.SOMETIMES RAW.

For the last four weeks, I usually cried on Sundays. At least once. No clue why; maybe because the grocery stores are closed. Last week, I cried so embarrassingly loud that my son heard me from the furthest room of the apartment. He ran over, assuming something catastrophic had occurred, but when he asked me if I was okay, I covered my face and choked out a sobbing laugh. Am I okay? A perfectly reasonable question. Lately, my answer depends on the day, but regardless of whether it is yes or no, there is a heaviness to my emotional state that remains persistent, strangely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Familiar because I have been feeling sad on and off in the last couple of weeks, so I know what it is like to see everything faintly slick with gloom for a while. Unfamiliar because it took me a while to realize that this is all really happening, whereas right now I am sharply conscious of the descent. The urge to cry had been hanging over me for days like a shadow. I saw it coming from a distance, the culmination of absorbing so much crushing news about how the virus is impacting the world every morning and egged on by the looming reality, that, yes, I will probably have to postpone anything planned. Am I okay? On the one hand, I am super happy and okay. My son and I are physically healthy, I am only spending time with people I love and am able to quarantine safely for the indefinite future. Things that I certainly don’t take for granted right now. On the other hand, my mental health has suffered. Is suffering. But, of course, I am not losing it, won’t give up or sign myself in at a mental institution.

What does giving up even mean? What am I giving up? Self-maintenance? Who is self-maintenance for if not, uh, the self? Me? I don’t feel like I am giving up. I am actually taking pretty good care of myself. I am working out daily. I am eating pretty healthy food (for the most part) that I am making for myself. I am washing my hands voraciously.

I listened to a podcast this week that rocked me to my core. It was a conversation between Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle, the author of Untamed, which is the name of a book that has caused me to question whether the real power of a woman is to live recklessly if actually, the most audacious desires among us are not reckless at all. While I listened to it, my attention faded in and out. I wondered where my son and I would be eating our meals hadn’t my mom suggested to buy a kitchen table. Carrying all the food in the living room every time? Eating around the coffee table on the floor? Then I zoomed back into the podcast at the call of such lines as, “Maybe imagination is where we go not to escape reality but to discover it.” Hey, this podcast is really good. You should listen to it because I am not doing their conversation the spiritual justice it deserves at this point. Because my son wants to play with Lego for another fifteen hours. While I played with him I thought about making a gigantic salad for lunch with arugula, salmon, avocado, pumpkin seeds and anything else I can find in my fridge. Yum! We will probably eat it for dinner, too. My thoughts are all over the place but I kinda like it.

Are you enjoying any element of the quarantine? Maybe if you live in a village, with a garden, in nature. But in the city? I am afraid to ask this. And you might actually never see it because there is a good chance I will delete it. It is a dangerous question because I am not really asking if you like quarantine, I am asking if you have discovered anything transformative. The kind of something you may never have seen, won’t want to forget or have never experienced before.

Currently, I think I am settled into an adjusted state of reality and am pretty impressed by the natural, human inclination to find patterns, attach meaning to them, and create new routines. My weekdays are falling into this new kind of rhythm. My weekends, too. Yesterday I had a thought that I might even like it more than the rhythms of routines past, then I realized that actually, I am just wearing blinders to get to the end of every day in spirits pleasant enough to sit down and write something like this. I haven’t forgotten the superior rhythms of the past and I can imagine the rhythms of the future. Is this what being present is like?

While I wiped away my tears last week I also realized that staying present with my son is great, but 24/7 for weeks and barely another child around to play with him is a challenge. Honestly, I can’t wait for him to go to bed so I can write, read, have time just for myself or spend an aperitivo hour with my friend. This is another new rhythm I have come to look forward to. Him being around. There is this awesome bottle of white wine that we will share. A wine with a rose-like floral aroma. We will enjoy it with crackers and dips in the kitchen. Setting all this up is soothing. So is washing dishes by hand and not using a dishwasher. I totally get it, there is something so reliable about knowing exactly what you are setting out to do and then through the function of your own effort, doing it. It is so simple. I think that makes it satisfying, too. The simple things.

Today, I did not cry. Today, I feel loved.

Happy Easter Sunday and Monday.

I like to have a plan. To some degree, we all do I guess. Humans are change and risk-averse. My need to control everything around me has backfired many times. The more in-control I tried to be, the less I actually controlled. Because change is the only constant in life, I learned that control itself is an illusion. How could I possibly have control when there is the Corona-circus dancing around me and I am in the middle?

We all are heading into spring and summer of uncertainties that will have a big effect on everybody’s life. This alone has made me feel out of control, as there are so many factors that are literally outside my command center. Add on top of that economic uncertainty and I put my hands up. I surrender.

I was always a person who doesn’t give up, doesn’t give in, doesn’t ask for help, and for sure doesn’t show weaknesses. Which is why I had always considered the word surrender to be blasphemous. Surrender was never a possibility to consider. I usually bulldoze through whatever stands in my way. That all changed, abruptly on Friday, March 13th 2020. When the world started to stand still. It felt so weird not to be in control.

