Words: Don’t Even Have a Title
People are wearing gloves for going to the grocery store and I am a mitten person. That is to say, in the world of self-judgment and self-loathing (the sweet spot of depression), I woke up thinking about mittens not gloves and how this is proof I am failing at proper comportment during a global pandemic.
This is a strange time, one that flings privilege and inequities, inadequacies and heroism, huge ideas (epidemiology, economics, global cyber-warfare) and the absolute smallest measures of human experience against each other. Actually, that’s always how it is, but we are being forced to acknowledge it right now. As ever, we are only human, for all that means.
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Everyone says structure is key to emotional survival through a crisis like this. I feel like I haven’t gotten there… yet. Each day seems to bring a mix of triage — mostly of an emotional/logistical nature, but emotional/logistical work takes hours (ask any professional therapist, which is to say, don’t take my word for this) — overwhelm (see the first time-consuming activity) and then a bunch of the mundane, which includes some of the first time-consuming activity on a lesser level of intensity. There’s trying to get the house into some physical order for this period of confinement. There’s managing the youngest child, which is to say, trying to get her off screens, endeavoring not to despair when the first day of home school turned out to be teary and tortuous and frayed three people’s nerves.
Things I am far as heck from: structure, feeling like I have something to contribute to the greater good, bandwidth for concentration beyond, really, my best efforts at emotional/logistical work and lifting myself from low-grade panic.
Things I am glimpsing at this moment: to care for others is the work at hand — for each of us in different ways, and it includes, foremost, physical distancing, which is our civic duty and which we must take it seriously. That said, no one is going to get this perfectly. And how we both treat one another and how we forgive ourselves and each other matters right now. It just does. I don’t know that I can articulate it better than saying at each turn our clarity — social distancing is not a choice — requires us to acknowledge two more things: one, our gratitude for those helping us all, in hospitals and grocery stores, in garbage trucks (or on trash-hauling bicycles) and shelters and by self-isolating, and two, our vulnerability. We are humans overcome by something most of us did not anticipate experiencing; the dynamics that come with weathering something unknown are at play, because that’s how we tick. Nothing outwits our humanness.
Stay safe. Take care of each other.
