The Pandemic Pull

It’s a confusing time to be alive, amiright? I honest-to-God feel like I’m living in some kind of macabre TV show, a Groundhog Day/The Good Place/The Walking Dead mashup.

Every day brings a new challenge, usually in the form of an ethical or moral conundrum. We don’t want the economy to collapse, so we want to open up—but if we open up too soon, we may amp the spread of virus and overwhelm our healthcare systems. We yearn to see our family and friends, but wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves if we unknowingly carried COVID-19 to anyone we love. We want to support our local food places by ordering take-out, but are we bringing virus home on the food containers?

The very hardest thing for me lately, though, has been the polarity of my emotional responses. They are, in layman’s terms, “all over the fucking place.” Those who know me well know I’ve never exactly been a “medium emotion” kind of gal—I tend to have big feels. But this? The reactions that are coming with this pandemic bullshit? I’ve never felt so drawn and quartered, so pulled in very different emotional directions all at once:

I am in love with humanity for the sacrifices many have made to protect people at risk. I am disgusted with the many who continue to act in ways that puts their entitlement, shortsightedness, and lack of empathy on display. I am so grateful to be able to work: for the sense of agency and usefulness, the structure, the income. I am exhausted with the weight of others’ despair, anxiety, and grief. I want to be as connected as I can to my family and my world. I want to be alone as much as possible. I want to swallow the news cycle whole. I want to never hear the words “uncertain times” again. I am doing enough. I am never enough.

(I honestly get tired just reading that paragraph.)

If I were my client, I'd say to me, “You don’t have to choose. You don’t have to be either happy or sad, you can be both. People are neither entirely good nor bad, they’re both. Let it all in. Make room—I know you can. Let all the feelings make you bigger, so that you have more space in you the next time something is hard.”

And yet. Suggesting to anyone that they can hold all of these pandemic feels at once—the rage and the compassion, and sorrow and the hope, the restlessness and the acceptance—it’s a big ask. It’s so much holding. It’s exhausting. And I’m feeling it.

And I wonder if you are, too. 

Annals of a therapist during COVID-19: Day 1

3/26/2020

I’d intended, since I went into social isolation about twelve days ago, to write a few blog posts. Funny, uplifting stories and perspectives was the goal, because I think now more than ever, we need the ability to find joy and laughter.

And I might still do that. All bets are off.

But I haven’t yet been able to access that part of me that can pop off a funny anecdote like it’s nothing. The inside of my head is usually a ticker tape parade, colorful and chaotic and overwhelming, and often joyous. Now, though, it’s more like a funeral procession. My brain mechanics feel rusty and worn, slow and heavy, like maybe one of the gears fell out altogether and the others are having to compensate, but aren’t quite up to snuff. Like maybe the whole machine is about to go kaput.

The era of COVID-19 isn’t easy for anyone, so I’m not trying to say my mental distress is special. It’s not. I’m floundering in a completely foreign situation just like everyone around me is. Problem is, I’ve got people looking to me for help, too. I’m still a therapist, even if the world is upside down and inside out. Especially because the world is upside down and inside out.

It’s been a weird road, these past two weeks. The week leading up to Friday the 13^th of March, I was still in a state of heavy denial. The virus was just another flu. I was going to Jamaica on March 21, as planned for over a year. Over that week, I started the process of acknowledging and grieving what my losses were shaping up to be. And on Saturday the 14^th, I woke up and was like “waiiiit holy shit, hold the phone, what are you doing?” It was a strange experience, like all of these new and very real thoughts had infiltrated me and I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been there all along. I accepted the reality and gravity of Coronavirus in a new way, and grasped my responsibility in flattening the curve. I cancelled my vacation. I got a telehealth platform set up for my practice. I emailed every client to tell them there would be changes in my service delivery. I created consent documentation and consulted consulted consulted. Between Saturday and Monday, I transformed my practice completely. It was exhausting, but exhilarating. I love learning, and I had to—and fast.

Fueled by caffeine, novelty, and optimism, I marched into last week. I saw twenty clients over telehealth, and the process went beautifully. No tech issues, and the whole videoconferencing thing felt a lot less interpersonally weird than I thought it might be. It felt empowering to be able to offer hope and guidance in bleak times. I ended the week with a sense of relief that I could still be a steady presence for my clients, put some good into the world, and also bring in some income for my family.