“Until your knees finally hit the floor, you are just playing at life, and on some level, you are scared because you know you are just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It is when life begins.” – Marianne Williamson

I know this is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender. It takes strength to admit I am weak, bravery to show I am vulnerable, and courage to ask for help. It felt very strange in the beginning. Surrender to me means that when something isn’t working, I don’t force it anymore. When something is out of my control, I stop trying to control it. And when the shit comes pouring down, I know I will survive it. Somehow. Because this too shall pass. It means I know everything is happening exactly as it should at just the right time, and I no longer believe I am responsible for everything in the world.

It wasn’t until three weeks ago, which brought more and more hints at the overbearing uncertainty of my life, that I had to sit down and do some emotional healing and soul searching. It was during my meditation, yoga, writing, and crying sessions that the word surrender actually came to me. At first, of course, my natural tendency to control kicked in. And then reality (and the fact that too many things are now out of control) kicked in even harder. And then I dropped my walls and felt a sense of relief. There is nothing that can be done. I realized that there is a space between action and reaction. But I can choose how I react to where life brings me. It is in this space that I found healing and light.

Life no longer feels precarious, or about to crumble. By surrendering to whatever is unfolding and by accepting what is, by giving up on the outcome and allowing life to flow the way it is meant to, by stepping out of my own way and letting the natural order take the lead, I not only get a break from the exhaustion of having to control everything but I also get to experience life, instead of what I think life owes me. I believe that what life wants to give us is infinitely better than what we think it owes us.

If the current circumstances have taught me anything, it is that I can and must live presently and take small actions each day to move in the direction I want. A direction toward living and loving bigger than ever before. I can have faith. I can trust that as long as I live in a way that feeds my soul, I will always be in the right place. What helps me is to know that there is a bigger plan, a higher purpose, for me and for all of us. Things will definitely change drastically. I have learned that I need to love myself more. It is through self-love that I can feel strong enough within myself to let everything else go. I can be my own queen and sit on a throne. And it is my throne. It is the front seat of the rollercoaster of my life. I am buckled up and I won’t look back. Just forward. With someone special next to me.

This tension between what actually is and what I want it to be has been on my mind a lot lately. Besides counting stones in the park. Or pigeons. If two weeks ago, the energy that was pumping through my veins and shooting out of my fingertips was so chaotic I could have combusted and come back as the emoji with an exploding head only to combust again. Last week was, as a direct reaction to the previous week, the precise opposite: deliberately psychologically slower, then this week, I think I am settling, or have settled, into an adjusted state of reality that defines me right now. And it’s got me feeling contemplative. Is this what happens when you give yourself space to think and permission to let your mind run as it will into the uncharted corners of your thoughts where true and fallacies loiter, waiting for both exposure and destruction?

I called my parents the other day and told them I was anxious. They reminded me of what they said when I was nine years old and off from school for six weeks and complained that I was bored. “There is no such thing as boredom, only lazy minds,” but also, “that any changing of scenery requires adjustment”. What I was feeling was not boredom, it was the lull that bridges a packed school schedule and the benign emptiness of six unplanned weeks. They were right. Within days, the mass of formless time started to feel like it was disappearing and before I could savor the quiet, I was back at school. As we get older, they told me, the bridging lulls stop looking like boredom and start to feel more intense. Like panic. Whether they are right or wrong, it made me think that maybe I am not anxious, so I stopped saying I am anxious and now I am not. I don’t think.

Oh, food and going to the grocery store are still the highlight of my day.

But back to that tension. Last Sunday was a bad day. I was confronted rather directly by my integrity as it told me I am not living up to it. And it wasn’t. The negative voices. The uncertainty. Less alone and more understood by my six-year-old? Doesn’t seem like it when your highlight of the day is to take the garbage downstairs and smoke a cigarette. I don’t feel bad for myself, to be clear. I just think about the nurses and doctors out there at this crucial time. I have been saying this a lot lately. I guess because it sounds to me like I am complaining, but I am really not. Or maybe I am but don’t want to be. The point is, I don’t feel bad for myself. I would if I couldn’t see the disparity between me and what I call my integrity. If I kept on, floating above my body detached, too scared to look in the mirror and thus continually self-distracting but his, I think, is precisely what a slower pace brings.

It is Thursday today. I was supposed to go back to work. I had tears of joy in my eyes when work called me. April 2nd. Regaining normality? Not really. Work has been canceled. I have been informed to stay at home this week, too.

On our walk to the grocery store: A car drove by, it moved rather slowly. I wondered if its driver ( a man) is adjusting to a new pace, too. If he is evaluating this period as a silver lining opportunity to examine the features he has either taken for granted or never cared to lift the lid on because he is internalized these features as Things That Are True, or frankly, Not True. That’s what I am doing. And it is worth mentioning that if we can assess this time as a silver lining opportunity, we are very, very lucky. Imagine the frontline heroes, those begging for their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. What a privilege to be able to think: I feel pretty safe where I am.

One time I listened to someone say that to be an icon, you have to actually do the thing that makes you iconic. It seems this is true for whoever, whatever, however you say you are. Except, for being human. We are all that. We might be far from ourselves these days, but we are all human. As Dr. Seuss would say, “Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.” We have become physically separated but psychically connected.

Will we get through this? Yes, we will.