On: Recovering

On:  Recovering

One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t write more during the pandemic that has now stretched for nearly three years beginning roughly in February 2020.  If I think back, I can make a fairly jumbled list of things that defined the last three years, especially in my line of work as an expert in occupational safety:  homes that became indistinguishable from offices, “virtual” everything from wine tastings to craft nights, mountains of work with no precedent or meaningful guidance, lost jobs, months of operating at maximum mental capacity while under a constant cloud of uncertainty, panic, anxiety, and worry that even though you did your best, somebody might still get sick or die.

I can also trace the arc of my emotional experience, which is adjacent to my work experience but independent from it despite the lack of any physical or metaphorical boundaries between work and not-work.  In the beginning, there was an initial feeling of “this is temporary; we’ll hunker down for a few weeks, and we’ll be fine.”  We stocked up on dog food and a few other things, but generally enjoyed a slight change of pace and the novelty of working entirely from home, ready to resume normalcy after the immediate danger passed. 

But it didn’t pass. 

The initial approaching of pandemic life with aplomb was quickly replaced by a feeling of life grinding to a screeching halt.  Vacations, concerts, shows, and other plans, sometimes months in advance, were cancelled as we headed into the summer of 2020.  My ability to look ahead shrunk, overnight, to a timeframe no longer than the next few days – short-sighted for someone who usually has things on the calendar weeks or months in advance.  2020 holidays brought a level of stress and anxiety that were new and hard to navigate.  The push-pull of wanting to see loved ones and hold onto some tiny remaining shred of normalcy, yet not wanting to put anyone in harm’s way, balancing varying understanding and tolerance of risk, was overwhelming and impossible to get right by everyone, despite best intentions.  And by then, there was the one-two punch:  Hubs lost his job and then slipped on the ice and broke his leg, rendering him mostly confined to the basement man cave for the better part of 5 months.

I think my emotional experience bottomed out around February 2021.  I remember days where I just physically couldn’t move – where I would lie on the couch and feel like the weight of the world was pressing down on me.  On those days, the only thing I could muster the energy to do (besides pulling myself together enough to face some senior leader or another in my company who needed to understand some new reality of COVID protections in the workplace) was to lie in bed, pull the covers over my head, and stare at the wall.  I didn’t want to read; I didn’t want to watch TV; I didn’t want to sleep.  I just wanted to stare at the wall.

Things started to look up a little in April 2021 when vaccines became widely available, and there was a slight mood bump again in June when Hubs got traction on starting a new career path.  But even with a few positive developments, there was little forward momentum for me, and I felt like things had settled on an emotional plateau that was only slightly above the floor.

2022 has been better, little by little, but like 2021, it feels like the year started with baby steps that caused a small and short-lived hit of dopamine, but then settled back into drudgery: getting a new office space, for example, and getting back into more of a routine that doesn’t involve working from home as much.  Of course, hardly anybody else is there with regularity, so it’s not quite the bellwether of impending normalcy I may have naively hoped it would be.  Couple that with some stutter-steps and false-starts on Hubs’ new path, and early 2022 continued to zap my resilience.

In June 2022, though, I somehow found myself on a freight train that hasn’t stopped speeding along the track with 10,000 tons of momentum behind it ever since.  Hubs started a new job and his coursework toward a masters degree in Prosthetics and Orthotics.  All of a sudden, he’s a student again – and for those of you who, like us, were a couple of decades out from our last school experience, things change fast in the academic world.  Every nine weeks, to be precise, which in one’s mid-40s feels like a nanosecond.  It’s constant adjusting and readjusting, getting used to a cadence just in time for it to shift again. 

All of a sudden, I had multiple work trips scheduled, multiple crises and problems unrelated to COVID to tackle.  I saw ads for concerts and shows I wanted to see.  I started planning events and travel and outings a few weeks in advance.  I was finally able to start planning and doing all of the fun things I used to do, but instead of easing back into my normal cadence of life, it’s like I ran the second half of 2022 in a full-out sprint.  As a consequence, I sit here on New Year’s Eve exhausted; I’ve lost the conditioning that I used to have to handle a full life.  It’s confusing; things that I used to enjoy doing, planning, and thinking about are draining and don’t bring as much joy as they used to.  Even more confusing, I’m sometimes uncharacteristically paralyzed when I find myself faced with decisions, especially simple and reasonably inconsequential things like what mode of transportation to take into the city for a concert.

Don’t get me wrong:  I’ll take my mental and emotional state at the end of 2022 over either of the two previous years any day.  But it’s still not quite right.

My leader at work said something the other day that stuck with me.  “I’m recovering,” she said.  A simple declarative sentence that became more profound the longer I sat with it and turned it over in my mind.  “Recovering: the act of returning to a state of normalcy.”  Or how about “Recovering:  the act of finding things that have been lost.”  Both are appropriate and subtly different in ways that seem to fit perfectly at the end of 2022, as they describe a state of motion, a process that is currently underway. 

In other words, it ain’t done yet. 

I’m the first to admit that in 2022 I’ve tried to force the process of returning to normalcy and finding things we lost in the pandemic.  In my defense, brute-forcing my way through life toward whatever result I want is kind of my MO, and it’s served me reasonably well for the last four decades.  What the last year has taught me, though, is that sometimes I need to back off and let things play out, trusting that there is a process in play and leaving the pushing to someone or something with a lot more power than I have.

I’m not back to normal yet.  I’m better, but I’m still recovering.  Maybe there will be a distinct point in time where I can say that I’m no longer “recovering,” but have instead “recovered.”  Maybe not.  Maybe the process takes a few more months; maybe a few years.  But one thing I know for sure is that this time next year, I’ll be able to look back at this rambling collection of thoughts at the end of 2022 and think about what’s changed for the better and what still needs work. 

I guess that’s all anybody can ask for.