Chapter 12

2020 COVID-19 – April 19

My birthday was last week. 42 trips around the sun and a million reasons to be hopeful and thankful. This last week was a blur. We didn’t make a cake because after eating an entire one last week for our daughter’s birthday it seemed best not to allow another into the house. We want to get through this health crisis both Covid and diabetes free. Also, to be able to fit into pants.

A few nights ago we were concerned that the baby felt a little warm…he is cutting in two top teeth now because teething is best done during quarantine.

Quaranteething.

But these days even a slight temperature is cause to gallop to conclusions. We got the thermometer out and I asked if he was the right temperature….he was…which then resulted in a 15 min Sean Paul/dancehall dance party and we all really showed up for it. It’s the little things these days. Like letting your pre schooler dance to songs with questionably appropriate lyrics if the beat is solid. But who is really keeping tabs anymore…

This sudden upheaval of uncertainty and fear has taught me that my years of living with crippling anxiety were in fact preparing me for exactly this…navigating fear and uncertainty.

It is also teaching me that:

Your biggest fears don’t really exist.

Because the only thing I really have to deal with is the immediate present. Broken down into as small of a segment as needed. Days, half days, hours, half hours, minutes or seconds. Nothing outside of that matters.

In the end everything, and I mean everything, is out of my control. I was stressed in late February because my freelance client base was slow to regrow. I left my full-time job to transition back to being full-time freelance last December. The irony of my poor timing is not lost on me. But it allowed me to take some much needed family time off in January and I had planned to ramp work up in February and March.

Turns out trying to build a freelance design business back up during a sudden global economic catastrophe and pandemic is tricky. Who knew!

We will weather this storm. Keep going.

But even more ironic is that despite it all I’m happier still than I was before and this forced slow time off to spend with our kids is both merciful and essential.

Even crazier is the fact that I’ve been less anxious overall in my day to day life since this whole thing started.
Anxiety makes you think that you are alone in your feelings of isolation and often desperation. That the volcano of angst and rumination erupting in your thoughts are for only you to navigate. Thinking that fear, hopelessness and the ache of pending doom happens to nobody but you.

It took a global pandemic to further unveil (what every therapist has tried to point out for years) that all of these feelings are just part and parcel of the human condition. Everyone has them. And the perception that somehow other people are always managing everything in a more calm and competent way than you has become blatantly untrue.

We are all reset to the base level of – “what the actual f*ck is going to happen next” And as terrifying as that would have been to me in the past. Right now it’s somehow reassuring to globally all be together in this large collective of unknowns.

Now that the impossible is happening everything else seems somehow possible.

Stay safe, I love you.