I rearranged our few books today, and what I found shocked and surprised me. We haven’t quite been here a year, but there was a thick layer of dust on the back of each shelf!
Actually this shouldn’t surprise me at all, since we live with a parrot, and African Grays are little whistling dust factories. The shelves in question are only a few feet from where she plays all day, being her dusty self and merrily shredding cardboard. On the other hand, I go around dusting when I’m on the phone, or listening to an audio book, or tense about something, or generally annoyed that there is visible dust somewhere. I am not a casual housekeeper. I wish I were sometimes. I wish I could be a bit more casual about my apartment, in the same way I can be casual about going around barefoot, but it just isn’t in me. Even as I’m recovering from pneumonia and my bout with COVID-19, still only a few months ago. What I noticed while I was wiping up this distressingly thick layer of dust was... just what was getting dusty. Books. Books I haven’t read, partly because I haven’t read much of anything since I started my new job. This is another area where I have no chill whatsoever. Not sure why. I took a job that was well within my abilities because I was looking for something to do. I figure we will be working from home for at least the next two years because I have a solidly pragmatic regard for the pandemic. Our employer acted before the governor did in sending everyone home, and I can tell you as a matter of simple fact that they still have a more clearly defined and carefully followed binder o’ guidelines for this crisis. It makes sense to me to be doing this for the duration, for a place I trust and respect. Yet I can’t seem to escape this lingering sense that I’m constantly going to “get in trouble” for something. I’ve talked it over with my husband, my best friend - who has done professional projects with me - and even my work partner. All of them are like, “Yeah, that’s weird. Where is that coming from?” I’ve been proactively trying to figure it out, to work through my dissonant feelings about my job, and the way I always do that is to clean everything in sight. Sometimes, even things that are not in sight, like the backs of the bookshelves. I recall that I went through similar paces with my leadership roles in Toastmasters. I won a contested election by the highest margin of any candidate that year, and all I did was beat myself up miserably all weekend. The entire year, I constantly felt behind and scattered and disorganized - and then I won two trophies for my performance in the role. I’m looking at them right now and they still make me think, “What?!” Sometimes it feels like the harder I work, the better I do, and the worse I feel about it. I could have chosen to keep doing what I was doing, which was to work on side projects and writing my book proposal. We were already saving half our income and doing fine. I keep reminding myself that I am not trapped, that I chose something I really wanted, that I fought to get to where I am because it is so interesting. Which it is! Sometimes I catch myself thinking, Whoa, I can’t believe I’m actually in this meeting right now. But then another wave comes up telling me that I’m colossally screwing up and everyone is going to find out. It isn’t the same as impostor syndrome, I don’t think. The tasks I’m doing are all things I could do just as competently 15 years ago. I don’t really have moments where I do not know what to do or how to approach a task. I actually wonder if something weird happened to my brain while I was ill? If there’s some part of the brain that just makes someone feel racked with guilt and shame and dread for no reason? It’s important to talk about this kind of thing, because I think most people feel very alone and isolated with these types of emotions. “I’m the only one and nobody must know.” I totally know that I’m not the only one. The last six months have very much been a struggle of putting one foot in front of the other. I keep telling myself, “Just get through this day.” This included our dog dying of terminal cancer, and my husband nearly being blinded, as well as my getting COVID and trying to recover my baseline energy level. Again, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, just being overwhelmed by life and one legit crisis after another. This is when I remind myself, I would probably feel the same exact types of emotions whether I had this job or not, whether I had a different job or not. It’s not a function of the role, or the company, or the people, or the culture. It’s me and whatever is haunting me. Working is a million times better than sitting around staring at the walls and feeling this way. When we internalize these dark feelings, it’s so easy to forget that there are external influences at work too. Probably my emotional waves of “you’re going to get busted” are just my feeble brain’s way of dealing with the foreign, confusing, outlandish reality of life under quarantine. (Yeah, technically my hubby and I are still quarantined - by both medical and business guidelines - because I’m still coughing a little). Do any of us really know how we’re “supposed” to feel during this strange historical moment? What I’d like to do is to dust myself off. I’d like to blow off these feelings that are so unhelpful and unnecessary. What should I replace them with? The task is to come up with some unique, interesting, and plausible feelings, like earning someone’s regard, or satisfaction in a job well done. We can remind ourselves that our mission is simply to live up to our own standards and be consistent with our own values. One day after the next. I worry that what has happened to me will eventually happen to everybody else. I worry that everyone is going to get COVID-19, and that a significant chunk those of us who didn’t die will just feel cruddy forever.
