Transitions

We learned over this last year that, as Glennon Doyle famously touted, “we can do hard things.” For some of us, the hardest thing may be returning to “normal” after such deep immersion in a new “normal” that, in many ways, felt easier, better, more aligned.

I’ve been keeping this geranium alive on a windowsill over the winter. It’s hung in there, but it’s spindly and weak and needy to get back outside as soon as I can safely harden it off and return it to its rightful place outdoors.

Some of you may feel like the geranium: fully ready to resume your rightful, pre-pandemic lives. Some of us are feeling more reluctant, hesitant.

I’m going to share a series here on my blog about what’s coming up in me (and in others, I presume) as many of us are faced with the options of transitioning our lifestyle once again as pandemic restrictions ease (at least here in the US) and as the vaccines become more widely available. I know many who are struggling with these new transitions—including myself—and writing about it helps me, and if you share any of these feelings of hesitancy, I hope reading about it helps you.

Throughout the series I’m going to talk about transitions as liminal spaces and rites of passage, explore ways to get intentional about the shifts in our lives, talk about boundaries that can support us in this new season, explore other resources that can help, and try to normalize the awkwardness some of us are feeling around this transition. A good friend recently described re-emerging from the pandemic as going to rehab to learn to walk again after an accident or illness. We may have to learn to use muscles again that we previously took for granted.

A year ago, we went through a major transition. When the pandemic began in the US in March last year, we all had to transition into a new way of doing life: learning how to navigate lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, learning how to connect with people virtually instead of physically, learning how to restrict our circumference.

Now, 13 months after the pandemic started, we’re all facing another transition back to ways of life that more closely resemble our pre-pandemic existence.

For some of you, this transition feels easy. You’ve been desperate for it for over a year, counting the days. These posts aren’t necessarily aimed at you; rather, this blog series is aimed at those of us who are feeling challenged by the transition out of our pandemic lifestyles. Maybe there are things we’re looking forward to resuming, but there are just as many things that we’re feeling uncertain or overwhelmed about resuming, and there’s anxiety surrounding all of it.

Here’s my particular story: If I’m honest—which I always want to be—the pandemic restrictions felt really aligned for me, in most cases. I missed being able to see my family regularly and with ease—especially because my dad had a stroke a month before the pandemic began, and I wanted to be seeing him more rather than less—but in most other ways, the transition into pandemic living suited me brilliantly.

I have some privileges that helped me: I work online, so I had no difficult adjustments with shifting into working from home, as many others did. And I don’t have children, so I didn’t have to help children adjust to doing school at home. (Whether not having children is a privilege or a disadvantage/handicap is a much bigger topic, and one for a different blog series.) My husband, too, could work from home and we faced no economic hardships from loss of employment. Not everyone had those privileges, I know.

Just as importantly, I’m pretty used to a life that often finds me content at home for long stretches. I love traveling and pre-pandemic I traveled frequently, but between travels, I’m an intense home-body. I don’t even always like to leave the house for a nice dinner out. Part of that is because I have a chronic illness that often makes being at home easier than being out in the world. I can gear myself up and make accommodations for managing that illness during travel, but when I’m not traveling, it’s often easier to manage the flare-ups by keeping my world small. My illness impacts my sleep, and I can’t always predict how well-rested I’ll be or how much energy I’ll have for enacting plans. When I’m traveling, I can power through sleepless nights and run on adrenaline, happily touring the Louvre in Paris even when I’m sleep deprived. But in normal life, that kind of adrenaline push is harder to sustain, and not at all healthy. So when I’m home, I like very much to have very few plans. It’s an adaptation to my illness I’ve developed over time; it’s why I work online, in fact, and sought out online work as my mainstay 15 years ago. I’ve had a lot of time to adjust to this way of living. (And, it was this chronic illness that made me extra worried about how my body would handle the coronavirus if I contracted it, which made it feel important to adhere to all the restrictions closely and keep my world pretty tightly buttoned up.)

