Going stir-crazy yet?

I’m trying to stay upbeat. I really am. I take long walks every day if the weather is at all inviting. I video-chat/call/exchange texts with several friends almost every day. I enjoy living in my cozy nest of a house with a funny, sweet guy. Given that so many people are out of work and have bills piling up, I remind myself how lucky I am to have the mortgage paid off and Social Security hitting the checking account every month.

BUT. But there are days when my “how to remain upbeat” system crumps out on me.

Tuesday was one of those days. I did the early-morning grocery shop and pharmacy run, as safely as I could manage – wearing plastic gloves, keeping an appropriate distance, wiping down everything when I got home. (I thanked the grocery store people for being there, too. That felt good.) It must have used up my entire emotional capacity to do it, because afterwards I couldn’t get myself to do anything remotely useful or fun. I sat in my chair and watched the snow fall. Yeah, yeah, I admitted sourly, it’s pretty – in a somber way, It’s also heavy, gray, and depressing. It sends a shiver through me just looking at it.

I felt at sea, off balance, scattered. Between half-hearted bouts of Solitaire and Facebook, I silently groused. A grumbly monologue ran in recurrent loops inside my head. I’m supposed to be in ENGLAND this week. My hair is getting too long. I HATE walking in the piercing damp cold. I want to sit in the coffee shop and eat French toast! If the f**ing government had just been prepared with masks, tests, and a strategy . . . And on and on. I suspect many of you have your own version of this soliloquy. It sounds dull and whiny, even to me. Yet, like the phone, it’s so compelling.

Theoretically, I know how to fix that mood. I inherited chronic cyclic depression from my dad, so I have a practical plan for when the black restlessness and torpor descend. Years ago, I labeled the process NERM: Nancy’s Emergency Rescue Mode, a version of what we now call “radical self-care.” It’s pretty simple: I cut way down on the sugar, walk and stretch, write in my journal (including the gratitude and “three things I enjoyed yesterday” exercises), use the full-spectrum sun lamp for at least an hour on gray mornings, read books with heart (preferably while soaking in the bathtub), and talk honestly with people I trust.

The system works for me. Unfortunately, it does not work like a magic pill. Here are its downsides:
A) It does not take effect immediately.
B) It requires that I muster the will and energy to do it. Myself.
Often it takes me a few hours of being cranky and miserable before I can manage to pull myself together to start.

(Well, duh, some of you less neurotic people are saying now. What does she expect? That she’ll always feel upbeat? The short answer is, Yes – I was raised in the Midwest. By an energetic, extroverted mother. Enough said.)

One element of beginning NERM yesterday was checking out a new podcast series by Brene Brown. (Some of you no doubt know her work. If you don’t, check out her TED talk.) She led off with a topic perfect for her first major broadcast: FFTs – or F**king First Times. She described the way she wanted to “armor up,” to be cool, smooth, and super-professional, as she began this new project. Instead she chose to stay transparently awkward and vulnerable. (The podcast was, in fact, charmingly clunky.) But she talked, too, about teachers who are doing remote learning for the first time and parents who have kids at home all day and no experience with home-schooling. She mentioned the many unwelcome things we’re learning these days: wearing gloves, keeping a distance, surviving day after day at home. (I would add Zoom. And surgeons who are retraining to use respirators . .)

It’s worth listening to the podcast for yourselves. In case you don’t have forty minutes for that, here are her three big recommendations for dealing with FFTs.

First, name what’s going on. It’s your first time to ___________ [insert whatever aspect of this situation is really hard for you]. That normalizes it: of course you’re feeling frustrated, impatient, weird, exposed, and pissed off. That’s what it’s like to do something new and difficult.

Second, put it in perspective. This experience, these feelings – they’ll pass. It won’t always be this hard. We don’t suck at everything. We learned to drive. (We learned to drive a stick-shift. We learned to drive in the snow.) We learned to cook a meal, speak a foreign language, hook up the TV to Roku, run a meeting. We did them badly at first; now we do them well. We do them so well, in fact, that we tend to forget how hard they were to learn.

Third, reality-check your expectations. Nobody crushes anything the first time. It’s going to take longer than you hope, be more chaotic and frustrating than you expect. Some of your early choices will not work. That’s not a failure; it’s a learning curve. You’ll change them next time.

As we all do “global pandemic” for the first time, it’s useful to work through those three steps consciously. (For me, the hard bit is to keep reality-checking my expectations. I have to accept that I will be drifty, compulsive, restless, and out of sorts for periods of time. That’s just the weather of my mind.) Like my Emergency Rescue Mode, Brown’s three steps provide a practical, rational plan to manage tough times and tough emotions. And also like NERM, they’re not a magic pill.

The closest thing to a magic pill for me is a short exercise taught me years ago by a fabulous therapist. It’s basically an easy form of meditation/mindfulness for those of us who get too caught up in our heads (especially for those of us for whom paying attention to the breath makes us self-conscious and even more tense). It goes like this: sit in a comfortable place and look at the world for five minutes. That’s it. Just look – at anything. But really look. I try to look like a painter looks – for details, for colors – but there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules about it. Whatever works for you, you do.

Facile dictu, difficile factu – easy to say, hard to do. It usually takes me a couple of tries to get myself settled down enough, but it works. My breathing deepens; my mind unkinks. Often, that’s all I need to shift mode. Suddenly I know the next smart thing to do. Even better, it doesn’t seem that hard to begin.

Luckily, these strange days have their bright spots. I’m loving seeing people’s puzzles on Facebook, hearing about them helping their grandchildren with Spanish homework via a video interface, admiring the paintings they’ve done, listening to the beautiful music created remotely from all over the world, seeing neighbors eating dinner six feet apart on a cul-de-sac. I love encountering family groups out on the bike path together and talking with neighbors from a respectful distance as we pass each other on the street. I find it amusing and sweet that my step-kids are checking up on us oldsters as though they were the parents.

We’re getting through this — apart but together in spirit. We’re doing it for all of us. It’s difficult, but it’s also f**ing beautiful.