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Notes on caring for yourself in a lockdown

Today in Boston everything feels different. The city is slowly drawing to a close. Schools are closing. Colleges are sending (or have already sent) students home for the rest of the semester as campuses empty out. The grocery stores are bare of eggs and milk and anything canned or frozen. 

Today in Boston everything feels normal. No one I know is sick. Our case totals of COVID-19 are growing, but so far the numbers remain small. Access to testing is still very limited so there may be many more cases that we do not know about, but for now the official totals are reassuring. The state of Massachusetts has not yet recorded its first death from COVID-19, which is also reassuring.

Today I am settling in for the long haul. I have been instructed to work from home as much as possible in the coming weeks and have no plans to return to the office for the foreseeable future. Very happily my job can be performed remotely and I have adequate paid sick leave and good health insurance so I am already so much luckier than so many here in Boston and around the world.

Today in Boston everything is okay, and yet I know that very soon it probably won’t be. An epidemic is a slow moving crisis that seems okay a while and then suddenly isn’t. Here in Boston we’re still waiting for that tipping point to arrive and until it does we won’t have a good idea how bad things are going to get. Right now the disease is spreading slowly and silently and in the absence of mass testing there’s really no way to know how far it has spread until people are gravely ill.

Today I’m finding myself restless. Perhaps today you are feeling restless, too. Perhaps your restlessness is an attempt to quell a thinly veiled sense of worry or panic. Perhaps mine is, too.

All of my routines have been upended. I won’t be going to ballet classes again for the foreseeable future. I won’t be going to restaurants or to the movies. I have had to choose which doctor’s appointments to keep and which to jettison as I try to balance the importance of keeping myself healthy in other ways with the risk of contracting COVID-19 and possibly spreading it to others.

Social distancing doesn’t require total isolation but it does mean far fewer contacts with people. I’m trimming my social circle back to just a couple of the most important people. Everyone else will be transitioned to digital-only interactions. Many of my loved ones are already remote, so we will be talking on the phone more often and caring for each other from a distance. 

Today I am grateful to live with a roommate who is also one of my dearest friends, rather than a quasi-stranger from Craigslist who I only vaguely tolerate. Living with a good friend feels like a blessing always, but especially in light of the weeks of close quarters that likely lie ahead of us.

I’m also grateful that modern technology makes it possible to connect with the people who matter to me remotely, so that we do not have to gather in person to feel a part of a community in quite the same way as was true before cell phones and the internet made it so much easier to be together from afar.

In just a few short days COVID-19 has changed life from normal to different. Today we are struggling to patch together new routines. We are trying to learn how to stay emotionally and physically healthy when we are trapped indoors in ways that we are not accustomed to. 

I too am struggling with these things and so I don’t pretend to have answers for you. The only thing I know is that it is okay to find this transition disorienting and to struggle to find a new equilibrium. It’s okay to feel restless and anxious and scared for our loved ones who are most at risk and sad for the trips that were cancelled and the activities that we have had to give up.

My plans for the coming weeks involve:

  • Enjoying as many remote interactions with people as I can.
  • Doubling down on my at home yoga practice, as well as adding other forms of at-home fitness to my daily routine. It’s really important for my wellbeing that I don’t just sit on the couch all day.
  • Deep cleaning the apartment, doing some mending, and otherwise getting to all the nagging chores that I always mean to do but never have time for.
  • Writing more — especially working more on my memoir, which I’ve been working my way through re-reading in preparation for beginning work on the second draft.
  • Reading more — I have a huge backlog of books on my kindle that are waiting for me so I’m excited to put a dent in my list.

If you’re looking for books to read while you’re in lockdown, here are some books I’ve read and loved in the past year: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, The Bear & The Nightingale by Katherine Arden, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.

Plus a few of the books I’m looking forward to reading while I’m stuck at home: The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

There are also some things I will be doing less of:

  • I’m limiting how much time I spend reading the news. I want to read enough to stay informed, but not enough to induce panic. I will also be limiting myself to just a few reputable sources: one source for local news and one or two national papers.
  • I’m limiting social media (especially Facebook). I won’t be pulling off of social media altogether because some of it is good for me. I get updates from loved ones in my extended network on social media and my women’s memoir writing circle has a group there which is lovely and nourishing. But also: I will be temporarily muting anyone who shares too many articles about coronavirus or otherwise fills my news feed with fear. 

Most of all, I’ll be trying to shape my life in a way that allows me to remain healthy and sane and well-rested so that I can do my part to keep everyone safe by staying home and continuing to do good work and checking in on my loved ones.

I share this list not because I think that these ideas will be exactly right for anyone else, but because we should all be making plans for a lockdown now. And while most of us have thought to stock up on toilet paper, food, disinfecting wipes, cold medicine, and any prescription medications, we have perhaps not thought about how we will need to reshape our routines in order to keep ourselves sane and healthy through the worst of the outbreak. 

