Existing in a Pandemic: 8 Months Later
Six months into shutdown, we started running out of gas. Inexplicably, we started struggling to find the headspace to work, and a sense of weariness took over our usual fervor. For a while, we couldn’t figure out just what it was, or why, a whole sixth months after we made all these adjustments to our lives, we finally started to feel the weight of the changes. We found some answers — and lots of hope — when we came across this viral Twitter thread by Dr. Aisha Ahmad, which details her experience with the “six month wall” on assignment in disaster zones. While the circumstances may be different, the science is largely the same: six months into a crisis, our bodies recognize that we’re in it for the long haul.
At the beginning of September, it felt like we ran smack into this metaphorical wall. Our high-effort, high-impact summer of Rad Studio Online wrapped up, and for the first time since we transitioned to virtual work in March, the Rad Magpie team took a collective breath. And then, in both a literal and figurative sense, we all took a nice big nap.
This was much needed when the air started getting crisper and the days started getting shorter. But now, it’s been two months since we took that breath, that nap, that step back from our nose-to-the-grindstone pace. How have we refreshed our energy and managed the difficulties of hitting the wall?
Each one of us has had to recalibrate and be intentional about our coping skills. Recognizing the six month wall and allowing ourselves to truly rest for the first time since March was the first step, but since then we’ve had to try new strategies to live with this new normal. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, but we hope you find at least one strategy here that resonates with you. Here’s how the exec staff help manage COVID woes so we can be our best selves both at the virtual workplace and not:
Maggie
When we first transitioned into lockdown, things weren’t so bad for me. I got to cut out a long commute, I had plenty of time to charge my social battery, and I honestly prefer working from home. But right around, oh, September or so, my brain started to feel like this:
When the Rad Magpie team took a step back to readjust our sails in mid-September, I was deeply entrenched in this so-called “six-month wall.” Because I didn’t mind quarantine at first, I was in pretty hardcore denial about the long-term implications of adjusting to things like social isolation and feelings of impending doom. I pretended that things were just fine for a really long time, and believed it would only last “another few weeks” for waaaay longer than I should have. So when all of the above factors (including those Spidermans in my brain) came to a head this fall, I hit that wall hard. I learned the hard way that I have to be really intentional about the ways I approach my work and my mental health right now. Here’s four main strategies that have kept me intact — not thriving, but intact:
Getting dressed: This one is a lot harder than it seems! When I’m particularly depressed, or on days when I don’t even have a Zoom call to dress up for, it’s really hard not to stay in the Totoro onesie and cozy up all day. The problem with that is the way it blurs the boundary between my work time and lounging around time. Dressing up for work, even if no one will see me, helps me cross an invisible threshold and start my workday. When work and fun happen at the same desk — when the same computer is both your workspace and your game system — these thresholds are key to eliminating the “I should be working” feeling that pops up during leisure time and the “how did I end up on Facebook again?” moments that pop up during work time. You can create any kind of threshold you want, even make it a ritual, but for me, getting out of my PJ’s is the first step to a successful workday.
Going outside: To me, this is mindfulness practice. And I recognize that I’m luckier than most in that I can walk to a riverside park and indulge in nature without seeing any neighbors or getting in anyone’s six-foot bubble. Fresh air is important though, even when you’re breathing it through a mask. Sometimes I realize that I haven’t left my apartment in four days, because everything I do is online and my partner is the designated grocery-getter. I think we can all recognize that this isn’t the healthiest. Making my best effort to take even a short walk every day helps me feel grounded, get some fresh air, change up my scenery, and get my blood flowing. This will get more challenging as the weather starts to turn, but that will only make me more grateful for every bit of Vitamin D I could soak up this fall.
