The Rollercoaster World We Live In

We are fast approaching the one year mark for most of us in the United States when things as we knew it took a shift. For many households this included many changes. I will speak about the abrupt changes that happened in my household.

Initially, our life involved schedules, spaces for transition, and spaces for individual time. Then with the turn of a day we were all home. It felt like we were getting reacquainted with each other in a different type of way. The slow down caused us to have to tune in more with each other and more with ourselves. I wrote a blog post about the abrupt changes around the time all of this started. “What Happened to 2020” that you can find here.

So no need to go backwards. Now that we are here and approaching the one year mark of the thing formerly called life as we knew it, we are starting to operate in a space of pure exhaustion. We are over the multitasking of our brains to manage working from home, virtual learning and trying to cure the understandable boredom of our 5 and 7 year old. We are over not feeling relaxed enough to step outside of our house without the annoying face mask on. We miss having dinners indoors and sitting at a bar and chatting with your neighbors and strangers.

I don’t miss driving in traffic everyday due to my long commute and being frustrated. I do enjoy waiting until the last minute to get ready to log in for work. I definitely love getting to spend more time with my husband. And my new favorite and forever permanent shoes have become my Adidas slides.

We have sprinkles of moments where we are all really in tune with each other and connecting with laughter, time or just sharing space. Then there are the more chaotic moments when everyone has had enough of each other and do not want to even look at the other person lol.

There have been personal family loses and loses of friends both related and unrelated to the pandemic for both my husband and I. And so many lives lost of the faces of people we never knew but saw their life represented in many of the reports on the collective number of loses in America and globally. My heart goes out to them all.

To say emotions can be all over the place would be the hard core truth. At the end of the day, to survive mentally, we have to wrap our mind around the fact that what is just is. How can we take what we have and make it enough?

For my culture and ancestors this has been an unfortunate normal part of life. A constant state of adaptation. Having something ripped away from you outside of the realm of your control and working with the pieces left in front of you. I also think this has been the experience of many who are marginalized in our country as well as the bereaved, in which a loss of a family member potentially means the loss of income, livelihood and so on and so forth.

We have the grand power to decide what direction we want to take our life in. Circumstances are really irrelevant. What you make of those circumstances make all the difference in the world. So, my encouragement for this very unwelcomed fast approaching anniversary that we will all collectively experience is to learn how to be with what you have, what you are, and who you’ve become due to this pandemic.

Allow yourself to feel the emotion you are having right now. When you just try push through without pause, you aren’t making any real space to validate what you might be experiencing. Acknowledging our feelings does not mean we have to hold on to them. Remember you have the power to navigate through this experience in a way that works best for you. The paradox of control is letting go!

In Love & Light, -E