Category: feelings

It’s almost Christmas, 2022 is coming up and it feels like a bad reboot of 2020, the anniversary of my mom’s death is in January…there is a LOT going on right now in the feelings department.

This is why we need to take a minute and a half and listen to…a squirrel hand puppet on TikTok? Yes we do. Take whatever feels heavy right now and whisper it in his fuzzy ear. Honestly, it will help.

 

@squirrel_dialoguesAre you carrying something heavy? ##mentalhealth ##healingtiktok ##mindfulness ##selflove ##selfcare ##nonviolence ##acceptance

♬ original sound – Squirrel

This New York Times article has been circulating a lot in the last couple weeks, I think because so many people read it and think, “Yes! That’s exactly how I’m feeling.”

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

As the article itself says:

We still have a lot to learn about what causes languishing and how to cure it, but naming it might be a first step. It could help to defog our vision, giving us a clearer window into what had been a blurry experience. It could remind us that we aren’t alone: languishing is common and shared.

I would add that it’s common and shared especially now, 14 months into the pandemic, where we’re all thinking, “Now what?”. Do we just go back to normal, when normal failed so many people? Are we going to acknowledge the losses and the challenges of the last year collectively? Or even, say, in the workplace? (If mine is any example, the answer is no.)

I don’t know what the future will look like, but I hope we’ll continue to at least try to publically talk about the mental and emotional toll of the last year. Articles like these are a good start.

My mom would be 73 today. I took the day off. I’m going to fertilize and trim my houseplants and think about her (she loved to fertilize and prune).

I don’t have many words of my own today, but I’ve been sitting on a Cheryl Strayed newsletter–a reprint of an old Sear Sugar column–for a few weeks now. Every single one of  her newsletters destroy me but this one particularly, about living with loss and making a home in grief, didn’t leave a thing standing. It’s beautiful, though. If you have lost a loved one, read it. And know that I’m thinking about you.

 

I saw this Instagram post on Thanksgiving and it hit me hard, especially the caption, which I will just copy below:

Thanksgiving can be the hardest holiday of the bunch. It’s centered on community and gratitude and all of it seems to highlight the empty place at the table.

[…] Gratitude gets presented to grieving folks as a cure for their ills: “At least you had them for as long as you did. Be thankful for the memories.” Parents grieving the death of a child are often told to be thankful for their remaining children. None of this is helpful. Gratitude and grief don’t cancel each other out, they sit side by side.⁣
⁣
There are ways to celebrate and acknowledge the holiday that don’t unintentionally make things worse. It’s far more helpful to find gratitude for things that help us survive, that give us even a bit of comfort.⁣
⁣
There are so many things in this life to be thankful for. For example, “I am so glad for the Off button on my phone. Thank you, technology, for creating this bubble of peace and silence around me.” Or, “I’m thankful for the birds outside my window, for bringing me company and beauty today.”⁣
⁣
Finding things that companion you, exactly where you are, can be a great way to practice the theme of Thanksgiving.⁣
⁣
Always remember that you can choose to ignore any holiday, no matter what anyone else says.⁣

 

Yes to all of this. I love it when someone (a writer, a therapist, a friend, an Instagram account about grief) can help you put words around what you’re feeling.

 

It’s kind of a perfect storm right now for anxious people–Seasonal Affective Disorder is setting in, there’s so much uncertainty around the election, not to mention the ongoing pandemic that shows no sign of getting better. I found this quote in a book I’m rereading and now “bag of snakes” is my shorthand for Doc when I feel ready to jump out of my skin, which has been almost all the time now for the last couple weeks.

I have my lists of things to do to manage anxiety; things aren’t out of control. But they’ve all been a little harder to do lately–except “go to the gym” so I’ve been leaning into that. (And trying to not get into a cycle of anxiety about how risky it is while rona cases are spiking in my state, because the gym helps so much.)

This crappy gym meme really does sum it up for me:

So I’ll keep doing what works and break out the daylight simulating lamp, too. “This too shall pass.”

I was talking about the pandemic with my therapist and how no one on my team at work has said they’re having a hard time dealing with it. I’ve been having a hard time (feeling unfocused, feeling irritated, feeling like I want to just weep in a corner and then eat cake and buy fabric) and my therapist pointed out that my team members probably are, too, even if no one is talking about their feelings. So when I saw this article last week, I decided to share it in our team check-in….and lo and behold, every teammate said that they’d been feeling the same way and that things were hard. It was a good moment.

The article–Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful–is full of good info (who knew about surge capacity!) and it’s just really comforting to know that 1.) feeling like this is normal and 2.) everyone is feeling like this.

…people are having to live their lives without the support of so many systems that have partly or fully broken down, whether it’s schools, hospitals, churches, family support, or other systems that we relied on. We need to recognize that we’re grieving multiple losses while managing the ongoing impact of trauma and uncertainty. The malaise so many of us feel, a sort of disinterested boredom, is common in research on burnout…But other emotions accompany it: disappointment, anger, grief, sadness, exhaustion, stress, fear, anxiety—and no one can function at full capacity with all that going on.

Speaking of just sitting with your feelings, here are some nice words I found (from Morgan Harper Nichols‘ Instagram account, full of nice words):

Of course, this doesn’t get into the haunted house aspect of feeling your feelings, but I can speak from experience that that part does go away a little more every time you do it. And “take heart, breathe deep” are evergreen words of advice.

This is a wonderful recent advice column from Ask Polly–aka Heather Havrilesky–advising someone who just can’t be alone with their thoughts, who feels like they’re a sham, who can’t relax or find meaning.

“Feeling your feelings”–and learning to differentiate feelings and thoughts–has been ongoing work for me in therapy (to the point of keeping a journal where I had to start every entry with “I felt” to practice). I’m still working on it but have learned enough to see that Polly is spot on in her advice: The only way to “deal” with feelings is to feel them. I relate to this haunted house analogy HARD:

Even though [sitting with your feelings] might sound like walking straight into a haunted house and scaring the shit out of yourself for no reason, what you’ll find, when you turn on the lights, is a bunch of fake-looking automated ghosts running on car batteries. You’ve got to shine a flashlight on these wilted ghouls and see them for the self-created echoes of your underlying anxieties. Your anxieties are your mind’s way of trying to handle all of the feelings trapped inside your skin. You never let them out. The automated ghost is your irrational fear, the car battery is your anxiety, which is recharged whenever you try to take your feelings and stuff them inside your brain instead of just FEELING THEM, which would drain the energy there and keep the ghosts from dancing around.

When you feel your feelings, you turn your haunted house into a regular house. Feeling your sadness and your longing and your love for the people who matter to you is a way of dragging those fake ghosts out to the curb and stuffing them into the trash. Are you morose or depressed, or are you just sad sometimes? Is this a momentary manic feeling, or is it actual joy? When you pay attention to how you’re feeling, your thoughts slow down. You can focus.

 

The whole answer is wonderful–it was hard to quote just two grafs.