Your Hard is Hard (The Pandemic Version)

Maybe you are like me, during this Covid-19 crisis. I am privileged, with my Internet (Netflix!), clothing, soft blankets!, essentials, continued work and (knock on wood) healthy children with enough food to eat. Maybe you are like me. I am not suffering, no not really. But here I am.

I am walking around in a fog, blinded by confusion and a lack of clarity. I’m hurting and I don’t think I have any idea how scared I am.

Are you trying hard not to feel it, too? People keep talking about how scared everyone is, and how this virus and its quarantine are making us feel this, and feel that, and I’m sure a lot of people are. But maybe you’re like me. Maybe you have been, in many ways, when you can pull it off…numb.

I want you to know your hard is hard and perhaps you should face it. Me too.

For me, shutting down emotionally is a) a coping skill that I often take too far (recovering alcoholic) for fear if I feel too much I will fall apart in ways I’m not prepared for. And/or shutting down is b) a response to worrying that if I feel sad or overwhelmed, I am being selfish and forgetting about people that have it worse than I do.

Funny thing. I can compare myself to those who have it harder and try not to feel anything, but there the feelings stubbornly remain. Maybe you’re like me. I’m working on this. Oh Heather, just sit still and let it come. Stop running from it. We need to be working on this. I know, it’s hard, what with all the demands and our ruminating minds, but we’re gonna have to sit with the feelings.

This is how we don’t forget ourselves. This is how we don’t disappear.

So hello, you there, just regular ol’ you with what has become your lonely exhausting and often scary pandemic life. You are not downplaying the pain of others by acknowledging your own and neither am I. I just thought you should know. You are also not doing something wrong or coming across as hopeless by speaking your struggle. What you are doing is giving people a ME TOO, I feel that way too; and we all, every one of us, needs a solid ME TOO.

Not one human can pull themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough to weather this storm and call themselves FINE. OH, I’m fine. Could be worse…

Stop that.

Please stop that, because we are not fine. We are buried under the weight of a whole new upside down world and its constant flow of toxic shifting information. We have no idea how long this will go on, how many will die. There is a low thrum of anxiety under our skin all the time, asking how we will come through this? Which ones of us will not? Economy! Are my most vulnerable people going to somehow get this thing? From me? From the railing I touched, or the door knob, when I brought the groceries over?

Every small thing is a build up. Every big thing is a digging away at our sense of self, our view of the world, and the people in it. This is so hard. Feel it with me, please. Have you cried? I’ve cried about other things but not really the whole pandemic and quarantine thing. It’s like I’m staving it off, for fear I will crumble if I let go. I believe in being positive and hopeful, but sometimes I take that too far, if that makes any sense at all.

It’s time for us to let go and feel because the best part of recognition of our pain is that it deepens our empathy. This is how we keep room in our heads and hearts to see and feel something for those that are struggling the most; in poverty, old age, essential workers facing the germs and each day with an “I must,” those who are sick, incarcerated, left to die alone, on the margins, no coping skills, in constant panic, jobless, homeless…priceless. This is how we keep room for them. We say, This is so hard, and we feel how that hurts, and then we look up to see the pain in their eyes or hear the strain in their voice and we recognize it and we feel again. But this time, for them.

That sounds awful, all that feeling. But the good news is that we cannot feel pain for others and do nothing.

Thank God. We are miraculously motivated to action because of pain. My pain. Your pain. Our pain.

We get out of ourselves (I am so sick of myself) this way. All the feeling, it is a catalyst for change. We need hope, and hope comes from the change-makers. We cannot pull this change-making thing off if we are denying we are in any pain ourselves.

So you there with the roof over your head and your paid bills, your take-out, and another episode of Schitt’s Creek. I know you have the fear and uncertainty, too. You have the questions and the distance. You have a lot, too. I know others have it harder, but you have a lot, too. It’s okay to feel it. It’s okay to stop the news and the social media and the binging and just sit. Free the feelings from that tight grasp you have on them. I’ll try it, too.

We can hold our own pain along with the pain of others who do have it harder. We can hold both.

If we don’t acknowledge this pain (and its good friend exhaustion), whatever form it comes in (panic, hopelessness, depression…) our minds and hearts will deteriorate until we can no longer be the helpers. This pain is there, at some level, for each of us. We are binge-watching and binge-eating it. We are drinking too much or turning to our righteous indignation to ignore it.

The pain doesn’t leave while we distract ourselves or binge. We know this. We need to sit with the pain a while. We cannot go dark in isolation. We cannot.

Let me preach to both of us: Stop and listen to your heart-gut, feel your weariness. Feel what you feel when you feel it. Be in it. See it. Cry. Feel it again. Call someone and speak the pain. Don’t be afraid that your pain will swallow you if you feel it. It cannot do that. Feeling it is like ripping off a band-aid; there’s an ouch! that’s followed by a deep breath of air, for the healing. We don’t have to wallow or go forth to pity parties. We simply need to feel.

This pain leaves us wiser and stronger. Let’s be kind enough to ourselves to move through the pain, so we can get back to the work of helping those that simply cannot rise up without us. Our hard is hard.