Lost and Found

The effects of COVID are hitting me, and I'm at a loss for what to do with them. I crave family and community. I crave certainty. I crave direction.

I want to know that the things I'm doing — at work, in life — are effective. And I just don't know.

Control is something that's always been an issue for me, and it's something that I learned a lot about in my yoga teacher training. Just allowing things to be. But the allowance of these things still come with weight that I don't know how to carry. It's difficult to be positive when I don't see a light.

It's difficult not to jump on a plane or plan a backpacking trip or have that thing to look forward to.

Of course, I'm not alone. Some people have lost jobs, lost loved ones.

I started this process by controlling my space. Projects around the house. Cleaning up the attic, the basement, finally painting the shed. But as those projects come to an end, and as my financial future becomes less apparent, I find myself in a place of discomfort.

I find myself in a beautiful backyard, weeping guttural sobs. Ones that the neighbors can hear. Ones that have no end, and no single source.

I think that this is depression, and depression does not work well with me. My team did not sign up for a depressed version of me. My boyfriend did not sign up for a depressed version of me. And it's hard to show up for them when I'm in this phase. It's hard not to feel that I'm disappointing myself, my community.

Anxiety, I can deal with. Anxiety and I are friends. I can breathe and logic my way — eventually — through anxiety.

So this week, people needed to show up for me. And it's hard accepting their help. It's hard to know that I'm not giving to them, that I'm only taking.

And so what can I do with this? This is a never ending year-long chair pose, maybe. (A difficult and challenging pose that makes you stronger but totally sucks in the moment.) And I have no idea what's on the other side of the chair pose, but I guess I just have to sit into it. And hope that something is stronger on the other side.

The difficult part of the COVID-19 situation is that the only people that it seems socially accessible to contact are family. And, also, no matter how weird family is, they are family. So, like, not talking to them is not an option.

I've spent much of my adult life trying to create family, in the stead of the one that abandoned me as a child, the one that put me in the basement, allowed me to escape to other people's families, allowed me to skip family vacations, and hide at the pastor's house during fights. The one that led me to finding family in religion, in friends, in boyfriends' families, in building my own family unit.

Those made-up family units don't work on Mother's Day during a pandemic. You can't show Facebook gratitude to your friends for providing the emotional support that a mother or father should have given 40 years ago. It looks gross.

_


And when you've forgotten to procreate, you can't post the pictures of your spawn with heart-felt stories about how they've changed your lives.

_


If you want the thing, you do it. You work for it. That's what I've learned. The self esteem: work for it. The greater understanding of self: work for it. And family: work for it. But it's an incredible burden to carry, to be the only one trying to carry the weight of connectedness when it's an uphill battle of travesties and trauma that need to be forgotten but never quite go away.

_


They seep out.


-


On the yoga mat. And during holidays.

_


My therapist and my boyfriend and probably my boss all say that I take the blame too easily. But what else can I do? If I want a family, I have to try to make the one I have work. I can't go find new ones. But it's a sea of exhaustion. Of disappointment. Of trying trust and it not working. Again, and again, and again.


_


So the group text comes every holiday — someone says the thing: happy Easter, happy Mother's Day, it's the anniversary of Grandpa's death — and the replies follow with emoticons and hearts. And the rest of them — they talk every day, love one another, carry one another's burdens. And I'm alone, until the next holiday.


_


I used to roll my eyes at the Twitter posts that remind us that it's okay not to feel perfect during the big family holidays. And maybe I still do. But maybe those posts aren't just for people who have lost a parent or a child. Maybe they're for me, too.

Tomorrow I turn 41. And tonight, I'm drinking wine, shopping for patio furniture, and listening to John Prine. He passed yesterday. The pandemic. I didn't really know much about him before, but I should have. He's my type of music. There's a pressure to do something with this time. To write poetry, or that memoir I've been talking about for a year. This year, to be exact. How To Be 40. But 40 came and went, and what I'm writing is tipsy tweets, restaurant stuff, and lots and lots of emails for work. Here's something about being 40. I paid the cleaning people today to do my windows. I would have never thought about it, except Jef suggested it. And I would never have even remembered to ask, except I was home when they came for their monthly visit. So I asked, and they said yes (not in Spanish, but in Portuguese), and now I can't stop looking out my windows. They are so clear, so clean. I cannot believe that I was looking through foggy and dirty windows for the past 15 years. And so that's what 40 is. It's not appreciating clean windows and their wonder. It's the fact that they're clean and clear. A year ago, my life was not so clear. I was not okay, and maybe I kind of knew it, but I wasn't prepared to do anything about it. Just yet. But then I did. And this year I cleaned my windows. And maybe it's not going to be an incredible birthday, but it's okay, because I'm appreciative that the fog is lifted a little. I cannot believe that I was looking through foggy and dirty windows for the past 15 years.

There's a global pandemic now. You've likely heard of it. COVID-19. And so I work from home and kind of worry about my job, and do chores that I've waited 14 years to do, like clear out my medicine cabinet. And I drink tea and eat oranges and think of Leonard Cohen. The birds still sing and thunderstorms still happen. The atmosphere, the creatures, they don't know about the pandemic. They don't know about Twitter and the New York Times and crisis communications. They know it's spring and it's time to soften the soil and fill the air with song.

A member of my team — who is successfully practicing the field for which I went to college — is teaching a class on documentary, and I've learned that there's a wait list. I'm happy about this. It's a good thing for him, for the students, for the institution. I wondered out loud what sort of class I could teach, and a colleague (who knows me from both meetings at work and the stuff I put on Instagram) named my expertise in three words: Cynicism and Yoga. No prereqs required.

Surprise.

The biggest surprise about getting older is that no matter what I've learned, no matter what experiences I've been though, no matter what my influences are, I still have the ability to make poor decisions, to hurt people.

The difference, though, is that with age comes realization. I now recognize when I've disappointed, when I've caused others pain. No logic or reason can undo what's been done. And so I become envious of twenty-something Jill. Barreling through life, she paid little attention to her affect on others. But now, she lingers, thinking about things that should have been forgotten long ago.

Stuck.

I went to a therapist for six months about a year ago to learn how to read myself. It's an incredible skill and I think that everyone should do it.

I'm going to whisper something to the one reader who still visits this site: I think I may have outgrown my job.

Perhaps this is a fleeting thing. I don't know. After you learn to read yourself, according to my therapist (or, perhaps, me... maybe I'm making this up), you need to act. Make a decision.

And that's where I'm stuck. What's next?