2020.
Where to begin?
As I begin to write this, I’m not sure if this is an extremely public journal entry or an extremely vulnerable blog post but here we go.
I heard someone say recently, “I don’t buy all the ‘we’ll come out better’ crap. I think God is faithful and makes good out of anything but I don’t buy the blanket statement that this is all turning out for good. People’s mental health and relationships are seriously injured.”
This really made me pause. We have a lot to grieve. Anyone in the world who has walked through this pandemic has a lot to grieve, in their own way and it would be a grave mistake not to do just that – grieve the losses. Mourn the expectations and hopes you had. Be honest with yourself, God, and others about disappointments.
I don’t know who, how, what, or why we were brainwashed about the “right” emotions in our culture but when did it become taboo to be honest when what you’re feeling isn’t a positive emotion? No one in this world only feels positive emotions. Even Jesus never asked us to hush up if we’re not talking about joy. Jesus was named the man of sorrows and was near to people when they grieved loss in scripture. Negative emotions are not a waste of time, they are a reminder that we are human, limited, and life comes with disappointments sometimes that shake us. To deny that is to reject the opportunity to be comforted by God and loved ones. To repress emotions or put pressure on others to stuff it down only leads to feelings of shame and isolation! So if denying negative emotions only leads to more negativity rather than producing positive emotions, why the heck are we still pretending we are okay when our entire world as we knew it crumbled in the last 8 months.
The beautiful thing about pain, disappointment, failure, and unfulfilled expectations is that we really can learn something about ourselves when we are honest about what we feel and why. We can learn that we treasure some things more than we should (idolatry) and that’s why it hurts so bad. We can learn that we are meant for more than the dream job opportunity that vanished with quarantine. We can learn that we are gifted in vessels of expression like writing, music, art, cooking. The things we never have “time” for. We can embrace the simple things of life when our fast pace world shatters. We can learn that being home all day every day makes us crazy with online classes or work and that we may be more extroverted than we thought. Some of us finally spent some time to ourselves and realized maybe we are actually introverts or realized that the fear of being alone has driven us to crazed busyness and relationship failure for too long. We can learn to trust God with our finances when work looks different or even absent.
What happens when we push through our new realities as if we are unfazed and nothing inside us is broken or hurting? We burn out. We begin to feel abandoned as we try to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and keep pushing through all on our own. We shut down and withdraw from loved ones. We lash out and say things we regret. We spend too much money on things we don’t need looking for satisfaction. We are in constant avoid mode. Avoidance does not foster growth, healthy relationships, or joy.
It would feel a little silly to write all about this and not do the very thing I’m talking about – which is being honest about the hard things and the loss in 2020.
I remember when our spring break was extended one week because of the spread of the virus. I was honestly mad because I had to buy a new planner because white out wouldn’t cover 5 classes’ worth of assignments being pushed back. I had no idea I’d still be doing online school for all of my summer and fall courses. I lost my sense of control over my time and space completely. I lost my job on campus.
At the very start of the pandemic when I came home, I heard things like “I’m worried about you and Paul. You may not have parents or grandparents by the end of this” like a broken record at the dinner table. I was terrified of having contact with anyone, terrified of my family dying if I did!
When rumors of a stay-at-home order hit, I scrambled with flustered ideas of what to do. I didn’t really believe that the virus would be that big of a deal yet still. Thinking of being trapped at home as what feels like being an only child when your only sibling that still lives at home is glued to xbox, I felt deep loneliness just thinking about being tied down hours on hours by myself as a huge extrovert. I knew I couldn’t go back to San Marcos either based on how much my friends were still hanging out like nothing happened and having roommates who would bring that contact home to me. Not if I wanted my family to live!
Before the stay-at-home order began, I thought of my friend and her family. Her family who had become a second family to me. I talked with my parents and her parents about the possibility of staying there with them for the lockdown because I knew how cautious they were and with 4 friends my age in the form of sisters, that would be socially healthy for me. 2 weeks turned into 2 months in Austin! The very beginning of the sense that this pandemic was a bigger deal than I originally thought.
When you do college in your college town with your college people in your own room and privacy for 3 years, having to “do college” in any other way is a major curveball. The loss of privacy and my own schedule was so hard for me. Even the loss of control over my diet. I ate healthy pretty consistently for about a year until quarantine hit and I wasn’t the one cooking anymore. This may sound totally silly and ungrateful! Believe me, as a broke college student I love food being provided and cooked for me! It is a gift. But as someone who struggles with self-esteem from time to time (like every human alive), controlling my diet and food intake was something that had fostered healthy and better self esteem for me for a long time, and then I lost a stable sense of self esteem of my body.
