Moving & being

Hey.

I miss you guys. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.

This is me, at my desk, wearing a jumpsuit that makes me feel optimistic, and noise-canceling headphones so I can't hear my husband conducting work calls in the kitchen. I've been listening to Classical Indian music which seems to help me concentrate (I don't know any of the words, so I can’t sing along) and ignite a bit of much-needed creativity.

Last week was the pits, not as a result of any specific hardship (which made me ashamed with myself on top of feeling crummy), but because I just went numb. As the number of deaths and unemployment claims kept climbing, I felt less and less capable of connecting with the magnitude of the pandemic's impact. I kept dialing into phone and zoom calls, but I was totally checked out. 

By Thursday I was grumpy and increasingly apprehensive about what to do with myself over the weekend. All I could see ahead of me was a lot of hours and zero structure, so I doubled down on the thing I know best: making myself busy.

When I texted the list of things I did over the weekend to a friend–made a sourdough starter, granola, batches of dal and yeasted waffles for the freezer, cooked beans, walked for miles, deep-cleaned the apartment, took selfies with the cat in the yard–she wrote something back about how yummy and fun all of that sounded. But it hadn't felt fun I confessed. In truth, it felt a little manic. She commiserated. The day before she'd spent an embarrassing amount of time organizing her coffee mugs.

Something about the toxic mix of hyperactivity and hollowness I felt was familiar to me. What else was like this I wondered, as my thumbs hovered over my phone. And then it hit me:

Her text gave me words to describe the thing I hadn't been able to articulate about the experience I was having, the same one I have every time I move. There's a deflation after all of the doable parts of moving are done, and I reach the point where I think I should find a regular rhythm. Instead, all that's in front of me is the vast, undefined expanse of forever that lives on the other side of arrival.

Being is not my strong suit; I’ve always been a bigger fan of the doing. I once had a therapist gently suggest that the challenges I faced were not the kind that could be resolved with doing; they were the kind that required a new way of being. I paused, desperately wanting to comprehend what she was saying. I responded, without irony, "Right, ok...so what do I do about that?"

Hyperactive doing is the way I distract myself from my discomfort when big things change, as is evidenced by my laundry list of weekend activities. The problem is that it’s exhausting to operate at that pace. I can only keep it up for a few weeks. For the past month, I have been running around like a cranky toddler in search of something to soothe me.  

First, I tried talking to everyone all the time. When that didn’t work, I gorged on content–I started five books (Truth and Beauty, The Tenth of December, Parable of the Sower, Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance, The Portable Dorothy Parker), and umpteen podcasts, barely making a dent in any of them. When I realized my mind had a bellyache, I moved on to being super productive in work, chores, and exercise–my quads have not been this sore in decades. The funk I entered last week was right on schedule.

I've never consciously decided to ‘just be here’ in the face of any move or major transition, it’s more like something that happens when all of my efforting takes me past the tipping point. The pandemic is no exception. I trotted out every coping mechanism in my bag of tricks, and I would have kept at it had I not tuckered myself out by the end of the weekend. Exhaustion gave way to stillness and the dust settled enough for me to see the reality that I am in a different place. Now I just have to be here.

Situations that call for being–things like forgiveness, trust, familiarity–operate on their own timeline. They are best served by patience, humility, and a degree of friendliness towards uncertainty. I'm working on it, but I still struggle to trust that more will be revealed if I just be where I am and live through the thing I don't understand or can't resolve.

When I spotted a familiar thread in my response to the pandemic, I felt a tiny bit of relief. It's the kind of relief I feel when I'm lost, spot a landmark, and remember that I've found my way home from this place before. Connecting emotional dots like this give me something as good as, if not better than, an answer; it reminds me that I know how to just be here in the absence of one.