be shown, not told.
Which may be why this matters for how the pandemic gets remembered. Left to prose, it resolves into policy, waves, numbers, dates. The comic keeps the texture of how it was lived: the therapist as clinician and person in the same panel, the home as workplace and refuge and pressure chamber, coping not as an act but as a line constantly being redrawn.
That texture is the part the record loses first, and the part the page is built to keep.
Thank you, Rachelle. Your piece made the window do real conceptual work, not just visual work. That is what I appreciated most, the way the form was thinking alongside the story.
Great piece!
Thank you, Margreet!
This project is so powerful. We all lived through a big moment in history and these personal stories will mean a lot for years to come.
I agree! I wanted to contribute to this project in some way to be a part of the time capsule. Hopefully we won’t be dealing with these societal restrictions again anytime soon. x
What stays with me is that you found one image doing three jobs at once, the Window of Tolerance, the video-call window, the windows of the family home, and let them rhyme.
That is not decoration. It is the form discovering its own argument. A window is already a frame that holds inside and outside at the same time, which is exactly what prose struggles with: it has to take the inside and the outside in turn, one line after another, while the pandemic delivered them simultaneously.
And the rhyme is doing something precise about boundaries. The Window of Tolerance is a psychological edge; the video window is a barrier that also connects; the home window separates private from professional. What the pandemic collapsed was the distance between those three, and only a form that can hold several windows on a single page can show a boundary being held, breached, and redrawn at once, rather than narrated after the fact. A window of tolerance is spatial and moving by nature; it asks to be shown, not told.
Which may be why this matters for how the pandemic gets remembered. Left to prose, it resolves into policy, waves, numbers, dates. The comic keeps the texture of how it was lived: the therapist as clinician and person in the same panel, the home as workplace and refuge and pressure chamber, coping not as an act but as a line constantly being redrawn.
That texture is the part the record loses first, and the part the page is built to keep.
Thank you for the analysis and compliment- as well as the window to your mind. 😊
Thank you, Rachelle. Your piece made the window do real conceptual work, not just visual work. That is what I appreciated most, the way the form was thinking alongside the story.