At least it feels that way. I first got sick four months ago, and as I write this I’m still sitting listlessly bundled up in blankets. Woke up twice from chills last night. Still on an inhaler, still planning my days around the latest alarm to take my pills. What if this is all there is? There’s this saying: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ I used to puzzle over it when I was a kid and try to figure out what it meant. Basically it means, enough stuff happens every day to worry about. No reason to worry about the past or the future. The problems of today will always be enough to keep us busy. There’s a balancing effect there, sort of like dollar-cost averaging. On the days when things are truly terrible, we can make a memory that will help to remind us why we can appreciate the easier days a little more. Taking a decent day for granted is a sad mistake. In one sense, I can remind myself how fortunate I am in almost every respect. At least it’s something to do to occupy my time... I lived, I can call my family, I have health insurance, my doctor is responsive, there is currently a little robot mopping my floor. All pretty great stuff. I have to keep going through these exercises because the rest of me is getting pretty fed up. What did I even do to bring this on myself. I don’t mean getting COVID, because to be fair I was duly warned. I actively debated whether I should go out that day with both my husband and QT. I took an informed risk that blew up my entire life, but it wasn’t like I had no idea it could happen. What I want to know is where the bacterial pneumonia came from. The antibiotics seem to have done a reasonable job on it. Now I just feel like I have a bad cold, which is a huge improvement over feeling like someone kicked me in the chest several times with a steel-toed boot. But still. I’ve spent eight weeks so far this year being ill. Now it feels like my rational course of action is to just plan for this to be my default mode. Get up. Hit inhaler. Get dressed, eat breakfast, take pills. Start work. Clock out and lie down on couch. Drink NyQuil and go to bed. Repeat. * This is the location of the pivot * See, I know I can go on like this if I have to. If I don’t get better but if I also don’t get very much worse. I wouldn’t be able to do it if we had to go in to the facility. I don’t know if I’m contagious. I also think it would be too much for me to get up an hour earlier every day and get myself across town. But for now, it’s possible. The alternative? The alternative would be to lie around feeling cruddy every day and watching my husband work. Whenever I think about that, which is daily, I think of how boring and depressing it would be to feel this way and also to have nothing to do. Then I think of all the famous historical figures I can remember who fought chronic illnesses. It turns out there are a LOT. Carson McCullers had lupus and died at age 50. (I have a friend who has lupus who has outlived this sad milestone). Proust, he... what the actual heck was wrong with him?... he was considered to be a hypochondriac but it turns out he actually had a rare genetic disorder and died aged 51. Frida Kahlo was in a horrible bus accident as a teenager, suffered chronic pain the rest of her life, and died at 47. Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis aged 30, although she wasn’t sick yet when she wrote Wuthering Heights so that’s sort of a different point... (Which is to make the most of the time we have, because we know not the day nor the hour) Anyway there have been all sorts of artists who made their art in spite of their physical state, level of pain, or mood. Probably about as many as those who had substance abuse challenges. Someone could do a statistical comparison; it might be comforting. Or a PhD topic, or both. This is exactly what is annoying me so much right now. I had this bright idea that I was going to apply for grad school and get a PhD, but now I feel so low that it seems like it would probably be a fantastic waste of money. What can I manage on a daily basis, what can I do simply by putting one foot in front of the other and making it through the hours, one hour by one hour by one hour by one hour? Living, I suppose I hope that thinking about my state of breathlessness and exhaustion helps someone else. I hope it can help uplift someone who at least feels capable of breathing cleanly. Of course I also hope it helps someone to deal with the boredom of self-isolation, knowing you are saving yourself from something yet more boring and depressing, which is to just be ill all the time. But I hope it helps some of you to feel that you can go on, cook a nice dinner or put fresh clean sheets on your bed or something. I’ll learn to pace myself, like we all do. Eventually I’ll figure out how much I can expect of myself. Eventually I may find a way to get up to my old hijinks. For now, it’s worth remembering that there are only five months left of this stupid year. Others have dealt with worse (cite: 536 AD) and made something of it. This is my hope, that I’ll find a way to dab my own drop of paint or scribble my own smear of ink. You as well. Let us all get through this together, breathe our way out of it and try to make it into something worthwhile. Nobody is really useless, I always say; if nothing else, you can always be a bad example.
I just feel useless since I’ve been sick so much. Maybe even worse than useless, since not only am I not doing much these days, other people have to keep stepping up to do my work on top of their own. It’s a little melancholy to get pneumonia for your birthday. Honestly I would have preferred a scented candle or some colored pencils. It makes me wistful for all the years I made some big enthusiastic goal, and then eventually got around to completing it a few years later. This year? I thought I’d make a goalless goal, just give myself a year to do nothing and not feel guilty about it. Or bored. I made it a few hours, I swear I did! Then I came up with something, something I actually found inspirational and exciting in spite of my current limitations. Let’s get to that in a minute. First, I want to say that there are quite a number of goals that are still possible even in the midst of severe pain and illness: To maintain a streak of never snapping at people, no matter what To always say ‘thank you’ when appropriate, plus some extra To track symptoms as accurately as possible - for science! To set alarms and reminders, and take meds on time To use a wastebasket rather than leave tissues etc all over the place Not that anybody needs to do anything, or follow anyone else’s dictates - just that for me personally, it helps to maintain a certain amount of control over my attitude, my behaviors, and the things I say to other people. Until the day my head starts spinning around backwards, I can stop things from coming out of my mouth that I wish I could call back. (If that happens, go ahead and call a priest, why not). Even on bad days, I can recall a few particularly rude people, notorious for their constant sarcasm and cutting remarks, and think to myself, at least I’m not nasty like So-and-So. Keep it together, suck it up buttercup. Kindness, if nothing else. Kindness, or maybe they won’t keep coming back... It weighs heavily on me that nobody owes me care or nursing. There is not a person on this green earth who was born to be my servant or wait on me or watch over me or bring me things. Those who are willing will say, “I’m doing what anyone would do,” or “you’d do it for me,” the second of which is true and the first of which, alas, is not. Everyone is somewhere on the spectrum of Taker to Giver, not always where we think we are, but we’re all on there somewhere. I try to keep it dialed to Giver when I’m able, because I know how often there are extended periods when I’m forced over to the ‘receiving’ end. Personally I don’t mind caregiving. There’s a lot of room for personal time when looking after an ill person, especially when they need a lot of sleep. I can just turn on an audio book and clean and cook and carry a tray, doing what needs doing, while reserving a corner of my mind for myself. This is because I’ve always been able to see a way out, that there is a natural time limit after which my services will no longer be needed. It’s probably much harder when it’s indefinite, when it’s been going on for years, when it might go on for yet more years, when nobody knows. That’s what I worry about. I worry that I’ll never feel well again, that I’ll never get back to what I would consider 100%, that I’ll just have to progressively reset what counts as ‘not unwell.’ That’s why I’ve put aside my goals about going to grad school, or writing a book, or training for an ultramarathon. At least for now, when I’m still on an inhaler and still not over this post-COVID pneumonia. And that’s where my new goal comes in! As bad as I feel right now, a day that has included chills, trembling hands, coughing, ears ringing, and the swallowing of 18 pills, I believe that improvement is possible. Why? Because I’ve done it before. I realized recently that I have a storyline about this already. Back in 2004, I had a terrible respiratory infection. At that time in my life, it didn’t occur to me to go to the doctor at times that should have been obvious, because I didn’t have health insurance for most of my 20s. It wasn’t until my friends intervened that I went to the doctor on campus, leaning on every bench and tree and lamp post along the way. The nurse had me breathe into a spirometer, where I rated a 52%. (Oh, maybe that’s why I’ve been coughing up blood...) Tl;dr, they gave me an inhaler, and I missed three weeks of work, but I quit coughing and got better. Looking back, it really took me about a year to start rebuilding my cardio endurance. There was a day that I tried to go for a bike ride, made it about a mile down a gentle hill, and had to turn around and push my bike home. But? Exactly ten years later I ran a marathon. I know it’s possible to regain lung capacity because I’ve done it. I know it’s possible to recover from a really gnarly respiratory infection and go on to feel totally fine. Is it going to be the same for me after COVID-19? I don’t know, but that’s not going to stop me from trying. If I have data then I’m going to contribute it. My new goal is to learn everything I can about breath work and respiratory therapy. If there are exercises, I’m going to do them. If there are training tools, I’m going to test and compare them. If there are logbooks or studies or tracking devices, I’m going to find them. It’s hard sometimes, feeling weak, feeling like a burden on others, feeling disappointed about having to let go of goals that were appealing and personally meaningful. One way to deal with that is to shift focus to something else. Not “what can’t I do anymore” or “what am I losing this time” but: What CAN I do? What can I do today? What will I be able to do tomorrow? If nothing else, how can I use this particular experience in a way that might help others? Someday this pain will be useful to me. Or maybe not me, but someone. And if that’s true, then it’s useful to me after all. “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine,” we used to sing, back in the early Nineties. Everyone in Generation X knew this was coming, and that’s why we spent so much time cooped up in our rooms.
We had no idea how great things would be when we would find ourselves doing it all over again at some near-future point. When we were young, we had to pay $16 for an album, or $1.99 for a cassette single, or try to record stuff off the radio. There was none of this free streaming on demand business. We had to go to the video rental store if we wanted to watch a movie or an old TV show - assuming they were available - and if someone else was watching it, we had to wait until next time. WE HAD NO INTERNET If we wanted to use the phone, we had to do it in the living room or the kitchen, where the entire family could overhear us and would often chime in on the conversation. Nobody could tell who was calling, so anyone might answer the phone. I recall an old roommate telling me, two days after the fact, that “some lady” had called for me... about a job posting... Nobody had seen grocery delivery since, like, the Fifties. The only hot food you could really get delivered was pizza. Avocados were fairly expensive. If you ordered any kind of “stuff,” like from the Sears catalogue, everyone knew it took 6-8 weeks for delivery. Okay, I hope I can get away with saying what I’m going to say next, because I’m a COVID-19 survivor, and I can claim that it seems to have warped my brain a bit. But... If this is The End of the World as We Know It, it... isn’t as bad as it could be? I’ve been comparing notes with some of my friends on what year would be the worst possible year in their life for COVID to happen. For me, it would have been either 1982 or 1999. Both of those were tough years anyway, but adding a pandemic to the scenario would have been devastating. So far, everyone I’ve talked to has agreed that this is not the worst possible year for their personal timeline that this could have happened. The year of the divorce. The year of the cancer diagnosis. The year one of their parents died. Their brokest year, the year they had their worst roommate. All sorts of times that would have been harder. Of course this isn’t going to feel true for everyone. A friend of mine lost her dad a couple months ago - he was a COVID doctor - and this is probably always going to be the worst year of her life. Which brings me to an interesting, though somewhat taboo, point. If this is the worst year of our lives...? Does that not imply that if we get past it, at some future point, everything else will be at least a bit of a relief? We’re at the midpoint of 2020, and this has been a truly rotten and terrible year in my life. I mean, bag it up and haul it out to the curb, right? Still, I have to acknowledge, I did not die of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in December. My husband did not lose sight in his eye in February. I did not die of COVID-19 - I didn’t even have to check in to the hospital, and what’s more, I didn’t even have to pay for any of my treatment other than $10 for antibiotics. This is the beginning of strategic adjustment, when we realize that hey, things could be worse. It wasn’t all that long ago (two months, but who’s counting) when I was still feeling actively surprised each morning. Hey, I woke up! I don’t know how I would know if I didn’t? But I did notice and I did feel a sense of awe and wonder. For at least 45 seconds, before the day’s symptoms kicked into gear. Nobody likes forced gratitude exercises, so let’s call it something else, something more hard-headed and practical. Let’s call it: inventory. What is working? What is not a dripping bag of situational trash? What resources do we have at our disposal? (Internet, literacy, running water and flush toilets, an education, pens with no caps, half a dozen USB cables, etc). Example: I started saving all our cardboard for my little parrot, and built her a fort to keep her busy while we’re on work calls. She won’t play with a $15 bird toy from the pet store but she will play in her fort all day. The other thing that is very important to consider is, what if dying is not the most pessimistic possible scenario? People forget to plan for this. What if we live through all this, and in fact we live to be 90 years old, and because we assumed we’d die tragically young we didn’t save any money? Or wear sunblock or take care of our teeth? For me, the most pessimistic baseline scenario is that I live to be 110 with no money, no house, no living family, and no friends. Whenever I think about future planning, whenever I’m at a choice point, I think of Very Old Me and what she would like me to do today. There are two things I’m doing during this TEOTWAWKI-lite scenario. I’m working in my dream field and packing away money like a trembling hamster. I’m also scheming on how I can get paid to go to grad school for free. I figure the young ones are going to be more likely to put their educations on hold, because paying full fare for virtual classes is a giant rip-off. I’ll be 45+, though, and I don’t mind, so there will be less competition for slots. I have all the focus and self-discipline that I never did 20 years ago, and in fact I doubt there are very many young people who could beat me in that department. This is TEOTWAWKI in lots of ways. A couple of them are probably good ways, and we won’t really have time to think about that until later. As long as I’m going to be cooped up indoors for what I assume will be the next three years, and I accept this depressing situation as my temporary reality, I am free to try to spin it in the most productive way that I can. Is this the end of my world in its previous phase? Is it then the beginning of a new phase? The sense of a fresh start can be incredibly motivating and invigorating. It’s important to remember, though, that fresh starts are fake.