Living in Austin, I felt so welcomed and loved but comparison was driving me crazy. I constantly felt guilty for not being with my own family like other people were, feeling that they were disappointed or hurt that I didn’t stay in Tyler. I felt guilty for intruding on what could be the most special quality time for the family I was staying with if I wasn’t there. I had projections of what everyone felt toward me waging war in my mind all the time. No matter how welcomed I felt, there was a deep sense that I didn’t know where I belonged or “should” be. In San Marcos, I felt that my roommates felt unchosen or neglected when in reality I had such grave fear instilled in me about going back there. At home, some family members worried that I’d burden my friend’s parents by staying too long. Entering into someone else’s family with different communication patterns, conflict patterns, and general ways of dealing was a whirlwind for me. Playing the role of hija y hermana with family that wasn’t my blood, I never wanted to overstep or cross a boundary. No one made me feel the ways I did, but I did feel them and I didn’t know where to turn to let it all out because it felt like I was living a life that wasn’t really mine. I don’t know if you can relate to that. The entire pandemic felt like such a false reality, a dream, not real in any way especially at the beginning.
This is when I began to recognize my idolatry for comfort and control. It had been so long since I had operated as a family unit in any capacity more than coming home for the holidays and now as a young adult who has developed her own habits and patterns, I was participating in learning what it looked like to be a unit again. Through the loss of control, privacy, personal schedule, I gained flexibility and the true meaning of what it looks like to serve others before yourself. As it turns out, control and comfort doesn’t make anything “better” it just makes us feel a false sense of supreme authority over our lives that we don’t have anyway and being comfortable with what we know can hinder us from experiencing the things we don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, routines are so valuable! Learning to live differently through a new environment with different expectations is also valuable.
In the summer, I returned to Tyler for online school and it was a different world. In Austin, you get funny looks for not wearing a mask but when I came back to Tyler, I was stared at for wearing one. Not only that, it seemed that my home friends were constantly hanging out in large groups. So community at home felt unattainable. I had constant fomo but also an inner fear driving me rather than a pure desire for cautiousness. The dynamic of balancing time and wanting to please every family member as a child of divorced parents is truly a foreign concept that I believe only children of divorced parents will ever fully comprehend. So again with the feelings of guilt, I felt that at whatever house I was at, I was letting someone else down. I just could not escape this feeling. It’s really more simple than that. I was enrolled in two summer courses and I had a desk at Gran’s so I stayed there! I also had a companion all day every day who wanted to spend time with me. I had healthy food. Now, remember, healthy food is not a spoiled or picky thing for me, it is a self esteem thing. It was the environment that best suited my needs for the time, but I didn’t love my parents any less! I don’t think they felt that way either but as a child of divorced parents, it is so easy to feel like you are constantly trying to balance attention and time everywhere at once and that nothing is ever enough, eventually forgetting to give yourself what you need too.
Honestly though, things were pretty peachy around this time. Online classes kept my attention and my self esteem was solid with working out, eating healthy, and making good grades. I had an intimacy with God that I hadn’t felt in a while because I had time to choose Him every morning. It made sense to say no to hangouts because I lived with Gran who is 83 and you know, exposure. It made sense that I wasn’t in San Marcos because I was in Tyler. I still grieved a deep sense of loneliness. I missed spontaneity, my college friends, the routines I developed of movie nights and family dinner those two months in Austin. I missed community so much. Yet, every opportunity of being with friends seemed like a threat to security. I didn’t know how to reconcile these feelings at war with each other.
The hardest part of the pandemic for me was Spring and Fall. Spring, everything was new and there was so much we didn’t know, so much fear, change, newness. Summer, I was getting the hang of it and getting more into guitar, pilates, feeling like a diligent student. Plus, I turned 21 and could finally buy my own wine and not feel a little taboo every time I had a glass.
But Fall. Oh fall. I was returning to my San Marcos life a different person. Returning to a normalcy that wouldn’t be the same at all. Before classes started, only a handful of people were in town and only hung out with each other so it was never a second thought to be with people. We knew where everyone had been, with each other. Classes began and everyone moved back and half of the people were carrying on as if gatherings were no big deal and others were skiddish. The hardest part of fall semester in a pandemic for me was and is still the sense of divide between the friends who hang out and the friends who don’t. I mostly fall in the category of the friends who don’t. I felt so disconnected and also pretty misunderstood. It seemed that no one else had the same experience of fear and caution that I did except a handful. I wanted to see my friends, I wanted life to be normal, but for me it just wasn’t and I couldn’t pretend it was. I knew people who had gotten COVID and become horribly sick, cautious people who got sick. It was hard to trust anyone. Young Life was ramping back up but for months I couldn’t bring myself to hang out with girls in person because I felt like the virus was always in the air. When I began reaching out, so many of my high school friends weren’t allowed out for a really long time. I lost the sense of making a difference and doing ministry. I also felt like I was failing as a leader because some of my peers who were leaders didn’t have the same cautions I did.
