This is hard.
Today I woke up with a lack of motivation. If I’m honest, this hasn’t happened to me since this whole isolation thing began in mid-March. But it was there today.
The lethargy.
The uncertainty.
The heaviness.
The meh.
For me, it’s likely a combination of both personal and professional challenges. Not the life or death kind, and certainly not the kind that our frontline workers are facing (bless them!).
But, it is still a noticeable shift in my conscious thinking and one that I know needs acknowledging. For better or for worse!
I know this because I talk about it all day long.
How if we ignore these stresses, these challenges, these inklings, we give them power – power to stifle us, power to halt our experiences, power to prevent us from being who we are. In this moment. In the now.
And who we are, who I am in this moment, is ok and it is enough.
It’s ok that today I didn’t get up at the crack of dawn ready to tackle the world like a beast. It’s ok that I’m worried about the future and all the uncertainty that sits in the air like a weighted blanket. It’s ok that as a mental health professional I don’t have all the answers and that I too, stumble and fall, regularly – and sometimes wonder if I’m truly able to walk the walk.
I find myself oscillating between two paradigms:
- that throughout history people have endured a thousand times worse than this current health crisis and survived, and in many cases thrived as a result; and
- that COVID-19 is a serious and significant pandemic that will likely change the way we experience the world moving forward.
It is here, between these two perspectives that I find myself with a choice.
A daily choice that must be consciously attended to with every waking thought (which I know undoubtably affects my non-waking thoughts).
Some days the choice is obvious: I need to be positive and encouraging, not only for my family but also for the clients I serve.
Other days, like today, the choice is less visceral and is hidden, deep in my psyche. It sits in the thoughts of yesterday and yearns for the simplicity of my younger years, ones that although far from perfect, were less weighted and frankly, easier.
The burden of knowing what I know as a psychologist is that these thoughts, feelings, and experiences are all part of it. They MUST be acknowledged with grace and embraced for what they are – which is real and raw and true.
That these experiences, however uncomfortable and heavy with fight, flight and freeze (sometimes simultaneously) are integral, in a roundabout way, to the self actualization I seek.
The funny thing is, in my attempt to have it all figured out, I have unknowingly restricted my own growth and potential. The same potential I ask others to find in themselves.
So today, in response to my current state, I have granted myself a break. A break from should-ing, and role model-ing and all-together-ing and have made the choice to just “be”.
And somewhere deep within the recesses of my soul I know this is ok, that it is necessary, in fact. And that in the end, I am exactly where I am supposed to be, uncertainty and all!