What that means is that a fresh start is really a figment of your imagination. As such, it can be created at any time, and if it feels real on an emotional level, then it is real in fact. Just as valid a psychological spur as any other. In some ways, I have a legit fresh start right now. I’m still not over the novelty of narrowly surviving a deadly, lingering illness. Hey! I can stand up on my first or second try! Watch this, I can roll over without the room spinning! In other ways, everything else in my life is exactly the same. Same age Same family Same marriage Same credit history Same education Same apartment Same neighbors insisting on approaching and speaking to me with no masks on This is the trick: finding the sparkling newness in the midst of the stale, old, boring, annoying, and/or disappointing. (Not to say that every consistency is disappointing or boring! Just that some of them can be). I’ve used my physical fresh start to give me a push in physical areas of my life, such as starting to work out again and changing bedtimes. There is a ripple effect whenever a keystone habit is fitted into a routine, so that everything else adjusts around it - which of course can be good, bad, or neutral. The hardest thing to wrap your mind around, when it comes to habit changes, is that they all fit into specific time slots. Doing one thing displaces another thing. A minute spent in one way cancels spending it in a different way. This was a bit more obvious when the slow process of recovering from COVID started to feel like non-time, like I would feel just as bad forever and always, that there was no time when I was not ill and that everything would simply go on like this, far into the afterlife. Every minute that I lounged around being ill was a minute I was not visiting my family, training for an ultramarathon, reorganizing my closet, going to grad school, folding laundry, or anything else at all. This has actually been great, because even the tiniest little things, like fixing my own bowl of instant oatmeal or unloading the dishwasher, still feel that little bit magical. ‘Magical’ is precisely what we seek when we’re looking for that fresh start feeling. The trouble comes when we believe that magic comes from somewhere outside, rather than realizing that we generate it inside ourselves. It is our act of seizing initiative and creating something out of nothing that makes magic happen. All we have to do to make a fresh start is to snap our fingers... or not even that. We decide it. I decided, even in the depths of my illness, that I wanted to get a new job. I kinda meant ‘someday’ but it all happened very quickly. My dream job suddenly opened up when the previous person got a promotion and left the department. They were looking to fill it quickly, and the window for applying was closing at the end of the week. I was far too ill to do it myself, but previous efforts had left me well enough organized that my husband was able to put my application together for me. These are important factors to notice.
Two straightforward, common, ordinary things happened in my life. I got over a condition that literally millions of other people have had, and I got a new job at a time when dozens of people are being hired by my organization. There is nothing rare or special about either of those things. Statistically, at any rate! The events of my personal life are special and rare to me because this is the only life I have. Likewise, the events of your life should feel magical and fascinating to you, because what else are you going to think about? You don’t need a change in external events before you create the sensation of a fresh start. You can do it any time you like. Or, you can take advantage of world events such as the pandemic, or the rising tide of justice, and decide that THE TIME IS NOW to make major changes. The time is always now. That’s another reason that fresh starts are fake, because every minute is a fresh new minute anyway, exactly the same as the last one. Here’s a little bit of hope for the tired people, the injured, the ill. It can get better. Little by little, it can.