Enter this week. Now, I was supposed to be on vacation this week, so I opted to keep my caseload light. I scheduled nine people. I had hoped for a restorative week, filled with mostly reading and junk TV and personal stay-at-home projects. It has turned out to be a week of battling with insurance companies, intense client stress, and coming to grips with the mortality of my world. It has turned out to be a week of increasingly horrifying news, a week where I had conflict with family and friends about what “social distance” means in terms of how to enact it successfully, a week of fear and frustration and almost constant anger and anxiety. I’m trudging into Friday feeling like I’ve been steamrolled.

Today I held the sadness of a senior who will likely not celebrate the end of her high school career elbow-to-elbow with her friends. I held the desperation of a refugee who is running out of food with no apparent means of getting more, and whose children have fallen ill, possibly with Coronavirus. I held the anxiety of a pregnant mother who is unsure her partner will get to be in the delivery room with her when she labors. I witnessed the fear of my colleagues as we wonder if and how we will be reimbursed fairly for the important services we provide to others, in the age of telehealth, and I went to bat with and for them in the ways that I could.

Today I had my first panic attack in years.

Because the trauma of my clients is different than mine, but the same. I hold for them the very things I fear myself. Scarcity, financial ruin, loss, and death.

I assume tomorrow, if operating on a better night’s sleep, I will wake with a sunnier disposition. Optimism is my default, to the extent to which clients have described sessions with me as “hope infusions.”

But euthymic mood notwithstanding, I have no delusions of the next few weeks being easy. On me, on anyone. I think we’re in for some real shit, people.

And I guess until my funny bone kicks back in, I’m going to document it.

Kringle and Credit: To the woman who came before us

Every year, I make the Kringle, and I think of the woman who made it before me.

A woman I never met, but wish I had. Her name was Paula Haar, and she was my husband’s grandmother. A mother of five, a piano teacher, a talented organist, a lover of people, these things I know she was. I know these things through the stories her family still tells. Though she’s been gone for many years, she remains woven into the tapestry of people she brought into creation.

Every year, I think of her as I work the soft dough with butter-greasy hands, and I think: am I doing this right? Did her dough crack, too, just there, if she rolled it too thin? Did she, too, wonder if that was enough pecans in the filling, or too much?

Every year, I consider her legacy. Without Paula Haar, there’d have been no Margaret, my beloved mother-in-law. There’d have been no Jeb, and no story between he and I. There’d have been no Evie, no Jonah. Paula was responsible for the making not just of Kringle at Christmastime, but for an entire collection of some of my favorite people in this world.

How do you express gratitude to someone, simply for having lived?

I guess this is my way. I bake the Kringle, thinking of her rolling the dough, filling the pastries, years before I was even conceived.

Thank you and Merry Christmas, Grandma Haar

On being bad at birthdays

I’m going have a moment of honesty, here: I’m bad at birthdays. Really bad. I’m not at all an “I’m growing older with grace and appreciation” kind of gal. I’m more of a duck-and-cover, avoid the truth, “point me to your best anti-wrinkle cream” kind of gal. Though I’m certainly invested in developing the poise and gratitude toward aging that others around me seem to embody, I’m not there yet. I’ve never, ever been a natural at accepting myself as I am.   

And yet. When I stop to pause, when I look beyond the number and the achy joints and the new-and-already-deep eleven lines between my eyes, some of the changes that these past years have brought, I would not give back, not for anything. One point of development has been finding better ways to balance empathy with self-respect and assertiveness; in other words, I’m less likely to sacrifice my beliefs or needs to stay in others’ good graces; more likely to stick to my principles and have a dialogue or conflict about them if needed. Simultaneously, I’m more invested than ever in making the world better and kinder, one small action at a time. 

Maybe most importantly, I’m starting to own and honor what I am and accept what I’m not. I am moody. I am caring. I can be flaky and inconsistent despite having good intentions. My working memory isn’t good, so I will tell you the same story that I told you yesterday—but hopefully, it still makes you laugh. I am not a great hostess, but I am an okay bearer of random gifts and food. I have limits, physically and emotionally, and some of them are new. And finally, finally, I am accepting that I am not everyone’s type, and this is utterly okay, and in fact good. Being selective with who I pour my effort into is adaptive, both for me and for others—yet importantly, I can be kind and gracious to people even if we aren’t destined to be BFF. 

