January 3, 2022

The Old Year Broke Me

The old year broke me—it did! Which I should have seen coming. Scrolling back in my Instagram feed, I realize that I spent much of November overwhelmed by difficult emotions, mostly stress and sadness. While my own situation was pretty stable, I was feeling everything in the world so deeply, and then the advent of a new pandemic wave absolutely sent me over the edge. And not even the prospect of the wave itself, but everyone else’s perception of it. I saw a news headline at some point mid-December which was, “Holiday Health Advice from 150 Experts,” which pretty much summed it up for me, too many voices in my head. It began to feel like everybody’s Instagram stories were yelling at me, and there was so much doom, which I suppose some people felt was informative, but in my fragile state I interpreted it all as, “We’re all going to die.” It felt like, I told my husband, there was an asteroid heading straight for me. I was having panic attacks, spending nights mostly awake in abject terror that the airplane flying over my house was in fact end times. One day, coming out of the gym, I caught a glimpse of the 24 hour news channel that absolutely destroyed me. My panicked responses were just like I’d been in the first wave of the pandemic, which was SO ANNOYING because I’d already looked back and realized how useless and idiotic my reactions to the crisis had been. AND NOW I WAS DOING IT AGAIN!

Except I didn’t. I called my doctor, after dropping my daughter off at the bus stop and walking up Major Street weeping, the same way I’d wept 12 years previous when that same daughter was born and I was sure I didn’t have Post-Partum Depression and it was just that everything was awful, but only now I understood that it wasn’t that simple. That everything might be awful, but that there’s still no reason to be crying like that, to have to bear the load this way. That maybe the feelings and chemicals rushing through my body have far less of a connection to what’s actually going on in the world, even if those things are hard, than I really understand. No, I surrendered, because I absolutely couldn’t do this. “I just want to be put into a coma for the next three months,” I kept saying, which at the time I thought seemed perfectly reasonable.

I couldn’t have timed it better. (Look at me, optimizing my mental health breakdown, whee!). I put on a pair of trackpants and a sweatshirt, and leaned right into cozytown. The daily toll of worrying about school outbreaks was getting to me, but we made it to the end, and the world seemed to be shutting down a bit just as I kind of needed it to. I finished up my work for the year. I started my holiday reading, and decided that our holiday television indulgence would be Ted Lasso, instead of the bleak murder mystery I’d been gunning for. I got a prescription for Lorazapam, to use as needed, and it helped so much, and then my friend Kate helped connect me with a therapist colleague who even managed to fit me in for a session before her own holidays began, and all of this—as well of the quiet of Christmas, reading When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodran, and disconnecting from all those too many voices—helped me so much to feel stable and safer again, though the process of finding balance will be, of course, ongoing.

So that was my December, and it’s all been very intense, and also illuminating, and I am grateful to have so many new tools in my belt as we head into what will no doubt be a winter of pandemic challenges (my pool reopened today and i got to go swimming this morning before it closed again this afternoon due to new provincial restrictions, which include a delay of in-person schooling, all of this probably for the best, but also disconcerting, because there is no careful planning involved, instead it’s like somebody shooting darts with their eyes shut).

In the weeks ahead, I am intent on working on the nature of just being, even in more challenging moments, instead of being overwhelmed by anger and judgment, right and wrong, good or bad. I also want to do better at keeping everyone else’s voices, thoughts, rage and anxieties out of my head. Because Instragram, which was the last social medium that brought me pleasure (though it still does, but omg, stop sharing screenshotted tweets. If I wanted to be on Twitter, I would be on Twitter, and I don’t!) was such a big trigger into my mental health spiral, I’ve also become really wary of of the platform and less excited about creating on it.

And so leaning into #BackToTheBlog is going to be a big part of my 2022 plan, I think. Writing stuff out on Instagram and elsewhere has been a huge part of me processing our experience those last few years, but I’m losing interest in process, or at least in what’s intended as the result of it. Something succinct, and conclusive, a revelation. Except I find myself in a moment where I don’t feel like I know anything at all, which is just fine I think, and I’m happy to sit with that unknowingness—as opposed to the wild speculation that delivered me nothing but anxiety and pain. And here on my blog, I think, is the ideal place to do this.

So, Happy New Year. (And really, I mean it!)