I started recovering from COVID-19 about six weeks ago. I’m back to working out, doing 60 minutes of cardio a day. It feels great! I just realized today that I couldn’t remember the last time I had vertigo. That was a symptom that lingered for so long, I sort of thought I might just have it for the rest of my life. I figured every time I rolled over in bed, the room would spin, and I’d just have to get used to it. Then, finally, it went away. It’s important to notice these small victories, because it’s very easy to start believing in illness and injury as permanent conditions. The body doesn’t just “get stuck that way.” Sometimes it takes surgical intervention, sometimes it takes prescriptions, sometimes it takes many months of physical therapy. But the body can change and heal. That’s what a body does. I keep thinking of this as I watch my surgical scar heal. It’s almost completely invisible now, thanks to my obsessive twice-daily slathering with scar cream. What I thought would be a large ugly mark in an unfortunate location is now basically gone six months later. In fact, it looks so good that I’m going to take a picture of it and email it to my surgeon, a nice side-by-side before/after for her records. Satisfaction of a job well done, that is one thing that never goes stale. Yep, it’s been a rough few months. First the surgery, then COVID. I might also mention that I had quit running several years ago because of an overuse injury to my ankle. Year after year, month after month, there always seems to be a good excuse to roll over and quit. Legit doctor’s notes! This isn’t P.E. though. I don’t have a desperate desire to escape gym class any more; now it’s more the opposite. Let me back in! What do I need to do today to make my body feel at least marginally better? For me it revolves around quality of sleep. No matter what else is going on, if I’ve slept poorly I feel terrible. I believe that sleep is the main factor for a strong immune system. As a recent COVID survivor, this is understandably high on my list of priorities. Sleep depends on a few things, which are also very important to me as a person with a parasomnia disorder. (Yeah, I didn’t really appreciate having night terrors WHILE I was sick with the coronavirus, as if I didn’t have enough problems). These things are meal timing, hydration, and cardio. For night terrors, the absolute most important factor is to stop eating three hours before bedtime. I front-load my calories for the day, making an effort to eat about 3/4 of my fuel by the afternoon. Parents of tiny kids should note this, because night terrors are common in kids and they often get a bedtime snack. I think those things are related. Hydration is shockingly under-rated for insomniacs. I’ve found that if I’m even a single glass of water short for the day, I just can’t drop off. My sleep quality is dismal. I use an app to track my fluid intake, which is admittedly very boring, but not as boring as lying awake in the middle of the night for hours. I’ve tried out a bunch of different types of exercise, and they are good for different reasons, but in my experience cardio is the best for mood elevation, pain management, and sleep quality. When I can’t do it for a while, due to schedule, injury, or a cough or whatever, I start to feel the difference within days. There are different types of peace available from other types of workout; for instance, martial arts somehow magically removed my fear of needles and yoga is great for releasing old emotional junk. They just don’t hit the same physiological targets as running, biking, or the elliptical. It is so good to be back to reconsidering my workout! In April, I felt like I was dying. Now it’s mid-June and I don’t constantly think about being ill anymore. I put some effort into small improvements, in a process that is known as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” If you improve something by 5-10%, it may be enough to make a disproportionate difference in your results. For instance, 5% of one hour is three minutes. Getting ready three minutes earlier could be enough to start being on time for most things instead of chronically late. Cutting spending by 5%, as another example, could make the difference between being in debt or financial freedom. Little things can add up quickly. My small improvements in recovery were: Increasing our intake of cruciferous vegetables Tracking my fluid intake Setting a bedtime alarm Arguably, starting to work out again was not a small improvement but rather a “keystone habit.” It does tend to make the other steps, (drinking more water and going to bed earlier) just that little bit more attractive. More sleep. Better quality of nutrition. More water. Hard to argue with this strategy, two parts of which are free of charge. Right now it’s hard to tell whether my mood has improved so much just because I’m getting well, or because I’m something of a cardio junkie. Does it matter, though? Right now, I have everything I wish I did when I thought I was on my deathbed: my new dream job, the ability to do the laundry without tipping over and crying, maybe even the chance to run an ultramarathon in a few years. It’s so hard to be seriously ill and feel like it will last forever. It’s so depressing and boring and lonely and exhausting and painful. Every day we’re still here to complain, though, is another day we’ve made it through. Every day is one day closer to feeling better. One day, maybe even so much better that it didn’t even seem possible. I was asked to give an impromptu speech about civic engagement today. This is an awkward kind of question for me, because it’s almost impossible to talk about in a neutral, nonpartisan way. Yet that’s the only way to really get anything accomplished any more.
Right now it seems like a lot of people are more motivated to stop their “opponents” from doing anything than they are to do anything specific themselves. We have to pull back from that image of “winning” and find a way to frame our projects as non-zero-sum. Meaning, there is more than one winner and there are many ways to win. I mentioned five things in my speech, which I wish was as organized when it was coming out of my mouth as it is here:
Most people are complainers. Everyone complains about things - I think it is the main driver of all innovation and progress - but most people are *only* willing to complain. I’m a helper by nature, with many years of training in social services. When someone has an issue, I often know how to get it resolved. I’ll ask someone, what do you want to have happen? Almost nobody ever has an answer. If someone I know very well is annoying me with a complaint, I will ask, Do you have a request? Meaning, if you want me to do something for you, ask me and I will probably do it, but otherwise, shut the heck up. For example, if I’m late all the time, I probably deserve to be told off in some way, but I’m never going to stop unless you ask me for what you want. What counts as “not late” to you? Get specific. If you want me standing by the door with my coat on by T-minus whatever, believe me, I can’t read your mind. You’re going to need to spell it out. It’s very much the same thing with local issues. People will go on until they turn purple about “traffic” or “this place sucks” but they don’t usually have an actual, specific plan for what they would rather see instead. You can show up to town hall meetings, campaign for various candidates, write letters to the editor, vote for every single thing, sign petitions, apply to get propositions on the ballot, host a podcast, march with a sign over your shoulder... but if you aren’t clear about exactly what you want, nothing will happen. How would you even know that you got what you wanted if you were never sure exactly what it was? Part of this is an issue of empowerment, the feeling that you can ask for things and get them, the feeling that if you try to make something happen, it probably will happen. What I’ve learned is that power is not given, it’s taken. Power can also accrue through various unofficial means. It comes in different forms: charisma, leverage, influence, gravitas, money, job titles, specialized knowledge. An example would be someone like my husband, who sought out special training as an EMR. I’ve seen him in action several times. He will rush up and identify himself as an emergency medical responder. Then he starts asking questions. No matter where this happened, people would probably react in the same way, by making space for him, watching and listening. At that point, if he called out for someone to call 911, someone would obey, no questions asked. Obey! Most people don’t want to be in power during a crisis. They don’t want to be the one with the fire extinguisher. They don’t want to be the one to get the snake out of the toilet. They don’t want to make decisions, they don’t want responsibility, and they certainly don’t want to be held accountable for the results. Likewise, most people don’t want to bother learning whether something is handled by their city, their county, or the state. They might be able to get their request granted almost immediately by their district rep, but when it comes down to it, they’d rather complain for eighty-five years than spend twenty minutes typing into a web form. People have more power than they think they do. We all have the power to pay attention, to introduce ourselves to others, to ask questions, to learn new things. We have the power to imagine all the ways that things could be better. Not in the abstract of “things” like “the universe” or “land of rainbow unicorns” but *specific* things. Things like potholes or noise ordinances or how fast the traffic flows through a certain intersection. When we have a more specific idea of how we want the world to look, what we want to see happening around us, then it becomes more obvious that a lot of the time, we can start making it happen, all by ourselves. My parents taught me this when I was a preschooler. They got together with some other parents in our neighborhood. Each family took a street and a garbage bag. We all picked up trash and empty cans, and we turned in the cans for the deposit and bought popsicles with the money. I was unclear on the concept that other kids were doing this, too, because I couldn’t see them (and I was 4), so of course I thought I deserved all the credit. There are some policy decisions I’ve made over the years that make it obvious what I should do in certain situations. I always pick up broken glass at the park, even if I have to get a stick and dig it out of the mud. I sleep with my phone by the bed in case I hear someone screaming in the night, so I can call 911 right away. When I find a wallet or an ATM card, I turn it in. I don’t have to ask for permission to do any of these things. I’ve done what anyone can do to be more involved and engaged. I’ve decided that if I can easily help others, I will do it. Sometimes I will help others even at considerable effort, like writing them a reference letter or revising their resume. I do nice things because it’s fun, and also because it helps me to feel like I am a person who knows how to get things done. I like to be where the action is. Anyone can make decisions about what they are willing to do and what they refuse to do. After that, it’s just a question of how many things you think you can do and how many people you think you can help. So you want a job where you can work from home, but you aren’t sure how to get one. Maybe I can help.
One of the first things that happens when people are out of work is that they start doubting themselves and aiming low. They feel insecure about their abilities, maybe even defensive about their track record. Rather than think, Hey, now is the perfect time to learn a few things and become more competitive, it’s more common to think, I wouldn’t even make a good doorstop, or, I can’t even cast a good shadow. What I’ve learned is that employers don’t care what you did before. They only care whether you’ll show up and do something for them tomorrow and the day after. I spent a lot of time preparing for my new job. I read at least a dozen articles on tough, tricky interview questions. I scoured my resume and reviewed all my talking points from every major project I did over the last twenty years. I rehearsed answers to what I thought would be a sore point, which was, What had I done since I quit my last day job in January 2010? January 2010! Imagine my surprise when none of that came up? In two phone screens and a five-person panel interview, nobody asked a single question about any of my past jobs. A couple of things from my resume were mentioned, indicating that it had been read, but that was it. I put two important things on my resume: a list of all the software I know, by category; and a list of my skills. I’ve read that “skills resumes” are frowned on because they can be used to disguise a patchy work history. I don’t know if that’s true for most places, but it seemed to serve me well - and I *had* a patchy work history. I was transparent about the fact that I hadn’t had a traditional day job in over a decade. In my case, the majority of my most valuable skills were things I had picked up in between. The point isn’t whether you can prove that you’ve 100% done something under an official job title at an official employer. It’s whether you know how to do it, whether you can learn new things, and whether you are enthusiastic about giving it your best shot. This is where being unemployed, even for a very long time, can be an asset. It gives you the opportunity to study up. Someone close to me did this a few years ago. She had never really used a computer at work, literally did not even know how to right-click a mouse or copy/paste. She did a self-study Excel course, got over a 90%, and now knows all the advanced features I never learned even though I started using Excel around 1990. Since then she’s been promoted twice, has an impressive new job title, and makes a significantly higher income. That is my first piece of advice: Go through a bunch of job listings and look at what requirements keep coming up. (That’s why I went back to college. I kept reading job listings for which I was qualified in every single respect, except the bachelor’s degree. It was infuriating until it became simple and obvious). Stories keep coming up about young candidates who are shocked, stunned, and amazed that the job requires Microsoft Word and Excel. For those of us who are familiar with these programs, this might seem funny. Instead of laughing, we should be taking notes and realizing that we have been taking for granted what are actually very desirable professional qualifications. When we get mopey and fall into doubting our employability, we focus on ourselves and our shortcomings. We have no way of realizing that our supposed “competition” may be severely underprepared. I got my first temp assignment in an office because the woman before me quit two hours into her first day, saying, “I don’t have to do this.” They were looking for 1. Someone who would work for 8 hours and 2. See #1. It’s a similar situation with work-from-home jobs. They’re looking for applicants who are ready, willing, and able to work from home. Not everyone can do this. Sometimes these issues are not their fault; a friend of mine lives about five miles away from us, but the internet is so poor in her neighborhood that she needs two separate devices to try to get a better signal. If you have electricity, good wi-fi, a smartphone, and a computer you can use all day, you’re ahead of the game and more employable than you realize right now. Learning the basics of even one in-demand software title can be