I was listening to a podcast the other day about grief. Now, grief is not something I like. I am notorious for having unresolved issues with it, but I listened anyway. I learned that grief has been very much a part of all of our lives this last year. Grief for lost loved ones. Grief for lost jobs. Grief for lost time with friends. Grief for loss of self. Grief for loss of normality. Just, grief for loss. It struck me as I was listening that the pandemic has been a good lesson in how we handle loss. Now, I'd argue that loss of a loved one is a significantly harder loss to bear than loss of normality, and will therefore be a greater burden on mental health, but each are losses.
Loss is something we all hope to avoid but something we have been forced to deal with this past year. Even when we weren't ready.
The pandemic has been hard for a myriad of reasons and I have done my best to check in on people as much as possible, whether that's an email to my students to say "let me know how you are" or private messages to friends saying, "yo! Check in with me!" or a simpler generalized message on my Facebook saying, "How are you all?" I don't think we underestimate the power of that simple question anymore. Yet, I haven't had it asked to me a whole bunch. Most days during this insane period in history I have been totally fine. Others not so much. So, I thought I'd share how this pandemic has been for me and I invite you to do the same.
I'll start with this: I didn't lose my job. I didn't lose my home. I haven't lost a loved one. I haven't contracted the virus. Despite the hard days, I have been very privileged. I know that and I am grateful for it every single day.
My little pandemic journey started in early-March with, I'll be honest, a very blasé attitude about the whole thing. I very frequently likened it to swine flu and thought there was a very big chance people were overreacting about the severity of it. With 532,000 people dead in the United States as of today, I can safely say I was wrong.
The next few weeks consisted of teaching online from home with the anticipation of going back to the classroom in April. That did not happen and I am still teaching online from home a year later. It has been an interesting adjustment for me personally, but also watching how students handle change. I will say, perhaps a positive of this is that we have had to learn how to become comfortable with uncomfortable. We have had to really pay attention to how we react to things that aren't "normal".
I spent a lot of time outside with Milo and actually really enjoyed being able to work from home and spend some time doing enjoyable quiet things with my pup. I didn't feel super claustrophobic about the upheaval of my normality except one little thing -- I missed hugging people. We were nearing July and it became very heavy on me that I had not had any physical contact with another human in five months. I would have never anticipated that to be an issue for me, but it was. I was glad to be able to visit my family in Houston safely and finally hug another human.
In between all that, I was attempting to job search while the unemployment rate was at 18 million people. AND I was trying to get my visa, which Donald Trump has just made significantly harder to get. My anxiety levels were out of control on that front. Then, I got asked to come back to my job and had to readjust my life... again. I had to come back to a job that I'd let go of in my head, I had to tell my landlord "just kidding, I need my home again" and I had to fill out H1B visa paperwork in about two weeks in order to be in with a fighting chance of getting it. Spoiler: I ended up getting it as fate flew in my favor at the very last minute as an opening emerged to fast-track my visa and I was able to get it in because I had worked on my paperwork so fast.
Living alone certainly took a toll. I like living alone. I like having things the way I like them and I like quiet. But it became too quiet. I had no "heading to work and seeing other humans" time in my day and I would sit with everything in my head with no one or nothing as a distraction. In addition, I am way too empathetic sometimes and I would sit and cry for other people mourning losses. The death toll was just incredibly difficult to fathom in my head. I had never lived through a moment in history -- WE have never lived through a moment in history -- with so much death and collective grief and some days that was so heavy. It felt comparable to living through a terrorist attack every day in both the scale of loss and the lack of understanding in how this was happening. How could we be living in a world where someone had to die alone in a bed? How could we be living in a time with all these advances in medical care and sending people to the moon, but a virus was killing 3,000 people a day? I spent time asking how and why? Two questions that are sometimes impossible to answer.
I also had a very difficult time dealing with what I felt was a severe lack of empathy. It still grates at me. The fact that I saw people I know refuse to wear a mask just infuriated me beyond measure. We know that masks are not 100% effective, nothing is really. But it helps significantly. More importantly, it is a sign that you give a sh-t about your community. To see people share statistics and become hellbent on not wearing one as a marker of some intellectual superiority and not being "a sheep" was astounding. It is the smallest thing we were asked to do. It does you no harm. It could potentially save someone's life. Is it not worth it for that alone? And yet there were people walking into stores with no masks when they were asked to wear one. There were people flouting rules at their jobs and not wearing one when asked to protect the people they work with. I saw people in positions of role model jobs who were advocating for damaging behaviors. It was and is unbelievable to me. Public health is referred to as PUBLIC for a reason. We all depend on each other and it has been incredibly eye-opening and disappointing to see who we cannot depend on.