I am a writer. I am an activist. 

I am human. 

I’m 36. 

And if the price of the knowledge I now have at 36 was growing another year older, then so be it. Slowly, slowly I will learn to make peace with this process.

But I probably won’t be there by 37.

Penning privilege: What I learned from SCBWI 2018

When I attend conferences, my goal is to learn and retain one important thing. Just one, because at conferences, we take in data with indiscriminate abandon, and even with pages upon pages of notes and hours of excited post-lecture discourse with bright peers, who can keep more than one big takeaway? The conference I just attended (SCBWI, LA, 2018) was focused on writing kidlit, so I figured I leave with something to do with craft, or sales, or networking.

I did learn writing things. They’re in my notes.

What I will retain, however, is an expanded sense of my privilege, as a writer, and as a person.

As a counseling psychologist I’ve spent years in the study of it, in the awareness-building of it, in the talking to my clients and peers about it. And still, there are those life moments where I see the world through a different lens and come into contact with the extent of what I don't know. This weekend was one of those times. 

I became aware of my class privilege, as well as my lack of it, while chatting with conference colleagues about travel. We swapped thoughts on places we’d been and where we want to go. One woman shared which European destinations worked best for her young family, during their yearly summer two-week vacations.  Another shared which hotel pillows she preferred, and which beds, and which had the best toilet paper. I was swapping info and learning info, because my family can afford to travel a modest amount, but at the same time I was thinking about how neither of my parents had even been on an airplane until they were in their thirties. Our family vacations growing up were spending three days in nearby Kansas City or Des Moines, baseball games and museums and Dairy Queens, a far cry from the Isle of Capri or Edinburgh. 

My mom is as much a bookworm as I and had always spoken of writing a book, but in looking back, when would she have had time to pen the next American classic? Between 12-hour shifts working the floor at the county hospital? Or maybe in the one-hour time slot between suppertime and running off to my sporting events?  My mother would not have had the privilege of writing, not like I do, with my career and my spouse’s career and the way my life is set up. I’m so aware that there are many people in the world like my mother, those who have words inside of them that could be beautiful novels, but who do not the privileges of time and resources for writing. And yet, while I can afford time to write, and I can take my kids on trips in a way my parents couldn’t, and I had the means to come to this conference this year, I do not have the privilege of this conference fee and travel expense being a drop in the bucket, a one-off, something I can count on doing every year, as it seemed to be to so many people I talked to.

I became more aware of my racial privilege, in a city with far more racial and ethnic diversity than what is typically seen in my home city of Lincoln, Nebraska. It was unlikely anyone was going to doubt my motives because of the color of my skin. I was aware that, as a writer, I do and will come under less scrutiny than my peers of color. As Malinda Lo, one of the conference presenters, spoke of, the difficulty level I start with as a White woman is relatively easy, especially compared with those from marginalized groups, whose default might be "medium" or even "hard." I also thought more about my writing and became increasingly invested in the idea of not letting my manuscripts reflect “default race” as White.

And then there was this new-old thing going on, that has to do with both privilege and oppression. I was aware of the slide of eyes down the bends and curves of my body; men, in a way that made no pretense of hiding sexual interest; women, in barely-veiled disapproval of something hard to pinpoint: my body, my clothes, the way I carry myself? I must note here, too, that this didn’t happen with every person I encountered by any means, not even most. But when it did, I felt it, right in the scarred-over places of my patchwork heart. As an overweight, overachieving, straight-A straight laced teen I would have reveled in the appraisal, even the “bad” attention, because it was still attention. Even ten years ago, when I was still adjusting to a new type of body and a new type of interaction with the world, I had loud internal monologue when out in public, one that screamed, “I have a body! I am not just a brain on legs! Please, please, do you see me?”

And now it’s different. Though sometimes I still feel like girl who at age ten wore women’s size 18 clothing pulled off the racks of Wal-Mart because that’s what fit and that’s what we could afford, I’m more adjusted to this size 8 self, used to the way my body feels, the way the world treats me. By the third day of this conference, though, I started feeling when someone’s eyes crawled over my body. I felt sad. What hurt is that the dip between my breasts and the cleft between my legs was apparently a much bigger deal than the space between my ears.