I also love solitude and time alone, and I have strong introverted tendencies. I’m not a person who has to get out of the house everyday. In fact, most of my favorite days are the ones when I don’t have to leave the house. So those natural tendencies—and the long adjustment I’ve had to living a life with a pretty small footprint when I am at home—made it easy for me to give up the things we suddenly had to give up with the world shut down last March. In fact, I felt a lot of relief. I remember standing in my yard last spring, savoring the silence. There were no planes flying over; no traffic in the neighborhood. The air was more filled with birdsong. It felt right to me to be asked to live more quietly, more internally. If I’m honest again, I feel some nostalgic for the moments in March last year when it felt as if we could actually hear the world powering down, going quiet.

This is not to say that I wasn’t devastated by what was happening around us in the world. We live just a few miles from New York City and what was, last spring, the epicenter of the pandemic in the US. Soon, the silence around us was interrupted by omnipresent siren wails, as emergency vehicles transported people to hospitals. I knew there were mass graves being dug not far from where we live, and streets lined with morgue trucks. There was nothing abstract about the impacts of the pandemic for me, and that caused me grief and anxiety, but the restrictions I was asked to make in my own life did not. They were a solace to me. I didn’t resist them or struggle with them the way many did.

And over the year of the pandemic, I thrived in my quietness, my solitude. That lifestyle has suited me brilliantly, apart from the heartache of not seeing my family regularly. As a writer, this lifestyle was in many ways a dream. I’ve finished three books I’d been working on for several years. And I dove deeply into other creative ventures as well: I made a quilt, my husband and I renovated much of our house, with just our own hands, and I finally learned to bake some challenging things I’d wanted to learn for a long time (laminated dough! croissants! sourdough bread! macarons!). I also launched a new business, finally accomplishing something I’d been talking about doing for years.

I’ve rarely left my house in the past year, except for excursions to a state park where Chris and I could walk and hike outside for a change of scenery. Coming out of this year, I feel—a bit—like I’ve been on a retreat. But I’m not emerging refreshed and ready to return to my normal life; instead, I’m emerging weary and wary, and not at all certain about my return.

Really, I’d like to stay buttoned up a while longer.

It was easy for me to transition into the pandemic lifestyle. Now, what feels far more challenging is being nudged to leave it. Three times in the last week, I’ve woken in the night in the midst of a panic attack. I didn’t even know such things existed. But they do. They’re called nocturnal panic attacks, and I’m having them. It’s not that I’m afraid to leave my house, but I does feel overwhelming to be out in the world again, navigating traffic and noise and people and congestion. And I feel overwhelmed at the idea of re-engaging with things I’d given up happily for a year: like running errands, going to the doctor’s office rather than having a virtual appointment, and seeing more people again. Even when they’re people I love, the amount of socializing I feel looming toward me as restrictions ease and invitations start flying makes my chest pound and my breath catch in my throat. I never had social anxiety before, but I truly think I do now.

“At least half of my clients are feeling the way you do,” my therapist told me last week when we talked about it. But this feeling isn’t the dominant narrative we’re hearing. What we mainly hear about is how great it’s going to be to get back to “normal” life, how excited we should all be to get back on airplanes and return to restaurants. (And I know some people returned to airplanes and restaurants long ago; we’re all in really different places with all of this, which is also part of what’s confusing to navigate.)

But for those of us who have adhered to the restrictions fully and foregone a lot of things that shaped our lives previously, and for those of us who feel uncertain or nervous or even anxious about resuming a different and prior way of living, this series is for you. I want to help normalize your feelings and create a safe space for you to feel them and feel held in the midst of having them. In posts over the next few weeks, I’ll share some strategies I’m using, some things that are helping me and might hopefully help you as well.

We learned over this last year that, as Glennon Doyle famously touted, “we can do hard things.” For some of us, the hardest thing may be returning to “normal” after such deep immersion in a new “normal” that, in many ways, felt easier, better, more aligned.

If any of this resonates with you, I hope you’ll join along on reading this series—and I hope you’ll find it useful and supportive. And if you’re inclined, I’d love to hear how this transition is feeling for you and what’s helping and supporting you, so please share a comment.