For the first time today, I am breathing without anxiety. What happened? I sat down to write. I sat down with the intention to process a phenomenon that I am experiencing, my friends are talking about, and clients are bringing into their sessions. I don’t have the words, but I hope to find them. I trust I will find them.
I’d love to coin a term that names it, resonates with your heart and soul, and wraps those who need to hear it in immediate comfort. I haven’t found that term, but I can describe what the experience is like: a firehose.
The world is opening up. It’s beautiful and terrifying all at once. It requires me to constantly adjust. It’s so different than the shutting down, which also happened suddenly. The shutdown whisked away my husband just after our four boys switched to virtual school. They were just settling in to the new town … coast, actually.
It seems like it shouldn’t be as hard to open up to all the small and big things that we’ve been missing and going on without. But it is.
My heart is breaking open after months of survival mode. I hesitate in saying that because we survived when many didn’t. But to not call it what it feels like also is to erase the relational necessity of our existence that truly does make isolation from others feel like survival.
I’m an introvert. To be honest, and I haven’t said this out loud yet, I’ve dreamed of having time all to myself without the usual obligations that pull on me and drain me. I’ve had that time. I don’t want it anymore. It’s not what I thought it would be. It didn’t bring me clarity or allow me to catch up. I didn’t take on a new hobby. I didn’t write that book. I am one of those who just wanted to get through each day. And get her children through it.
Each blow up. Each meltdown.
Each demand. Each refusal.
Each lonely day. Each holding night.
Now, I can re-emerge. I, like many, plan to weave into our new routines the threads we found that held us together during the pandemic. I plan to hold on to time outside, more time cooking, more time together, etc. I plan to continue to say no to people and events and guard my calendar.
At the same time, and here come the tears, I am dreading re-emerging into the world.
The same world.
I want to emerge, fresh, for the first time, into a new world. I know you do too. When I wrote, “We were made for these times.” It resonated. I felt it was going to be true.
Perhaps, what is so overwhelming about all this is that many of us have been forged individually and as a family by this fire. And even though streets have burned during this time. And fires have pulsed through our veins. And these firelights have helped us see the inequalities around us. Still, despite all of this, we are not forged together as a society.
Maybe, we just don’t want to realize that, no, this pandemic didn’t change us for the better. We don’t actually care …
beyond the words
beyond our worlds.
As we open up, I am leaving behind hope. I thought we would walk through darkness and come out appreciating the hands we grasped along the journey—the hands that sold us food, that drove their cars to the hospitals … There were so many people who got us through this. Many of them risked their lives. And, now, we part ways again.
A part of me doesn’t want to go back to this divided world. I don’t want to live in a world that so easily turns on one another, tells each other to shut up, and shuts each other down.
The firehose is this:
We shut down to survive. Literally, we shut our doors. Figuratively, we shut our hearts.
We are opening up to a shuttered world—a world that shuts out each other in order to shut out the pain.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Many of us will find that when we sit to meet our fears and anxieties about coming together, forging together, we will find something else: Tears. After all, we’ve spent a lot of time apart … not just the last year+ …