Creating routines and habits: One way I felt the impact of the six-month wall was the sensation of being on autopilot all the time. I’m used to dissociation as a symptom, but this was something else. I’m working on combating the feeling in general, but in the meantime, I’ve had to figure out how to cope when my brain won’t turn on. I’ve found that if I establish something as a routine or habit, I’ll complete the task on autopilot even when I can’t do much else. To give an example — I decided Sunday was vacuuming day a few months ago. Every Sunday I include vacuuming the apartment in my planner. And now that I’ve ingrained “Sunday is vacuum day” into my mind, I won’t let a Sunday pass without knocking that chore out. Even if I don’t have the spoons to do any other chores, I gotta vacuum, for no other reason than it’s Sunday. The more tasks I can add to my autopilot list, the easier it is to keep up with my responsibilities when most of my brain is out to lunch. That said, creating habits is much easier said than done, and you can’t expect to fall into a routine effortlessly. Some things are easier to “automate” than others, too … You let me know if you find a way to add exercising to your autopilot list ;)
Readjusting goals and expectations: This is the hardest but most important to remember. This is not the year that I’m going to publish a book or get in the best shape of my life or pick up a new skill. This year is about surviving in the face of a crisis. There’s a pandemic happening! We’ve been in lockdown for almost nine months! Things are not normal, and I shouldn’t hold myself to the standard I would if things were normal. It’s key to keep getting excited over the victories, but the benchmark for success needs to be adjusted. Instead of having a jam-packed agenda full of creative output and things that are mentally or physically taxing, I only plan out my top priorities for the day. Anything else is gravy. But if my crisis-brain says I need to watch several hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer some days, I should listen, and let that be enough.
Megan
It’s excruciatingly difficult to create routines and habits when your life is uprooted by moving to a new home every 2-3 months, which has been my experience throughout this pandemic. I’ve had to cope with a truly unprecedented number of housing situations where things have been bad enough in one way or another that I’ve needed to leave.
I feel like I’m constantly “running away.” The problems that prompted me to leave former housing situations were each unique and valid. It was ultimately healthiest for me to leave, but I still catch myself thinking “What if I had stayed and pushed through?” However, I think one of my largest emotional takeaways of the pandemic has been to stop “pushing through” things that are painful, unrelenting, or deeply uncomfortable. I’ve stopped giving space to thoughts like “everything will be ok if I just change my needs!” and started thinking “everything will be ok if I leave this situation that doesn’t meet my (valid and important) needs” instead. My boundaries deserve to be upheld. Even if it’s inconvenient for me in the immediate future, I think the long-term benefits are going to be worth it.
Ultimately I’m writing this from a cabin in the middle of nowhere Maine because this was the only affordable option available to me three months ago and I took it. I’m a two hour drive away from any friends or family, but given the pandemic, I at least feel germ-safe in my little bubble — albeit bored out of my mind. I did have a medical emergency a few days ago that left me pretty shaken to be alone, but I’m safe & ok now. It’s peaceful here.
Video chatting, snuggling my cat, and playing multiplayer online games help me feel less alone, but I can’t pretend like it solves my problems. I still have a hole in my life where the physical presence of friends, family, and physical activism used to be.
I have found myself “imaginary-renovating” the house I’m staying in in my mind in order to channel my creativity into something that isn’t exactly as real or high-pressure as taking out a pencil and doing a full blown illustration. I’ll do little doodles of what different color palettes and arrangements of furniture would look like in the space, or dream of adding a greenhouse to the walk-out basement downstairs one day. I can’t explain it, it just relieves me and gives me a non-existent thing to look forward to “one day” lol.
I’m honoring my needs in another important way, by putting everything down and laying in bed when I experience physical pain. I used to be a “push through the pain” kind of person, but now I resign myself to crying under the covers as needed.
I’ve been doing a lot of doom-scrolling on social media. My favorite social media is Sonya Renee Taylor’s instagram account. The other day she posted something that made me feel kind of wonderful? She was celebrating one of her quotes being painted on the side of a building as a mural - here’s a screenshot from the video:
It says “We will not go back to normal.
Normal never was.
Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion…
We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”
- Sonya Renee Taylor
It really moved me to see this. To hear her speak her own written words, and see them reflected on a wall, and hear the joy in her voice. The magic of this quote is that it genuinely supported the “helpless” side of me that was grieving the loss of the things I liked about my former “normal;” it presented power to that helplessness, and afforded me the opportunity to fully recognize and leave behind the unhealthy things about that old normal. Kind of like processing a break-up haha. Now I have the right mental framework to turn my struggle bus into a chrysalis.
Things are difficult, and uncertain, and the world is testing my boundaries in a million different ways, and I feel like I’m playing the wildest waiting game of my life, but I simply refuse to let it irreparably fuck me up. I choose to move forward by embodying the determination and hope that I feel in Sonya’s quote. I choose to never give up on the boundaries that are most important to me, my identity, and my personal sense of justice. I choose to meet people with love and light even though I’m currently in a dingy, drippy, cold ass lil’ cave, emotionally. And, yes, I choose to attend regular sessions with my therapist until I’m out of that cave.
