My world has gotten so small in the past two years. It has gotten small because the world shut down and it has gotten small because it needed to. Like many of us, I’ve found that processing the real-time trauma and grief caused by the pandemic and its resulting isolation alongside unrelated, personal, capital-T traumas have left me unable to field and ingest much of anything at all. I have little to no patience for or interest in Instagram or other social media. My scope of attention has narrowed, only able to receive what is immediately in front of me, and what feels truly worthwhile. Healing. Meaningful.
We are now nearly two years in. As adaptive beings, we have learned to cope. We are generally less afraid while still exerting caution. We are learning to effectively exist within with this new normal, however heartbreaking it may be. We are re-assessing our lives. Making changes. Slowing down. Scaling back. Creating new visions for our futures that are aligned with the truths and values we’ve unearthed through each of our personal hailstorms of the past two years.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about expansion and contraction. About the ways of the body during childbirth. That restriction and clenching give way to openness and release, and that it is the symbiosis of the two that brings new realities into being. We were all so contracted for so long. Then hope felt tenable, doors flew back open, connection and expansion seemed to reinvigorate our lives. Until the variants came, and we were all confronted with renewed shutdowns and a sudden, severe contraction once again.
This makes me think, too, of the upward spiral of growth. The nonlinear nature of healing. The two steps forward and one step back. The way we think we’ve made peace with something in our past, our hearts, our bodies, our behavior patterns, only to find ourselves eventually back in the throes of that same wound and its teachings once again.
This cycle is inevitable. And so the question becomes: how do we hold ourselves in the contractions, in the revisitations of those aspects of experience we thought we had handled and left behind? How do we help ourselves see the presence and truth of our growth and change, which always does exist alongside our ghosts?
The following is a piece of journaling I wrote in early May, 2020, six weeks into the first quarantine. It is a snapshot of a precise moment in time, conditions upon conditions and my wrestling with them. It is a portrait of a broken hearted woman in forced isolation during a global pandemic, trying to make sense of her life.
Life is so different now; and still, in moments, so much the same. I share it to share my experience, knowing that there is always something universal in that which is the most deeply personal. Hope you’re all doing okay out there. Sending love.
~*~
May 2, 2020
There is nothing to do but be still and notice. The locus of the feeling in my body. Tightness in the chest; tingling along the spine; a throat clenching back tears. I give the sensations names, words so they may fall into understanding, a safe home in which to dwell. Give them a right to exist so one day they may no longer need to.
In this inescapable stillness, the memories come flooding back. Ghosts that drop me to my knees in fits of tears because of their robust rightness, the yardstick they grew into; my barometer of seamless love. These ghosts of loss and grief, gnarled in my heart amongst such profound anger—and nowhere to put it.
The both/and is a profoundly difficult and uncomfortable place to be. To love someone deeply and know you are better off without them. To allow for the truth of grief nestled right next to anger. To forgive yourself for loving someone who was harmful to your spirit and forgive them for inflicting harm. To allow the truth of the immense beauty and light you made together alongside the truth of how you both tore each other apart. The whole mess of it.
Every morning, I awake to the same. A pandemic. Solo-quarantine. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but be still and notice.
So, I sit. On my couch, staring out the window at the Craftsman homes with their whimsical gardens, shelter for families living out their own dramas, loves and lives. Sit in the bathtub, staring at the concentric ripples of water caused by my sweating faucet; staring at my own feet. And I stare into screens throughout my eight hour workday and take walks into the hills and do bedroom push-ups and downward dog and on the rare occasion dance and allow myself to bake but not too much and watch shows on the computer and FaceTime with my parents and friends near and far. But at the end of it all, every damn time, the same singular thing persists: me. Alone, in this apartment. With my finitude and infinitude and fickleness and overly analytical mind and big feelings and able body and breath that keeps breathing me into life without my having to ask it to. So, I tend to what I have. This moment. This feeling. This thought. This allowing, if I can manage it. This compassion, if I can will it into being.
Some days the loneliness sits like an anvil in my chest, suffocating and immobilizing. I call a friend who reminds me: "Times are really hard right now. It’s okay. This is being human."
Some mornings, in the liminal spaces of sleep-addled cognition, in the ebbs toward waking, mind grasped by past damages and present salves, there are fissures, cognitive shifts, hopeful awakenings. A flicker of thought: I deserve healthy love.
A great teacher of mine once told me that all people are mirrors, simply reflecting back to us what we already believe to be true. We experience reality through the lens of our interpretations, our expectations, the meanings we impose and stories we spin of things. All life, aspects of our own consciousness. And as our mirrors, people become our teachers. Gifting us experiences from which to self-reflect, to learn and grow.
Sometimes we get lost. And we need people who, through shadow or light, remind us who we are. What we stand for. What we want. What feels transcendent and what feels unacceptable. What we’re afraid to believe we deserve. Who, in their involuntary ways, push us to rise into our light, our trust, our truth, our knowing. Our hearts begging us to return home to ourselves.