The Covid Paralysis

As I'm writing this, it's newly 2022. Two years ago, I was updating my then-partner nearly every morning about what the newest happenings were across the globe as reported by my CNN app.

Obviously, I had absolutely no idea what was about to happen. Back then, I was a different person, as we all were. I used denial to avoid confrontation or dealing with things until I was literally out of options. Whether that was doing my laundry, or apparently, mentally processing an international virus that would destroy my idea of life.

We all have opinions on masks, whether schools should be open, and the vaccines. We all have opinions, as we do with literally anything else that's ever happened.

I'm not here to tell you my opinion on anything political.

I'm not here to tell you to get vaccinated, or to tell you that Trump won the election, or that there's a secret ring of pedophilia running wild among America's "elite".

I just want to tell you about my own experience in these last two years, absolutely and brutally isolated from everything I knew to be true.

When I was a kid, I was the black sheep. In fact, I still am. An unpredictable tidal wave of meditations and boxed wine, barefoot walks and being too depressed to leave bed. I consist of a lot of overwhelming extremes, contradictions, and radical chaos. I compromised a lot of who I was in order to survive, to thrive, to connect, and to stop drawing so much damn attention to myself. Sometimes, being ordinary is a blessing when all you've known is a whispering audience while you're alone, center stage.

Anyways.

In 2017, I fell in love with someone who saw me so much to my core that it scared the living shit out of me. I was in the part of trauma where you are juuuust starting to wake up to the truth.

But, being me, I avoided it at all costs and numbed myself as much as possible.

Eventually I couldn't do that anymore. She started to know things about me by being around me, with me, seeing open my authentic self to the world. Things I hadn't chosen to tell her. Things I hadn't chosen to release. But in my mission to face my shit, to live more truthfully, to find a sense of self.. That meant other people would have to... see me.

In every imperfection, instinctual behavior, and random kitchen dance party. People would make their decisions about me based on who I really was. Based on things that I couldn't change. If people didn't like me, there was simply nothing I could do about it. They'd see me, in my raw cloak of open wounds and turn me away in a snow storm.

And I wouldn't be able to change cloaks. i wouldn't be able to take any of it back. To tell them it was all just a joke, while absorbing every part of their personality to ensure they liked me more and more as we spoke.

For someone who's had a personality to match every room locked and loaded, picking something and sticking with it meant.. rejection. It meant losing people. It meant risking everything, in essence, your life's work. To have absolutely nothing, other than solid ground to rebuild something you didn't have any blueprints for.

So I left. I left it all behind. There was this giant mess of preconceptions, pieces of my life that were mine but didn't actually belong to me. I had to get them out of the way.

I moved to Colorado in my 2013 Chevy sedan. Everything I brought could fit in that car. I spent three years saying no to everything that didn't make my heart light ablaze. I fell in love with yoga, with the wild, the earth, I found so many platonic soulmates. I formed meaningful connections where my humanness was accepted, nurtured, safe, challenged, and loved. So much fucking love.

Then 2020 happened. I was working at a start up that I loved more than I thought was possible. There was financial restructuring and I lost my job on Wednesday night after not doing a thing but working for months.

That was January. Australia was on fire, and Covid hadn't hit North America.

I had saved enough that I was alright, but I was eager to get back into a routine. I never filed for unemployment and I just kept applying for jobs, Then I got one, for a little bit better pay, doing technical things that I wasn't stoked about but I was grateful for the opportunity to grow.

They paid me my hourly rate for two weeks of training in March and let me go along with people who'd been there for decades, on a Wednesday morning the following week. I drank more Coors Light that day than I care to admit, tipping off by 11am following a 10am meeting.

My lease was ending in April. I'd planned to move so far away from my people to be close to this job, that no longer existed. After plans to move to my dream city had fallen through.

My then roommate and I sat on the kitchen counter drinking beers while watching our food cook on the stove between us one night.

He told me about the time he'd moved home from Colorado. And how it absolutely assured him he wanted to come back and never leave. The idea of doing that broke my heart. The idea of leaving the life I actually loved. The life and people who actually made me happy.

I spent the summer in my parents house that I'd never lived in with my brother who I barely knew and my two cats. We day drank by the pool and I did everything I could to stay sane.

My life is built into schedules, routines, habits and hobbies, reliable, consistent people, and predictable sturdy infrastructure. This is all to keep my mental health...healthy.

I know what works and I know what doesn't, and the thing that doesn't is chaos. Is unpredictability. It's loud noises that have no obvious source and not seeing my friends four times a week for sunset walks that light my soul up. It's missing people who feel like home. It's hating my job.