enough to put you over the edge. If you can pass a quiz, do a demo, or answer a few questions about what you can do, that’s usually enough. Start writing down all the programs that you have used, even if you only feel a passing familiarity. It may surprise you. Another approach is to take on a volunteer position and build your skills there. I spent the past three years in leadership positions in Toastmasters. They stepped up in responsibility, and I learned so much that I got back more than I put in. I’m absolutely sure that I reached a higher level of leadership through Toastmasters in that brief period than I would have if I had stayed in my previous line of work for ten years. Again, it isn’t what you’ve been paid to do under your official job title; it’s whether you can demonstrate that you know how to get things done. Unemployed people, and their friends, family, and neighbors, often say the same thing, which is: “There are no jobs out there.” This is demonstrably false. Also, you only need one. Talking about what doesn’t exist, or what you do not want, is a pretty useless way to spend time. Much more interesting to talk about what you do want to do. If there is something you really want to do because it fascinates you, that will shine through. If it is true about you that you really want to do a good job and be proud of yourself, that will show too. Right now, there are thousands of WFH jobs available. Some of them have been open for months or years without the right candidate turning up. Maybe that person is you. *** Some stuff you can learn for free: Microsoft Office 360 https://support.office.com/en-us/training Tableau https://www.tableau.com/learn/training/20202 Jira / Agile https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials I’m still struggling and it’s been over two weeks since I got over COVID-19. My mood and energy level from day to day, or hour to hour, have everything to do with whether I am proud of my body, or frustrated with it.
Is my body a miraculous healing machine Or Is it my adversary? On good days, I think, Wow, my immune system is incredible! Great job! How fantastic is it that a brand-new virus got inside me and my body figured out what to do? On bad days, I think, Why is this taking so long? Why can’t my tired old carcass keep up with my brain? Am I just... old now? It would help if I had something familiar. Then I could hit the books and figure out what to do. This worked well when I was diagnosed with a thyroid nodule. I went directly from my appointment with the endocrinologist to the public library, where I checked out a couple of books on thyroid function. I’d already read a few chapters before my bus made it home. (That was before Wikipedia and Google, if you can believe that! And smartphones of course) My way of dealing with physical distress is to compartmentalize it. Try to ignore discomfort and distracting sensations. Get into a clean blank head space and try to figure out a plan. The trouble with this method is that it can start to take over, until “the body” starts to feel like a separate entity. It can be like the head is a floating balloon, or like the mind is a driver riding around in a car. This is when we start to see “the body” as a stranger, or worse, an enemy. Then again, the advantage is that it’s possible to ingest new ideas and new frameworks. We can take in new information that changes our perspective. We can also learn from other people and try out things they do. One example of this is that my husband’s doctor told him not just to drink fluids, which everyone knows, but *why* it matters that we drink more fluids than normal when we’re ill. Mucus gets dry and stringy, and that makes coughing, sneezing, and stuffy noses much worse. Water, herbal tea, etc keep it moist and help keep it from building up. Now that I know that, I have been focusing much more on keeping a mug of tea next to me. Another example would be a little more mystical, the sort of idea that takes more imagination and less practical effort. This approach tends to work more on the emotional aspects of illness, which is important because being sick can cause sadness and pessimism. It’s one thing to intellectually grasp that you have a statistical chance of certain outcomes, such as being loaded into an ambulance, put on a ventilator, or going into a coma. It’s another thing to physically feel your life force draining away, to have a continual stream of new sensations worsening day by day. It’s yet another thing to confront the emotions brought up by this, almost all of which were dark and unhelpful, at least in my case. The combination of alarming research data and severe illness defaulted to a low mood and fatalistic thoughts. Overcoming those black tides took considerable effort. One of the ideas that came to me in the second week, when I thought I would be dead in another day or two, was the concept of “hiring” the virus. I kept getting warfare imagery, from the media and from personal advice, and it was awful for my morale. Advice in general was awful for my morale. It contributed to my overall sense of shame and failure for getting sick. (Can’t people just send sweet photos or share memories of better times?? I mean, ARE YOU A DOCTOR??) I liked the idea of hiring the virus much better. It made me feel like a founder or a CEO. Yes, I’ve hired this special consultant to teach me how to make antibodies for COVID-19, potentially one of the most precious commodities in the world in this year of grace 2020. Then something else occurred to me, something I had been thinking back in December, when I had a terrifying drug-resistant bacterial infection that led to surgery. I had to take three courses of antibiotics, and I wasn’t thrilled about that, but I chose to reframe it. MAGIC BLOOD, MAGIC BLOOD, I HAVE MAGIC BLOOD I would just keep repeating this to myself as I went through the day, especially when I was swallowing the pills. I visualized the antibiotics flowing through my body and making me glow in golden light. Magic blood! Not the same scenario, but in the context of potentially donating convalescent plasma, that same blood of mine suddenly became that much more magical! Could it be?? Blood that I make inside my own body, without conscious effort, could save the lives of up to four people?? Doctors and nurses? Talk about magic! The idea that I might be able to generate a life-saving elixir was sometimes the only thing that kept me going. I thought, if this works, it might even be worth it. (Not really, but...) An irony of my illness is that I’m still tending the surgical scar, rubbing cream on it twice a day. I was able to watch it slowly, visibly healing. External proof of my body’s sorcery at work. The irony came in because I thought that infection and the surgery and the half-inch scar in my midsection were so scary and painful. Now they were barely noticeable. I could laugh at myself a little for being a coward, while at the same time appreciating that I had come such a long way and gained so much grit. If you pray for strength be sure that’s what you really want. I’ve resented so much of this process, felt so impatient and frustrated and disappointed in myself. I’ve watched my physical decline, from multi-sport athlete to dizzy, weak softbody, and it has made me dejected and miserable. I want my old body back and I want it immediately, not months or years from now! At the same time, I recognize that hundreds of thousands of people confronted the same challenge that I did... and did not prevail. There is really no other response than to be awed, impressed, and grateful that my body did all this, alone, with no instruction manual. I’ve overcome other health challenges, and it’s when I feel I’ve won that I feel total unity with my body and what I consider to be my self. I just found out that I was definitely exposed to COVID-19.