But this is important work, too — much more important than refreshing the news one more time to see what the latest infection counts are.

In addition to taking care of myself, I am also going to be looking for ways to donate financial resources to those who will be most affected by the coronavirus. As businesses close there are going to be many in Massachusetts and around the world who won’t be able to make rent payments or afford groceries. The economic fallout of the shutdown is going to be devastating for so many. As someone who is lucky enough to have financial resources and to be earning a paycheck during the outbreak, I’m looking for ways to give back some of my surplus. If you know of or hear about organizations doing much needed relief work during the outbreak, please hit reply and send suggestions my way!

Wherever you are reading this, I hope that you are well and that you are safe and that you have food and shelter and health insurance and paid sick leave and all of the things that human beings deserve. And if you do not have those things and are frightened or scared then my heart goes out to you. If there’s any way that I can help, please hit reply and let me know. We all need each other more than ever right now — even as we remain socially distant and physically far apart.

Much love,
Jessica

You’re allowed to be a work in progress

As I sit here on the first day of 2020, amongst the hubbub of an internet that seems to be overflowing with people announcing their goals for the coming year, I find myself wanting to offer a counter-argument. 

Maybe January 1st is not the time to tear down and disavow everything you do not like about yourself. Maybe January 1st is not the time to cast those rejected pieces aside like so much garbage in the hopes that the dump truck will come to haul them away for good.

Maybe that approach was never going to work out the way you wanted it to. Maybe the cast off pieces of yourself were always going to come crawling back just about the time your resolutions started to slip and old habits began to creep back again.

Maybe it’s okay to be a work in progress. 

Maybe you are allowed to be just as messy and imperfect today as you were yesterday. Maybe the only thing that’s changed is that today you are just a little bit braver, just a little bit more prepared to admit to your flaws and to love yourself anyways.

Maybe the only intention you need for the new year is to become every day just a bit more of yourself. Just a little bit braver, just a little bit wiser, just a little bit more willing to speak the words you are afraid to say, and to disagree with the people whose opinions of you matter the most.

Maybe these are the only things you have ever really needed. And maybe casting off the parts of yourself that you could not be proud of only ever served to make you feel more dreadful about yourself, maybe it never helped to dislike those parts of you at all.

In 2019 I did a lot of things I’m proud of:

  • I finished the first draft of my memoir-in-progress. Finally. After literal years of failing.
  • I read 38 books after several years of really not reading much of substance or quality.
  • I walked 96 miles from start to finish of the West Highland Way in Scotland with a great friend.
  • My sister got married and I managed to pull off being her maid of honor despite being far outside of my comfort zone.
  • I nourished connections with old friends and new ones.
  • I navigated difficult conversations and found that sometimes relationships come out stronger on the other side.

The thing about 2019 was that I didn’t set out to do any of these things. Indeed, in 2019, as far as I remember I abdicated goals and intentions entirely because they seemed way of torturing myself for not yet being the person I knew that I could be (and therefore thought I should be), rather than being a healthy and productive way of motivating myself to make beneficial changes.

Because the first thing I know is that when it comes to making changes is this: it’s okay to not be ready yet. 

There’s a particularly uncomfortable place that we linger in — a liminal space between the moment when we understand that more is possible for us, and some future moment when we are finally brave enough to step through the doorway and to try on that new way of being out in the world where other people might see and hear and judge us.

There is a sacred pause in the process of becoming.

It is a pause that cannot be skipped or avoided. It must be lived fully because only by leaning into the discomfort of becoming will we ever find our way to the other side.

But also: how you navigate this liminal space matters more than anything else. 

Learning to love yourself in the space between knowing who you could be and actually having become that person, will always work better than trying to excise the parts of you that you do not like.

In the end there’s nothing special about the beginning of a new year (or a new decade). 

Which is why in 2020 I’m not planning to make any big changes. Instead, I’m planning to keep leaning into courage as much as I am able to — and to love myself as much as I can in the moments when my courage fails me and I fall short of being as brave as I hoped to be. 

There are of course, more tangible things I would like to do as well: to revise my memoir, to perhaps begin blogging again, to continue to focus on the health of the relationships in my life that matter most to me, and to make sure that life is as rich and fulfilling as possible.

But in the end what I will accomplish in 2020 is less important to me than the choices I will make. Will I choose to act in accordance with my deepest values? Will I be brave enough to use my voice? Will I allow myself to be truly seen by the people who matter to me the most?

What about you — what choices will you make in 2020?