I had the urge to run up to my room and change clothes, put something “more modest” on. Something that would make me invisible, or at least, no longer an object. But the feminist within me rallied, pushed back, “But why?” I was wearing my favorite dress, the one I call “my happy frock,” because I wore it when I went to Hamilton and the fabric is woven with all of my favorite colors, and it is breathable and cool and L.A. is hot. Why would I swap out my happiest clothing for less-comfortable camouflage?

I left the dress on, but I stopped looking people in the eye. Carefully, carefully I kept my eyes facing forward, or at the ground, or on my phone. Even though I didn’t let myself go incognito, shame still led me to shrink down, back down, not be myself, the self that would look people on the street in the eye and smile.

In this body of gained and lost weight I have gained and lost privilege, yet overall, the objectification of me has merely shifted. As an overweight youth, I was a funny, maybe tragic aberration, and now, I’m a sexual commodity.  

As I sit here in the Los Angeles International Airport, at a charging station in my simple black peasant midi dress that I purchased for $25 at Old Navy, I think of the privilege that brought me here. I have the means and support to be across the country from home, taking time away from work and my family. I have a laptop that I’m plunking away on. I sip on a Dunkin Donuts iced latte and snack on M&Ms, because I could buy these things and because no one will judge someone my size for putting junk in my body. People do not clutch their purses closer when I come near, because I’m White and not seen as inherently criminal.

And the man sitting across the table from me cannot stop looking at my chest. I’ve got my eyes dropped to my laptop, because I need to need to need to need to need to finish this post, but also, I don’t want to look at his bushy eyebrows, red-alcoholic nose, frizzled hair. I don’t want to see him. But I know he’s there. Maybe before I leave, I’ll get brave and shoot him a return look, one that lets him know that I disapprove. A look worthy of Minerva McGonagall herself. But maybe I won’t, because I’m here alone and he’s bigger than me and I am, after all, a woman.

I’m coming home from this conference with more than I thought I’d leave with. A suitcase of new books, a notebook full of plot ideas, a bulleted list of things to discuss with my agent, a handful of writerly contacts to keep in touch with, a deepened understanding and relationship with my dear critique partner, and this, my one big takeaway thought, the one I’ll retain without help or review: I have privilege. I lack privilege.

And my fervent hope is that this post helps you to think more holistically about your own.

The gift of closure

Every day, life hands you a gift. Rarely, it hands you a Very Big Gift.

Sometimes that Very Big Gift comes in the form of unexpected closure.

We all want closure, right? Many of my clients are very explicit in their desire for it. One client described the loose ends in her life as constituting her very own Circle of Hell, a fiery inferno of What Ifs, I should’ve saids, ‘I wish’es, if onlys.

It’s human to crave the end of something distressful, and also to believe that we must see the end of that something to truly heal and move on. We as a society tend to like symmetry, and full circles, and clean cuts.

Yet, we live in world that’s inherently asymmetrical, the circles more like wavy ovals and rarely all the way closed, and the cuts jagged, hard to stitch up. The world we live in is messy. And despite our best efforts, we as people are messy.

It is for these reasons that I, more often than not, end up in a tough love position when my clients tell me that they need this thing to move on in their life. They need that apology. They need that validation. They need to be heard, or seen, or noticed. Need, need, need, they say, and I smile, and nod, and then say, “no, you don’t.”

You see, it’s a matter of want. We want those edges sewn up. We want to know we’ve said all we could, or that we were understood, or that there are no hard feelings. We want to apologize or be apologized to. We want the mess cleaned up, swept up, stowed away.

But we don’t need it. And in fact, I think it’s the believing that we need something from someone, in order to move on, that keeps people sunk into distress, despair, and with bad habits on repeat. When we rely on the reactions of someone else to determine our healing, we put the key to our contentment into someone else’s pocket.

Closure in the form of an interaction with another person, a certain thing you want to say or want said to you, is certainly something you can crave, yearn for, and seek out. And sometimes, if you’re really, very lucky, you just might get it. But hear this: You Are Not Entitled to It. If you get it, consider it a gift. Consider it an ultimate win.