It's feeling disconnected, isolated, and purposeless.

For me, aliveness is directly related to integration. To being a part of the machine.

I spent less than six months at my parents. I was antsy. I felt like I'd gone backwards. I was spending time with high school friends and we'd all gone different ways. Trying to hold onto something that was evolving into new places. As much love as I had for those friends. I hated being reminded of my past. The hard shit. The versions of myself I didn't recognize or care to remember.

The girl I'm so grateful for. The girl I'd be nothing without. The girl who walked so I could dance.

The girl I did not want to become, again.

I started looking to move, for jobs, for places I could rebuild my universe. I spent my days that summer blocking out tasks between the hours of 9 to 5. Job hunting. Working on a course I'd enrolled in. Meditating. Working out in the sun.

Once 5 rolled around, I could go outside to join the Covid variation of a pool party.

I wanted to move home. To return my soul to where it belonged. To the people who facilitated my healing. To the mountains that facilitated my sanity. It seemed really far away. It felt like I had a lot of work to get myself back across the country, this time with animals, more objects, and a saturated stubbornness that prevented me from asking for help.

So I looked locally. A beginning step to movement, I told myself.

However many emails later, I ended up working in retail in a pandemic, in a small city in Connecticut.

I started dating someone who triggered so many unhealed wounds that I couldn't keep my head on straight. For the first six months or so that I was there, I could not seem to find myself a way to stand on two feet. To feel the sun on my skin.

Walks to the coffee shop down the street once again felt like mental health must dos, sanity chores, instead of beautiful experiences of life.

The winter was cold. I worked in our extra bedroom. Eventually I was working later in the day, sleeping all morning, and struggling to not work through my unpaid break every single day.

I had become the must dos again. The things that paid my bills, the things I was too scared to lose. So I left again. And I found my way to a support system beyond anything I could explain in words.

And so through the isolation, the depression, the struggle to do the dishes, I had finally found someone to help fill in the gaps. Someone with a kind hand to hold me accountable to human interaction on days where lying in bed seemed the only option.

I found myself having anxiety attacks when his family helped us, guilt ridden from an independence driven past. I grew into love. I found all the places too sensitive to the touch, impossible to reach on your own, rough with scabs and sores.. and I nurtured them gently over time. And I continued to heal.

And I broke. And I cried. And I dissociated more than I could count. Leaving the house became impossible. I ordered take out most of the time. I couldn't sit on the couch because the added step to inevitably get back to bed didn't make any sense.

And so I sat, in this tiny apartment near some incredible food, art, and life to be lived.

I sat here incapable of moving. It took days of planning to go to a yoga class.

Time stopped existing. I would wake up from bed at 9:50 and roll into the office for a 10am start time. I'd wear the same clothes for three days and lose track of the last time i washed my hair.

No one had seen me in months, so who cares?

I slipped into a depression. Obviously. I couldn't get myself to the DMV, the doctor. I started having serious abdominal pain that landed me in the ER. I took so many Advil I should have a discount code.

I used to avoid Advil. I hated how I'd eventually take it too often and then end up feeling light headed all the time. I was convinced my blood was permanently thinner.

I started having body aches, nightmares, migraines, I lost all my muscle mass. Staring at old photos from the days I'd debate which protein was better with my lifting friends.

Even as I recall these memories, there is no timeline attached. It was just blurry. My partner planned a trip to Denver as a birthday gift. I collapsed into my own tequila filled tears when he told me. It was the moment I realized that as nonlinear as time felt, I would not be here forever. It was like wading while the ocean moved around me. Eventually I'd hit shore but everything would look the same for eons until only moments before. A dark sky that brought boats by without any room left to board.

It was just me, trying to force myself to do the things I used to love, until one day I felt like a person again.

And so, here we are.

It's January. And the future holds so many questions. But we are moving back to Colorado. We have tentative plans. And enough to do to fill the time.

So, I will be shopping for a new car, planning what to sell and pack, scheduling vet visits, and telling my people how much I love them. Every single day. Until then.

I do not know what the lesson is here. Perhaps faith. Perhaps trust. Perhaps I did the best I could but there's a lot to learn for next time I'm so fucking isolated I can't stop crying.

I anticipate reflecting on how staying with myself, forced to look in the mirror every day, broke me and rebuilt me more times than I can count.

As I look to moving my life back to the places and things that feel meaningful, I am so grateful to have been in this pressure cooker for the last two years. For who I've devoted to becoming. For who I've grown to. For how I've healed.

But I am so, so ready to move into the light. The days where hugs are routine and laughter is not echoed against bare walls.

I am hopeful, happy, healing, humbled. Forever.