The ChickieNob and I continue to do our indoor walks every afternoon. We’re still listening to The Magicians, trying to match it—moodwise—with different cities. When we were in Antarctica for the book, we walked through snowy Stockholm. When we were in the Neitherlands, we walked through Rome.

One day, while marching briskly through virtual Sicily, I realized that a bunch of people were wearing masks—mostly over their chins. The video had to have been made in the last year and a half; likely only a few months ago judging by the weather. They were gathered in crowds watching buskers, sipping Aperol spritzes at sidewalk restaurants, wandering in and out of stores.

Statistically, some of the people we were seeing were now dead.

That is true of any video on YouTube. Those people in the background will die at some point, and a person watching a video of a street scene in the future is seeing people who are possibly gone. But with COVID-19, it is extremely likely that some of the people we are passing on the street have died from the virus. Almost 3 million people are missing from the world due to the pandemic. 115,000 in Italy alone. During a 40-minute walk, we pass hundreds of people in the streets. It seems likely that a few are counted among that 115,000.

It’s a sobering thought.

Like I said, it’s not unique to the pandemic, though the pandemic certainly puts that idea front and center in the mind. It makes me sad when I catch their smiles, glimpse laughter, note a kiss.

It is currently National Infertility Awareness Week. I was going to write a post—the theme is the power of stories and the hashtag is #WhatIWantYouToKnow—but because I constantly write about infertility and loss, I couldn’t think of anything that hasn’t been said during the other 51 weeks of the year. Or, in the case of this blog, the almost 780 weeks I’ve been writing in this space.

So instead of repeating my story, I’m encouraging you to tell yours. Dust off your blog this week, start a new one, post on your favourite social media platform, and let people know what you want them to know.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Inaccurate Thinking and Self-compassion” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Bereaved and Blessed is remembering her daughter, Molly, on her 13th birthday. She begins: “Today you would be 13, a teenager. I’ve been struggling to write this for so many reasons. This week has felt really heavy, not to mention this month and year. It is both healthy and okay to feel everything I am feeling and it is really hard.” I love this post because it ties her daughter into the here and now, connecting with bereaved families and the hard events (both personal and worldwide) of the last year, and holding all in her heart.

Infertile Phoenix talks about the inevitable and unavoidable pain of emotional growth spurts. As she points out: “Growth is painful. It’s so hard. But staying the same isn’t any easier.” So true. She reflects on what is learned from re-reading old posts.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path reframes the term “rainbow baby,” balancing out the hopeful and the alienating. As good as those child-after-loss stories feel, there is the other side: “It feels terrible when there is no rainbow baby, when the miscarriage or baby loss is the experience you get and there’s no more.” She brings in an idea from Jessica Zucker’s book and extends that rainbow to cover alternative outcomes and other gains. She reflects on her own rainbows.

The roundup to the Roundup: Tell your story for NIAW. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 16 – 23) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

There’s a quote from the book Admission by Julie Buxbaum that I’ve been turning over in my mind over the last few months, sometimes in regards to the pandemic and sometimes in regards to infertility.

On page 295, she writes,

Is waiting the hardest part? I wonder. I don’t know. In the last few weeks, while we’ve been waiting in a different kind of purgatory, I’ve thought that the in-between was what made everything so difficult. Now, I think the in-between is emotional boot camp. It’s what prepares us for whatever’s next.

This character’s in-between is finding out if her parents will be going to jail and what will happen to her future. So a little bit different from being in the two-week-wait or waiting for a call from an adoption agency or waiting for the end of the pandemic.

Because her waiting is going to be something bad. She just doesn’t know which flavour of bad. How bad it will get. But those other waits are hard because you don’t know what you’re waiting for. You don’t know whether to be hopeful or hopeless. The outcome is so unknown that you have no clue whether you’ll be celebrating or crying at the end of the wait.

Boot camp is action. It’s preparation. But how can you prepare when your in-between is truly in-between? It’s not A or B. It’s A or Z—two ends of the spectrum.

Sending good thoughts to anyone waiting.

Dirt recently had a newsletter about digital rest points. It was about an Instagram account, though the concept would work well on any slow-moving site. Maybe not Twitter, but Facebook or Instagram. And the person posted the “breaks” at Stories, though it would probably work better as a post. I digress.

The idea is that the posts would show up in your feed, tucked around all the other updates, and they would be a visual reminder that you’re scrolling. And may want to ask yourself if you’re still getting something good out of that scrolling, and maybe take a break if you’re not. It’s just a pretty scene, reminding the person to pause.

It feels like programmers should have built these accounts as a default account one must follow in order to be on the site. Except it would defeat the purpose of getting you to mindlessly spend time on the platform. But I love this idea: digital rest points that remind you to take a breath. Look around.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I get Erin McKeown’s infrequent newsletter. She sends it out every once in a while, and it’s one of my favourite things to read.

In her most recent edition, she talks about how some songs (and put in any form of self-expression in that space that fits your world) are still relevant down the road, and some no longer fit.

“Time moves on, feelings change, we grow and grow older. Sometimes songs stay fresh because they grow with us, other times we need to keep singing them to remind us of important things, but sometimes it’s totally fine to put a song in the tomb, roll the stone in front, and let it stay there.”

I really love that idea of always weighing how something fits; whether it’s worth keeping around as a reminder or whether it’s better to set it in its place and move on to other ideas, experiences, or expressions.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.