Nine times out of ten, people don’t get closure in the form of an interaction with another person. They get it from somewhere inside of them. They learn to think about the situation in a different way. They accept that there are things that will never get to be said, or heard, or felt. They accept their lack of power in de-cluttering all of the chaos in the very messy world, and they find ways to move on with their lives. It can be done.

My life is just as messy as anyone else’s; maybe a little more so. That being said, I’ve got some broken circles hanging out limbo, swinging from branches, taunting me with their lack of completion. One of these broken circles, in particular, was not only broken, but also on fire. It has kept me up at night. I’ve cried about it, raged about it. It comes up in my dreams and I wake drenched with cold sweat and cursing my pockmarked and hypersensitive heart. And because I thought it was the best thing to do, I worked very hard at making peace this thing, internally. My gut told me that it wasn’t fair to involve the other person who held the missing link in my incomplete circle—because my circle was my burden to carry, not theirs.

I made progress. I left the circle hanging up in the branches, scorched and ashy, but no longer burning. I became able to tolerate its brokenness. I accepted it as it was.

Then I happened to run into the person who had the power to complete that tattered circle. And because I am both very lucky and also because there is goodness in the world, the person gifted me with closure. I said some stuff I’d wanted to say. I got some questions answered that had weighed on me. I felt heard and forgiven and valued, and I hope the other person did, too.

To be clear: I didn’t deserve this interaction. I didn’t earn it. I wasn’t entitled to it. It just happened. It was a gift.

I’ve still got a lot of broken circles hanging out in my branches—unfinished business and unanswered questions and points of grief and loss. It’s pretty human to have a few. And I know with a certainty that runs bone deep that many of my circles will never be closed; they’ll always be missing a piece, or bent beyond recognition, or crafted with a dotted line.

But I’ve gotta tell you: I am grateful, grateful, grateful to have one less now.

Half my life

I recently turned 35. I’ve been with my husband, Jeb, for 17.5 years. Do the math: I’ve been with this man half my life.

Yet not even the knowledge that comes with time can stop me from sometimes being plagued with doubt. I often worry whether we’re doing marriage “the right way.” I don’t know about you, but I do this thing where I look at other couples and assume they have it all figured out, everything in their life is perfect and wonderful. I go so far as to let others’ lives play out like movies in my mind. Other couples, watching every TV show together, spending all night talking. Agreeing on every single opinion about every single thing in life, ever. Skipping through dewy meadows in their perfectly pressed clothes and clean shoes, then going home to their pristine houses. (Y’all are killing it, in my imagination.)

I wonder if people do that with me and Jeb. We have an exceptionally well-documented life via social media, due to Jeb being a photographer and also knowing a lot of photographers. A quick perusal of either of our Facebook  accounts reveals lots of pretty pics of us, all made up. Tons of snaps of our kids being awesome. Photos from tropical vacations, and warm, cozy holidays. Our social media screams “We’re happy! SO FREAKING HAPPY!”

And that’s about half of the truth. A lot of the time, we are happy, content, doing fine.  

And a lot of the time, we’ve struggled.

Getting married is easy. You find someone you love. You think, yeah, I could spend my life with this person. You have a celebration and your friends and family all show up and everyone cries. The world is your oyster; everything is possible.

It’s staying married that’s hard.

If you’d have asked me at twenty-three, which is how old I was when I got married, I’d have predicted that over the years, I’d change very little—I knew who I was, what I wanted, the road I was headed down. I had it all figured out.

Except I didn’t and I didn’t have enough foresight to see that I didn’t.

People can change a hell of a lot over time, and I think it’s possible that Jeb and I changed more than most. I pursued many years of higher education, and due to that, was exposed to ideas and people and adversity and growth and culture in a way that molded me, shaped me, carved me into a different person. As for Jeb, he left his job as a public school educator and became a full-time photographer/creative. He learned that he needs to be making things, thinking outside of the box, and not answering to a hierarchy to feel fulfilled through his work.

We also became parents of two kiddos in a span of twenty months, so as we were stretching and learning and developing our singular identities, we were also immersed in the task of keeping tiny humans alive.

