Kate Walter — Writer

My Vision Came True

A month before the lockdown in New York City, I attended a retreat at my church in the East Village, and we made vision boards. As we sat at tables in the social hall, I clipped photos and headlines from magazines and glued them onto a poster. The idea was to envision what we wanted for the coming year. After I came home, I rolled up the board and stored it in a safe place. I forgot about it as the coronavirus closed down the city in March 2020. To keep my sanity during the lockdown, I wrote essays about my lonely predicament as a single gay woman living alone. My busy social life vanished within weeks. No lunch dates. No parties. No museums. No bookstores.

Westbeth Artists Housing, where I’ve lived since 1997, was gearing up to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2020. For years, I’ve enjoyed the many free or inexpensive activities in our Community Room. I took yoga classes and belonged to a singing group. I attended readings and concerts. I drank wine and socialized at openings in our beautiful gallery. I volunteered at our famous Flea Market. But that all shut down or moved onto Zoom. The Community Room closed, and the gallery went dark. Westbeth turned into a ghost town as residents left town or retreated into their apartments. I worried about how Covid would impact my building with its many elderly residents.

While others went upstate, I stayed in the city ensconced in my sunny loft and kept documenting pandemic life in Westbeth and my neighborhood. My efforts to chronicle this unprecedented time resulted in a memoir in essays. I tracked life in Westbeth from March 2020 to June 2021 when we honored the building’s workers who kept us safe with a celebration in the courtyard.

Things started to trickle back to normal as New York City reopened during the course of 2021. I went to an opening at the Westbeth Gallery in October. (Everyone had to be vaccinated.) I chatted with neighbors and drank wine in the courtyard. It was a lovely fall evening. I felt happy again. On December 1, I gave a reading in the Westbeth Community Room. (Everyone had to be vaccinated and wear masks). A pianist entertained as I sold and signed books. When I took off my mask to read, the audience laughed in the right places.

Over the next few weeks, as my fellow residents digested my book, they gave me feedback about our mutual experience: “This is so on target.” “You really nailed our experience at Westbeth.” Residents who missed the reading but bought my book online stopped by my place to ask me to sign it. Or they invited me to their apartments for tea and a private signing. I exchanged my memoir with a poet who had a new chapbook out. This was fun, and I got to know some of my neighbors better.

But as Omicron surged through the month of December, this window of opportunity to socialize was closing. I started preparing for another long winter. As I was getting my humidifier out of storage, I found the vision board shoved behind an appliance in a corner. After what I’d gone through, I was extra curious. I got the chills when I read one of the magazine clippings I’d pasted onto my vision board almost two years ago. It said, “The Story of the Building.” Wow. My pandemic memoir is mostly set in my building, Westbeth. What struck me at first was that I had no recollection of what I intended when I glued this on. What was I thinking? Maybe I planned to focus on the building’s fifty-year history and its legendary artists? So my vision of a Westbeth story evolved into a totally different saga I could never have imagined then.

I was into the law of attraction years before the pandemic when content about manifestation went viral on Instagram and TikTok, getting billions of views. As I studied my vision board more closely, I noticed that right above “The Story of the Building,” I had pasted “Get Noticed and Make Connections.” That had also come true, and the two sayings seemed related. What to make of this? Some stuff became real, but some did not. But what did happen (the book) was very cool and unexpected. It amazed me that I could manifest anything during the pandemic. And in the continuing pandemic, creating a vision board for 2022 was item one on my agenda for the new year.