Several times I began to feel more confident about hanging out with groups of friends only to find out that someone I came in contact with had COVID a few days later and that’ll really take away your sense of confidence in contact with people. I constantly thought of my family. I wanted to be able to come home and that meant being cautious of contact with people so I could see my family. Several family members have underlying conditions which whispers the horror of possible complications. Thank God for my roommates though. There couldn’t be a better season to live with four of your best friends, such a providential grace from God to me.
I learned so much about my ADHD, only through agonizing over wishing I was different and beginning to accept that my brain is different and be honest about how that makes me feel. Do you know how difficult it is for someone with ADHD to do online class every day?! To listen to a screen?! To do class work at your own pace with one collective due date instead of consistent spread out ones?! Even just the absence of taking the bus to campus, walking to classes, and going to the library takes such a physical stimulus away leaving more pent up energy and impulsivity. Do you know how hard it is to pay attention to zoom?! I missed due dates that were written in my planner months in advance. Something I had gotten so much better at over the last few years but it appeared I was just “slacking off” when I was still exerting the same amount of effort! I made all A’s the last 3 semesters but not this one. But you know what came of this? I started seeing a psychiatrist for the very first time. I started researching how ADHD affects other things like emotional dysregulation, boy did I see a lot of that in myself this semester. I’m still learning more about what ADHD as an adult and college student looks like for me and how to manage differently than other people. Even though I am learning about myself, it doesn’t cancel out how hard this was for me. Feeling stupid and incapable because education that used to be fostered and facilitated by professors was now on me. I used to have in person lectures over material and class discussions and examples, and now I only had my textbook and mini lecture over like 5 things in the entire chapter. Learning freaking intermediate Spanish through zoom? It was all a recipe for bad self esteem and feelings of “I can’t.” To someone who hasn’t experienced this learning disability, let me explain one thing. ADHD is identified as dysregulation of several central nervous system functions like information processing, inertia to begin tasks, attention, memory, focus, impulsivity, emotional rollercoasters, and deep feeling of inadequacy and disappointment in self. It is much more serious than people often think!
People in my life were dealing with depression and anxiety, sickness, trauma, death of loved ones. You can imagine that I followed the method of stuffing down my emotions for a while since mine didn’t seem severe enough to voice to loved ones who were experiencing “worse.” Like I said, not being honest about negative emotions only leads to shame and isolation.
I was missing out on what was supposed to be my senior year. All of us have missed out on what our year was supposed to be in some way. For me it should have been constant hangs with friends, roaming campus, going places without a mask. More than a few coffeeshops open. Fun young life clubs every week. Sending a text in a group chat inviting whoever to come over whenever and not thinking twice. Holiday parties, bachelorette watch parties, dinner parties. Church inside the dark high school gym with so many people surrounding you that you can’t hear your own voice. Church in person in general. Leaving the house multiple times a day, not multiple times a week.
I want so badly for life to snap back to normal my last semester in college next spring and regain my lost sense of normalcy. Oh to even have one last class on campus! I want to celebrate Christmas with my mom and stepdad and brother but they’re in quarantine. I want to have contact with my mom while I’m home. Even Christmas this year for me is not what I expected.
I’ve been reading Scott Erickson’s “honest advent” and it couldn’t be more validating and necessary. Through a year of loss and disappointment, we need real hope to cling to this Christmas season, not Christmas cheer of red and green lights and a tree but remembering that Jesus came into the world in the most vulnerable way, taking on human form, just to experience the pain we do to meet us in it.
I miss normal. I miss people. I miss how social life used to be. I miss talking with strangers. I want my senior year to go how it was supposed to. I won’t end on a positive “but” because that would defeat the purpose of the message – that negative emotions are part of the human experience and it is okay to say something sucks without adding “but.” Yes, good things come out of being honest about hurt and we learn about ourselves and that is a gift but it is only through the vulnerable work of naming disappointment and confessing how you truly feel, instead of what you think you “ought” to feel. I say work because it really does feel like it sometimes. Hope comes through suffering, not pretending. Validation and comfort comes through transparency, not giving people what you think they want to hear when they ask how you feel. Intimacy with God comes through facing the junk, not slapping “it is well” across it and forgetting about it.