Zynab
Returning to thinking about appreciative inquiry and positive psychology in a time like this is bringing up a lot of fascinating feelings. I’m realizing that a lot of my current feelings really do revolve around the pandemic. And in addition to that, many of my feelings revolve around how my transition from being a student to being a true professional was severely dampened by the pandemic. I don’t mean in the sense of the job I got (because 1. I’m grateful for the job I have, and 2. I love what I do and the people that I work with), but in how I was (un)able to translate my career goals as a student to my career goals as a professional. A lot of my goals that used to be just are not attainable right now, and what they would have translated to are just as unattainable. It’s not that they won’t ever be attainable now, but because I feel like I can’t take steps toward them, it makes me wonder, “What’s the point?” Why bother having goals that I can’t work toward? And that critical time period of adjustment for me just severed that possibility. That’s where a lot of hopelessness comes from right now, at least for me.
Rereading The Joy of Appreciative Living brought me back to when I first read the book, visiting my parents in a town I didn’t know with no ability to go out and be on my own. At 20, I felt like a child again, but this time (like the Plato allegory of the cave reference) I knew what was on the outside and could never go back. It sounds pretty dramatic looking back at it, but I think it was an important experience for me to have gone through. I recall the desires and goals that I had as a college junior, and where I thought I might be at 23 in 2020. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed correctly (who would’ve?).
And when I look back at my life in my last semester of college, just six months ago, I feel similarly (without the angsty hopelessness). I feel the stresses and anxieties I felt then about passing my classes, getting a good job, living somewhere over the summer, and more. Beyond that, I feel the hope I had for my future prospects. When I realized I have none of that hope now, it really struck me. Why did I not have any of that hope? What career goals did I have then that I can’t accomplish now? Why can’t I accomplish that?
And even deeper than that, what can I learn from the first several months of a full-time job, completely removed from school, that changes what my goals once were? How can I adapt them based on my current experience, and how can I still move my goals forward during this time?
I’ve heard many stories in the past six months of people reevaluating their lifestyle, their desires, and their goals, realizing that they weren’t actually where they wanted to be, or that they were ready for something different. I also know people who felt they were in a great place—even the happiest they’d ever been—and the pandemic ruined it all. I feel like the hardest part is that time when we’ve accepted the way that life is right now, and we attribute these depressed behaviors, lack of motivation, and other feelings to being just how life is, and not a result of the temporary lifestyle we’re in. I do think it’s true that life will be different forever, but life has always been different™ after a huge global event. Life as we know it will change to life as we will know it.
Basically, what I’m saying is, don’t forget that the pandemic going on is probably making a lot of things for you worse. Yeah, that definitely sucks, BUT that means you’re not going to have this much weight on you forever. It’s going to end. It may not be the same as before, but it will not be the same as right now.
I may feel stuck right now, and to a degree I am. It will be good for me to find strategies to cope, be happy, and do good work for myself and my job. Those strategies are a way of getting by for now, and they are not permanent. I can (and should) still think of my future in context of both my life now and what I wanted my life to be before. If I can’t move toward something now, that’s okay. There will be time later. Right now is a perfect time to say, “Not now, but later.” That is okay.
Dana
Dana’s instructions for coping (in three parts):
Phase One: cook lots of dinners, drain wine box (after box), dive into work, and Zoom feels a bit like not being alone. Say a lot: “when things get back to being normal…” Half-assedly set up a home office in the guest room of parent’s house. Schedule lunch breaks with mandatory outdoor walks, put it on Google Calendar even. Crying allowed and encouraged. Write long, wistful diary entries. Embrace leggings as a full lifestyle.
Phase Two: Skirt the lines of danger by holding the hand of a human you’ve practically just met. See more drive-in movies than you have total in your entire life. Take lots of walks. Nature if possible.
Phase Three: Pile on so much responsibility that you have no choice but to get out of bed. Get a dog. Buy a duplex that is absolutely wrecked that you need to rent half of immediately or face financial despondency. Take on another part-time job. Hit the “six month wall” and lean into it. Drink too much caffeine, then cut it out: repeat, again and again, mindfully calibrating chemical input with emotional stability.