. . . So, yeah, that happened. Might have exposed my husband and two other people. Sitting with that knowledge for a moment. I’m the only person who was exposed that day who hasn’t been sick for the last two weeks. That’s why I was the last to find out. Also, the test results just came back. It takes a while to even get the test, much less have it processed. Can’t blame them That’s what this is about, really. How do you feel the full range of feelings about something truly awful, while knowing there is nobody to blame? Well, not my friends, colleagues, or neighbors anyway. Only a psychopath or a malignant narcissist would deliberately infect someone with a lethal pathogen. Emotionally there are so many ways to deal with world events, with the unfair sickness or death of anyone you know, with your own incipient demise. I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of them. Denial - everyone on Nextdoor who keeps complaining that the whole world is “overreacting” - to something with a worldwide kill rate of 19%? This thing is killing more people than botulism. Come on, folks, get it together. Anger - like that matters to a microbe Disgust - see the neologism ‘COVIDIOT’ Fear - remind me to tell you about my coronavirus-themed night terrors Sadness - this is where I have been over the past week, choosing what outfit I want for my memorial and crying over photos of separated families every day, and that was *before* I found out I was exposed Embarrassment at being the kind of trainwreck who couldn’t see the future and who thought that following social distancing recommendations would be good enough HEY, what gives? I followed all the rules to the letter, so why am I being punished? The problem of suffering is a challenging one, a stumbling block that disrupts many philosophy students and spiritual thinkers. It’s related to the problem of evil, although of course we understand that evil and suffering are not the same thing, right? Epicurus had basically this to say on the subject: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Interesting point, not exactly the final answer. The tricky thing here is assuming that any kind of suffering is evil, whereas it seems transparently obvious to me that not everything that happens is... about us. A coronavirus, one of many, pops into existence, and it just so happens to cause illness and occasionally death to humans. Was this *on purpose*? Or was it just something that happens? There’s no real law about stuff that makes humans sick. Technically there could be several competing pandemics circulating at the same time. We’re not all suddenly immune to measles just because this dog-toy looking round piece of junk showed up. Yeah, I said it, you look like a dog ball, nobody wants you, get out of here Covid and go crawl back up Batman’s... *ahem* sorry about that. If there is a hurricane and people die, is it evil? How about it if happens in the middle of the ocean and only some fish die, is it evil? How about if it happens on the planet Jupiter and no sentient beings were within four hundred million miles, is it evil then? Really really big storm? Getting hung up on the problem of evil is basically saying that no human should ever suffer anything. But why? Says who? I have trained myself to ask myself, because my biggest flaw is that I am violently prone to self-pity, Why *shouldn’t* I suffer? Not like I’m asking for it or anything, but if anyone... why *not* me? My neighbors across the street many years ago? One got meningitis, one had a quadruple bypass, one got brain cancer, and the other got to be caretaker for the whole lot of them for several years. These were nice people, so what the heck? Why did all of that land on one house? A friend of mine? Her house burned down while her husband was being treated for prostate cancer, right after he got laid off from his job. Nice people. Why them and not me? Or... you, for that matter? No offense, just for illustrative purposes... I tend to hear these types of stories because I’m a sympathetic listener (and a bit of a gossip) and because I have the sort of gloomy disposition that records the dark stuff and saves it for later. As a good Stoic, I consider the prospect of suffering before it happens: premeditatio malorum. As a medievalist I think about the prospect of dying a lot, memento mori, and the reason they did it is because they had a lot more experience with epidemic illness than we do. As a yogini I do my savasana, “corpse pose,” and I’ve done a certain amount of Buddhist meditation on the subject, marasati, as well. In a way it’s been almost soothing for me, to assume that I know the manner of my death. I’ve been sick in bed before, I’ve had nasty respiratory infections and coughed up blood, I can visualize this. I can construct a counterfactual that helps me cope, such as, At least it wasn’t a shark after all, or, Thank goodness I won’t be taken by a serial killer, or, I’m so glad it wasn’t a fire. I’ve found this strangely satisfying, although of course I could just as easily go in a massive earthquake tonight. I have no reason to expect or demand safe conduct through this world. Nobody ever promised that we would carry our mortal bodies around for eternity - or if they did, wouldn’t we all be taking better care of ourselves? Especially our teeth? Wouldn’t we have been wearing more sunblock all this time? Of course we know that our time will come one day. I used to pray that I would die like a Stoic, without whining or crying WHY ME? Now I pray that when I go, I go alone, and that I’m not responsible for taking 400 other people with me. At least let my conscience be clean and clear, knowing I tried my best to protect others and obey quarantine rules. Let us make it through this as best we can. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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