Ostensibly, we are out of the pandemic, and we hear a lot of people say oh, that was the past. In our clients and friends and people around us we hear voices, feeling like they need to return to normal because the pandemic has passed. A part of us doesn’t want to think about the pandemic, but reflective practice is so core to who we are and how we live our lives, and encouraging other folks to do that is important to us. So, we’re going to role model it even though it feels kind of hard sometimes to think back to those challenging times.
On our end, we don’t look back on it with regret. We chat about it with each other when we have coffee or when we are working together or driving places. But, reflecting on it together to share with an audience outside of ourselves crystallises some of the connections between what we value, who we see ourselves to be, and what was revealed during the pandemic, and synthesise it for ourselves. Now that it is over, what’s still the same and different? Before we even explore that question, it is an exercise for ourselves to try to picture and remember the pandemic, the experience of it, and to get back in touch with those feelings.
How We Learned to Feel
For me, Dannielle, the deafening silence while being alone in my workspace has become a core memory. Equally, it is the isolation felt when I had to go out in public, for groceries or to the drugstore; the sense of people wanting to stay away from me impacted the already strange and traumatic feelings I carry day to day about thinking that people don’t want to be around me. When people were masked and wary of touch, it added a distance that even my rational understanding behind the reason found difficult to process, a feeling only amplified when people were frugal with acknowledging my presence, something that was triggering to deal with.
I heard varied experiences from my clients around the pandemic, particularly my adoption clients who were already struggling with issues of feeling isolated, rejected, or plain disconnected and displaced. Navigating that with the need to be in lockdown was particularly difficult, and it surfaced in strange and new kinds of inner turmoil, especially for parents overcome with new behaviours they saw in their kids.
I acknowledge that many people struggled way more than I did, and yet just like everybody else, I did not enjoy the threat of doom that came with not knowing. It added to the strain of navigating harsh adjustments within the house – teenagers unable to go out, my partner not knowing how to work remotely at the time, and having to self-reflect in a way I had never done in my life up till that point.
But all of it faded away in my office. It allowed me to turn inward in a way that was freeing because I had nothing else to do but self-reflect and become more forgiving about my life story than ever before. It was a stellar positive in a sea of negativity, the ability to weigh all my good and bad experiences and put them in the right context in direct contrast to the experience of feeling rejection and otherness outside, amplified by the pandemic. It helped me put the tough and traumatic chapters of my life in their proper slot on the bookshelf, and I could look back to the entirety of my past and realise that I got through all of those. I learned that the fact that somebody with a grocery cart just looked at me wrong because I touched a can twice was no big deal, and that person wasn’t rejecting me, but rather rejecting the situation because they too were scared, and we were in this together.
How We Learned to Value
For me, Leslie, it was something that feels funny on the surface, but the truth underneath it isn’t. I was in physiotherapy at the time for a knee injury, and it would be the only outing for the week, the only place to go. For this one session, I decided to dress up, and the physiotherapist asked me where I was heading off after. I said nowhere, it was to come here. I had put on my work clothes, and makeup, brushed my hair, and wore shoes with intention. I seized the day for myself, living a glimpse of the normal that I knew before the pandemic, something that feels equally distant, even if elements of those times have returned to my present.
I also have a memory of profound gratitude for the values we picked for how we run our household of five family members, which included how we organised, what we cared about, and how we influenced each other – values that have stood the test of time. Having already been parenting from a values-based perspective leading into the pandemic, we weren’t stressed about what matters. We knew what mattered, in terms of creating a life for the kids at home all the time. With all the chaos of school, and the ups and downs, we knew what our values were. I felt deeply for families for whom the pandemic was the catalyst to come to terms with some of their values or changing some of their values and intentions.
As a family, we were in it together. At the time, my partner and I had one teenager, one kid entering teenage years, and one who was a few years old. They had their ways of thinking that we were trying to help figure out as they learned to grow their values while trying to navigate health and safety. Truth be told, the pandemic has profoundly shaped the values of the kids, either in reaction to what we did or taking some of the values that were the same and holding onto those even more dearly.
We wonder about the generational outcomes of kids growing up in the pandemic. Everyone had a version of the collective experience. We live with the acute understanding that although we were all in it, we weren’t all experiencing it the same. Coming from a place of privilege, it was important for us to see that for ourselves and remind the kids that something that is happening to everybody might not be affecting everyone the same.
How We Learned to Work
While many of us learned about our feelings during the pandemic, it was a learning curve to figure out how to work in a new way. For me, Leslie, some of the most cherished moments were with clients, especially kids where we had to radically adapt to the new environment. For some kids, the absurdity of the situation was quite liberating because they weren’t trying to learn in a space they didn’t fit into anyway.
I have a core memory of helping a high school student study for a math exam. He was in a lawn chair rooted in a snowbank and I was in my car with the heat on to fight the cold. I was going through concepts, and he was right outside my car window, as if it was the front of the classroom, free from the pressure to do anything but listen. He couldn’t write, not with the mitts, and not with the wind ready to blow his book away. All he did was tap into his superpower – to listen and learn, lesson after lesson, and it’s the kind of experience that stays with you.
