There is no way to pretend 2020 hasn’t been a hard year.
We have been hit from so many different angles with challenges. Many of us left a job in March thinking that we were going to return to end up working from home for over 9 months. Some people were laid off or furloughed from a job that they weren’t expecting to have to leave. Our normal lives basically imploded and now we have a new way to live.
Many of us are wearing masks daily, social distancing and quarantining from our loved ones. Some are working their job and trying to also home school their children. Production has slowed down in many industries. Companies are scrambling to figure out how to change or move forward in an uncertain world.
The Pandemic changed our way of life as we know it. As if that wasn’t enough, we simultaneously watched the political world implode with people being polarized. Civil unrest broke out in the form of protests and government officials were slow to respond to all of the swirling issues affecting daily life. We were also in the midst of a volatile election year.
With all that required attention, it’s nearly impossible to expect someone not to feel levels of anxiety, depression or other symptoms of trauma and rely on coping mechanisms.
We are still enduring a collective trauma and there is no confirmed end in sight.
However, we are embarking on a New Year. While the new year won’t end any of the situations we find ourselves in, it can mentally bring a change in mindset. It’s an opportunity to give yourself permission to leave some things behind from the past year.
Have Compassion for Yourself and Others
Change is hard enough. Changing your entire way of life without your consent is very difficult. Prolonged resistant change is extremely difficult. Even if you accept that this is what is required of you, it’s not something you chose for yourself. People are going to go through all types of emotions in order to deal with a Pandemic. If you weren’t alive in 1918, this is your first time going through anything like this. And, it’s the first time for everyone else as well. There is no way to predict how we will respond and it’s based on our individual experiences. Be kind to yourself and assume that others are trying to cope with their new set of circumstances.
Grieving is Normal
Many people are losing loved ones who weren’t previously sick. It can throw lives into chaos and bring on unexpected grief. Grief isn’t only resigned for people losing other people.
You can suffer grief for losing all types of things that weren’t expected to be lost. The loss of a job is the loss of identity. The canceling of events can cause grieving. You can simply grieve your life as it was. You can also grieve your solitude or autonomy if you find yourself with people more than usual. It’s different for each person, but it does require going through the stages of grief.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed a theory of the 5 stages of grief:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression/Sadness
- Acceptance
The stages aren’t linear. You can go through several then find yourself right back at Denial. People may go through them over and over again before getting to acceptance. There is no shame in seeking the help of a professional in the form of therapy if you are struggling through the stages.
Re-Evaluation
It’s hard not to re-evaluate what you were doing before your life was upended. It’s easy to sleep-walk through life when everything is good. But, when everything crumbles, we are often left to examine if we were really doing what made us happy.
We have been given new eyes to look at everything we were doing before this day and see if it was really working or was it a precariously, bandaged wound that always needed to be tended to. As a nation, our skeletons came tumbling out of the closet and exposed areas where we need to care more about one another.
Now is an excellent time to make changes as we move into another year.
If you are waiting for things to go back to the normal as you knew it before all of this happened, that world is gone. We are emerging into a different way of being. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing unless you cling to what was.
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Maybe this year, instead of resolutions, make declarations.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock