First came the lockdown, then working from home, then a 75% reduction in my business… Then the Labor Day Oregon wildfires hit and our mountain community was threatened and we lost electricity for a week and couldn’t go outside because of the smoky, hazardous air quality. And now my spouse and I have Covid-19 (with symptoms, fun!), but at least we didn’t give it to my elderly, medically fragile mother who just moved to town. Oh yeah, and the political shenanigans that I keep trying to ignore. That’s a lot of stressors, and so many people have so many more problems than my list. I’m feeling my own stressors and sometimes it feels like all of theirs, too. The world collectively groans.
So, what coping skills am I using to get through this Year of Our Lord 2020? As SNL jokes, a lot of adult coloring books and guitar lessons! (I’m not kidding.) And I’ve done Noom for the past 4 months, I’ve been accessing my support groups regularly, talking to friends, snuggling my dogs, making a gratitude list, getting creative with work. But that’s part of “surge capacity,” the topic of Tara Haelle’s August 2020 article in Medium, and why I want to share her 13 min. read with you.
Haelle writes in such a relatable way of the “ambiguous losses” that we’re all feeling right now:
In those early months, I, along with most of the rest of the country, was using “surge capacity” to operate, as Ann Masten, PhD, a psychologist and professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, calls it. Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.
By my May 26 psychiatrist appointment, I wasn’t doing so hot. I couldn’t get any work done. I’d grown sick of Zoom meetups. It was exhausting and impossible to think with the kids around all day. I felt trapped in a home that felt as much a prison as a haven. I tried to conjure the motivation to check email, outline a story, or review interview notes, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t make myself do anything — work, housework, exercise, play with the kids — for that whole week.
Or the next.
Or the next.
Or the next.
I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an “anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,” along with a complete inability to concentrate. I spoke with my therapist, tweaked medication dosages, went outside daily for fresh air and sunlight, tried to force myself to do some physical activity, and even gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks. We were in a pandemic, after all, and I had already accepted in March that life would not be “normal” for at least a year or two. But I still couldn’t work, couldn’t focus, hadn’t adjusted. Shouldn’t I be used to this by now?