I often reflect that, pandemic or not, we needed to create a space where he could learn. And this became a pattern stemming out of necessity. Another client, who was about seven years old at the time, worked with me a couple of times a day online. This arrangement worked best when the kid set up all their stuffies on the couch and taught the concepts to the stuffies together with me, moving around the house. It makes me think how limited we are when we are trying to create environments that we think are going to work for most people all at the same time. Does it work for everybody? What if we crowdsourced other ways to do it? Do we want to pretend we are teaching, or do we want people to learn? Those young people were given a kind of freedom within the restrictions by devising innovative ways for me to help them.
To me, Dannielle, the pandemic was an embodiment of a phrase my mom always says, ‘needs must.’ A lot of people were challenged to learn new ways. Kids had to learn how to not go to school – some loved it, others hated it, and all of them persevered through it. We learned how to get around the city, somehow without touching anything, how to communicate with each other without being in the same room, and how to support our kids through what’s the most painful socialisation period of their lives.
Who would have known that we would embrace so many ways of thinking and feeling and focus on our mental health because of the pandemic, something so horrible, through creative resilience in the face of despair? Yes, people were against the wall trying to figure out how to live their lives, keep the paychecks coming in, still stay sane and normal, and get on with life. But we excelled at creating a whole new way of what life can be. Everyone did. Whether we wanted to or not.
How We Learned About the Layers of Resilience
For me, Leslie, as a facilitator, I am there to design the process where a group needs to complete a task together by helping people get from A to B. Something I have noticed is that people are not as resilient as they were during the pandemic. While they had to adapt when their backs were against the wall, it is now hard to keep adapting even to the basic realities of life.
I hear people say things that sound like internal thoughts externalised. I see that people do not have the skills to re-adapt to the idea of what it means to be socialised around each other, allow space for one another, to not be sharp, short, or impatient. The resilience they had is spent, and it is an uphill challenge to orient their capacities once again.
I’ve watched Dannielle, especially when we’ve done some group work together, hold space for people who feel like they don’t want to. As opposed to catastrophizing that people don’t want to sit with their emotions, it becomes an act of saying well, what if we just said we get it? You don’t want to. You did great before. It was hard. It happens. You got through it. We’re here. We are naming it. We are holding space for it. Now that we’ve done that, can we take a breath and dip our toe ever so slightly in the well of resilience and see what we’ve got? This acknowledgement, we believe, is missing for many people. The failure to acknowledge what the pain was, of isolation, uncertainty, fear, is impacting people’s ability to learn, to regulate, to have that resilience they need right at their fingertips.
For me, Dannielle, it is about people reaching a stage of developmental burnout. They figured out how to change radically, and they kept at it progressively, but not all people have the fortitude to keep up with the changes, and the mind seeks comfort, a chance to coast for the next few months or years, deservedly. At the same time, the experience of resilience in the face of great upheaval is a skill that we will always have at our fingertips, whenever the need arises. It doesn’t mean we need to be always alert and make it the new normal, but we can trust in ourselves to overcome the challenges because we have done it before. That’s how I look at it.
The magic I see Leslie do time and time again is when she unlocks the power of learning and resilience in our clients. It’s so much easier to bring them to the next issue, problem, challenge, curiosity, and open their mind, and work with them together. And then magically, the person, the child, the adult she is working with goes, oh, yeah, I can do this. And that’s my work too, dealing with emotional issues and traumas and just irritating things, helping people to understand that they dealt with it before. It was very painful. They survived it. And what can we learn from surviving? And now how can we apply that to the new situation?
Dannielle’s Reflections
The main lesson I learned from the pandemic is that I need to take time for self-reflection. But overall, self-reflection is not scary, and this is a lesson I take not only personally, but that I share with everyone. Leslie often catches me talking with people, and I say, okay, let’s just take a breath here, or let’s all collectively take a moment because we need to be in touch. I know I need to be more in touch with what’s going on internally. The next lesson I learned is that our human connection is more important than we ever imagined. And we all learned that the hard way, unfortunately through the pandemic.
Leslie’s Reflections
As a thinker and a doer, I realised the isolation of the pandemic was very challenging because I couldn’t carry out all my needs on my own. I realised the value of the places out in the world that helped me meet my own needs. Being left to my own devices during the pandemic, I now value those support systems even more than before because now I know that even if I can meet many of my needs, I can’t meet them all.
Two Chairs, Six Feet Apart, in a Garage in the Rain
Amidst all this reflection, during the pandemic, and thinking back now, we hold one fun little memory close to ourselves. We were tired of meeting online, so we made a little office space in the garage, with our chairs appropriately distanced, and we sat there in the pouring rain, cheering each other with our drinks six feet apart. And it was worth it. It allowed us to be optimists and see what’s most important to us – human connection.
Lessons from the Pandemic is part 1 of a two-part series centred around our pandemic experiences, particularly about our mental health.
