In the Shadows: Some Dark Sharing from the Days of Covid

In these times of not normal, What has brought you to your knees?

Some of it, I saw coming. This was never going to be the period of time I broke up with chocolate chip cookies. I was never going to build a raised garden bed or learn Spanish. I knew ahead of time that I would miss going out to dinner, people watching, blue polished toenails, travel. And I have missed all of those things. I knew business would be evolving and unreliable – and it has been.

Some of what’s been hard, however, I didn’t see coming – and my conversations with others confirm that they have been surprised by what is challenging them.  I’m not talking about the obvious: the death, the sickness, the financial ruin, the inability to get to family and loved ones.  I’m talking about a different thing.

The external scaffolding is gone, along with many of what Glennon Doyle (whose voice has been deeply resonating with me these past weeks) calls our “escape buttons,” by which I mean maybe  social time or social media, the wine or the weed, the triathlon training, the drama at work, the sex, the shopping, the travel … Because we can’t have a ton of conversations out and about, many of us are having more conversations with ourselves. Without access to many of those escape buttons, what is unexpectedly making noise?

A few have told me: they were made for this. That the quiet resonates.

For others, it has looked like grief, conflicts, messiness. Relationships unraveling, organizations in complete shit show mode. An unwelcome perspective on parenting. Unmanageable anxiety. Hostility towards others.

The Unbearable Lightness of Not Knowing.

For me, it has been the lonely, the hot lonely that spirals up for me sometimes in isolation. It is the sad and the bruisy wounds. The feeling like I’m not in the pack, a sense of unbelonging, of something missing. At times, it’s intense, as only empty things can be. Some days, it’s tears and conversations with my journal. Other days, it’s learning how to savor, how to be okay on this journey. What wants to be seen, heard? Learned?

If you are in conversation with yourself, you might ask: What are the patterns begging to be broken? The scream that needs to be soothed? What needs to get out of control before you find the calibration?

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