I had bouts of feeling unwell from October onwards and unresolved diagnoses that led me to a specialist. After a few visits, my diagnosis (although not set in stone) was interstitial cystitis. A chronic condition that is not curable, only manageable. I thought I'd cry when she told me but I didn't. The relief of having someone finally listen to me was more overwhelming than the diagnosis of a chronic lifelong condition. I learned this past year: YOU KNOW YOUR BODY. Do not let someone tell you that you are not in pain when you are. Commit to seeking an answer and do not accept, "Well your results don't show anything so..."
I also went through a lot of growth in some ways to balance out the areas of life I was losing control of. I became a lot more ballsy when it came to finding out the people I needed to speak to in order to make my dreams happen. I looked at the world and figured I had nothing to lose, so GO FOR IT. I got a reply from my dream job back in March, but unfortunately my hopes to travel to NY for an interview were stifled by the COVID outbreak there which was the worst in the country. My paper was published in print early last year and then in April received the distinction of Most Downloaded Paper with the publisher. That was exciting! Mostly because I had zero inclination to publish. I suffer from a heavy dose of imposter syndrome, I don't favor my writing, and, honestly, I couldn't be bothered. I never had any hope of being an "academic" in the traditional sense, but I am glad my mentor pushed me to do it. I also got to (I say "got to" because I definitely have not earned the privilege) to write the foreword for one of my best friend's debut novels. That was rough because there's a lot of added pressure when it's not just your reputation on the line. I learned to value my voice a little more. I started this blog and I made conscious choices to advocate for people and things that I love. I don't think it's helpful to use your social media presence to be deliberately abrasive and confrontational, but I think the opportunity should be taken to speak up about what matters. And to speak up for truth, even when it's hard and uncomfortable. I had someone unfriend me on Facebook last year because I said "tell the truth". When you have the capability to have your words or posts shared, don't you want to make sure they're true? Even as politically divided as we are, surely one thing we should agree on is truth. The reason why we have such hate towards each other is because truth is double-sided. Truth should only be truth. It shouldn't be Democratic or Republican.
This pandemic isn't over. I've written in past tense like it is, but it really isn't. But maybe we are one step closer? Unemployment is down, vaccines are out, death tolls have decreased in some places. Maybe, just maybe, we are out of the trenches.
I have handled this pandemic well in some ways and not in others. I have had some of the best days of my life (March 5, 2020) and some of the worst. I shouldn't be able to give advice but, since this is my blog, here we go:
I have learned that hope is the key and simplicity is the grounding force. You ask people what they've missed the most about this year of upheaval -- it's seeing friends, hugging family, hearing kids play together, taking a meal with people you love, sitting close to people, shaking hands with a stranger. You ask them what they've appreciated and they say: the sound of birds, a sunny day, a morning cup of coffee, having more time with my kids, getting to read, a long walk, a good home-cooked meal.
Things we didn't spend enough time appreciating before.
You ask them what keeps them going: the nice weather we are expecting this weekend, hugging my family again, the vaccine, a vacation -- hope. Hope for better times. We have readjusted what we hope for. We don't hope for glitz and glam anymore, we hope for the normal things that have become foreign. We ground ourselves in the beauty of simplicity and we hope for a step above that. We have adjusted what our priority levels in life are... and maybe we needed to.
I wish 500,000 people dying didn't have to make us see the value in the life of a stranger.
I wish not being able to hug people didn't make us understand the value of touch and connection.
I wish our shelves being empty didn't force us to rethink how we deem who is "important" and "essential".
I wish willingness to wear a face mask didn't teach us who has our backs and who doesn't.
I wish isolation didn't have to be the way to teach us about mental health.
But it did. "Normal" isn't coming back. There's no coincidence that one of the biggest upheavals in history (the 1920s) took place right after the last major pandemic. In that decade, we saw women gain the right to vote, sexual liberation, drinking, more wealth, more dancing, more zest for life. The end of normal doesn't have to be a bad thing.
It can be a new beginning. That's my hope. That has what has kept me going on the dark days. There's a quote that says, "new beginnings are disguised as painful endings". May we remember that when we choose what the beginning of this new period of history will be.
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