This week. Ughh, it was a tough one. It wasn’t particularly different than the past few, but there was just something about it that made it feel heavier. As I talked with a friend on the phone last night, she told me how she’s been feeling like this too. As she described what this week felt like for her, a little light flickered in my heart because it was like we understood each other completely. Sometimes it’s just nice to know that those waves of feelings that you’re having that you agonize over and second-guess constantly are shared by so many others too.
If this week was hard, it’s not just you.
Since this whole thing started, it’s like I’ve gotten good at building up a dam against the feelings of doom and gloom that are everywhere. They were still out there, but my positive, hopeful feelings were always just a little higher and kept everything else from taking over (for the most part). For some reason, this week, all of the crap just stacked up too high and spilled over the edges a little. It’s kind of like my brain can’t possibly fit one more racing thought and my heart can’t possibly fit one more worried feeling. They are full, and it’s exhausting.
It’s a little bit the fact that winter is inevitable now, and it’s going to mean staying inside most of the time. It’s also a little bit that actually knowing someone with covid wasn’t super common before, but now it seems like it’s everywhere and we’re lucky to have dodged it so far. And it’s a little bit that the holidays are coming up and I never in a million years would’ve guessed back in the spring that we’d still be in this spot right now. And sometimes all of those little things and so many more are just too much.
Do you ever scroll back to photos in your phone from early March or before? I find myself doing this all the time and sometimes I just stare at everything about those pictures. Is that person from back then anything like the me that I am right now? So much has happened since then. That blissfully naïve, hopeful, always planning the next thing person keeps getting harder and harder to recognize. Instead, I’m someone with the constant weight of worry on my mind. And lately, I just miss the old me. And I miss everything about the old “all of us.”
I want to look in my calendar right now and worry about something like trying to fit in all of the fun that we have planned for the next month. I want to get emails reminding me that my upcoming flight is just a few months away for that vacation we saved up for. I want to take the kids to the store with me and not even worry when they touch everything in the toy aisle. And I know that if these are my biggest problems right now, then I’m lucky. And my heart breaks for anyone in those hard situations beyond what I can even comprehend. But it all just sucks sometimes.
So, I think we have to keep reminding each other of everything about the old “us” that we miss so much. Talk with your friends, laugh together, reminisce about that fun time you had last time you got together. Let’s help each other keep that spark going of the person that we can’t wait to get back to. I sometimes think about winter and how if we didn’t have winter, then we wouldn’t know how to truly live our best lives in the summer. Maybe that’s true here too. If we can figure out how not to lose ourselves in this winter, then maybe what’s on the other side is even better than we thought it could be.