The years marched on. I got my PhD and started a private practice. The kids started school. We went to family celebrations. We hung out with friends. We did date nights sometimes. We traveled. We pursued individual hobbies and interests. We built a house and moved to a lovely new neighborhood.

And then one day in our thirties we woke up and realized we had no idea who the other was. I won’t speak for his side of it, but my personal awakening came with the question: Why are we together? We had different groups of friends. We didn’t read the same books, or necessarily gravitate to the same kinds of media, or have any hobbies in common. I loved Jeb, but I didn’t know why I was with him anymore.

At about the same time I was grappling with these serious questions about my marriage, I became depressed— so depressed I couldn’t even see straight. It seemed like every decision I’d ever made in my life was wrong. I questioned my entire existence as a human being: where I’d come from, what I was doing now, where I was going. It was hell. And Jeb got angry and withdrew. He didn’t know what to do with me; didn’t understand what I was trying to say when I talked about my questions, about my doubts, about what wasn’t working for me in our marriage. In hindsight, he was depressed, too, but men sometimes look different when they’re depressed. (Google Masked Male depression for more on that.)

And we fought. Good Lord, did we fight. There were tears and storming out and many nights spent sleeping apart. I spent the night of our 11^th wedding anniversary at my parent’s house, that’s how bad it was.

We contemplated separation. We ate meals together with our kids and had our best “everything is fine” faces on, even as I researched apartments, always late at night, or at the office, while I wept my way through my fifth box of Kleenex.  

But in the chaos, something miraculous happened. We fought for each other. Even through all the squabbling and miscommunicating and passive-aggression, we kept coming back to the same point: we wanted to try. We wanted our family. We wanted to see if we could find each other again.

So we tried. We went to therapy together, and went to therapy individually. First, we bent. I started trying harder to listen to him when he was sharing something he was excited about, even when I was exhausted from listening to people all day, and even if what he was saying didn’t interest me. He started greeting me when I came in the door after work, and went out of his way to tell me all the ways he appreciates me. Essentially, we slowly figured out the ways we had been failing each other and made the others’ emotional needs a priority again. We made a few big shifts, but mostly, we made a million little changes.

And after awhile, we had bent so much that we softened; the rigid edges of us melting. I let him back into the places in my spirit that had long been steeled against him. Though he isn’t and will never again be the man I married, he became a man I wanted to stay married to.

I don’t think that Jeb’s my soulmate. This is because I don’t believe in soulmates, this idea that you can meet someone and POOF, love happens and it’s forever and you don’t have to do anything to make it work. I used to buy into this stuff, and sometimes that wily belief wants to come weaseling back in—mostly when Jeb and I are struggling. I think, during those rough times: “Oh, if only I’d found my soulmate and married him, then I wouldn’t be going through any of this arguing or pain or doubt.” But you know what? I call bullshit. What I really believe in is two people fighting for each other and choosing each other again and again and again, every day. I can’t think of any better definition of love than that.

I didn’t write this for some kind of “atta girl.” I’m not aiming for you all to see me as a paragon of morality, because believe you me, the level of fuck uppery that I’ve reached during these years of growth and struggle has been unreal. I also fully anticipate that I will in some way, at some point, mess something up again.  Our struggle isn't over. It's not a thing that ends. I think marriage/partnership is less like a straight line with some kind of destination that a couple can arrive at, and more like a circle with little pit stops along the path, some happy, some sad, some totally fucked up. And round and round the circle you go, hopefully learning how to navigate the rough times as you know yourself and your partner better.

I also didn’t write this to shame those of you who have divorced or ended long term partnerships. I don’t think every relationship can be saved, or should be.  

I wrote this for the folks like me, who are sitting there comparing their imperfect relationship to everyone else’s “perfect” one, lurking and hiding in secret shame. If your marriage is messy, if there’s some stain on it that you wish wasn’t there but is, if you’ve hurt your partner or been hurt, if you’ve wondered if you made the “right” choice in a partner—you’re not alone. You’re more normal than you think. The more I talk to people who I’m real with, and who are real with me, the more I realize that every long term romantic relationship has problems. It’s what we do with the problem that matters.

As for me, I’m going to keep trying with Jeb for as long as it makes sense to try. Being with him for half of my life hasn’t been nearly long enough.  

Photo: Sarah Gudeman   http://www.sarahgudeman.com