In search of quiet

It’s a snow day here in Boston, which seems like the perfect time to write to you about quiet because a snow day always brings the most delicious hush to the city. People stay huddled up inside their homes and the silence is interrupted only by the howling of the winds and the thunderous scraping of the plows as they drive by…

The general bustle and lack of quiet is hands down my least favorite thing about living in the city. Those of you who are highly sensitive like me will probably understand my dismay at how difficult it is to shut out the world around you in the city (no amount of headphones or ear plugs is really sufficient in my experience).

But despite these challenges, my life seems likely to be tied to the city for a number of years still, and so I’ve been thinking about ways in which I can consciously create more quiet for myself in the city.

And if you don’t live in a city, or are not highly sensitive and are starting to wonder if this post is for you — here’s the thing. I believe that most of the time our circumstances are not entirely ideal.

Life doesn’t provide us with exactly all of the things we need in order to thrive.

I think it’s easy to look around at our lives and think, “If I just had an on-demand supply of peace and quiet, then life would be perfect…” (or whatever it is that you’re longing for).

But life is a complex optimization problem. Yes, I could move somewhere quieter — but then I might need to own a car and I really, really enjoy not needing to drive or find parking in Boston. Yes, I could move out of the city altogether — but then I might have to change my job and I like my job quite a bit these days and I don’t really want to give that up either.

So life is a series of compromises, which means that the best way forward lies in learning to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation — and learning to do this effectively means learning to harness your ability to look for creative solutions to the situations that trouble you.

For example, one of the paradoxical ways in which I am bringing more quiet into my life is by listening to more music.

On its surface this seems like a pure contradiction — but since I’m stuck hearing noise either way, one of the things I can do is I can try to take control of what noises I’m hearing. Using noise that has a neutral or positive effect on my mood to cover over less-pleasant noises (like the cars driving by outside or a coworker’s loud conversation), is actually really helpful.

And because my emotions are less jangly and aggravated when I’m not being disturbed by other people, I feel more quiet and grounded inside myself. By adding more of a specific kind of noise to my life I can actually increase the number of hours I experience a kind of quiet.

Trying to live the very best version of your life means looking for ways in which you can better all the parts that aren’t working for you until you’re doing everything in your power to maximize your happiness.

The truth that took me years to learn is that we have a shocking amount of control over how we experience our circumstances. By making small changes that move the needle just a little bit in the right direction we can dramatically improve our day-to-day experience.

I know this for sure because I used to be pretty unhappy with my circumstances, even just a few years ago. I really disliked living in the city and yearned for the small-town lifestyle I grew up with. I was dissatisfied with my job and I spent a long time seriously considering changing careers.

And then something magical happened.

I graduated from my life coach training program and I changed exactly nothing about my life (literally not a single detail), but I radically changed my beliefs and how I show up in the world.

I reclaimed a lot of my agency and discovered that I liked my circumstances quite a lot once I’d removed all the layers of suffering I’d layered in on top of the reality of how things were.

So you may not always be able to control your circumstances (I cannot magically call in a snow storm to bring me some peace and quiet whenever I need it…), but how you feel about the circumstances you find yourself in is surprisingly malleable.

Sometimes all it takes is a few small shifts in how you approach your life in order to make a really big difference in how you feel.

Because the truth as I know it, is that I am happiest when I am able to exercise my agency, my creativity, and my power to satisfy my needs and create the life I yearn for right here, right now.

My wish is that you might come to learn and wield this power, too.

So my question for you today is what do you need? What are you longing for? And how might you be able to create even the tiniest scrap of that thing in your life right here, right now? 

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. If there’s something you’re longing to create in your life but you’re struggling to actually do it, I’d like to invite you to consider the option of private coaching with me. While the concepts that lead us to freedom are in some sense universal, the barriers are often very individual and working privately with a coach can be the most effective way to overcome your unique barriers and see real results. If this interests you, click here to schedule a free conversation with me and learn more about what I offer my private clients.

Choosing to stay with the struggle

Here’s an often unwelcome, but ultimately unavoidable truth: sometimes life is just hard.

I feel like 2017 more than other years has been a hard year for me — as evidenced by the fact that I’ve barely written anything for this blog. But in some ways I can see that 2017, more than other years, has also been a really good year for me.

Yes, my health has been fragile at best and, yes, the daily news cycle has trampled my heart 3,000x over. But I’ve also mostly managed to stay reasonably cheerful and engaged in the face of adversity.

In some ways I consider this to have been my greatest triumph for 2017.

That life fell apart a bit and I didn’t spiral down into the depths of despair. That, slowly but surely, I’m learning to surf life’s sneaker waves instead of being bowled over by them.

Which isn’t to say that I never have days when everything seems like a mess and I can’t keep my tears to myself — because 2017 has definitely been enough to bring me to my knees from time to time. It’s just that the hard stuff hasn’t been what defines my experience.

I firmly believe that living this way is possible for all of us.

There’s no magic to it — and at the same time it’s still the most magical thing I know.

The secret is as simple as this: to the best of our ability, we choose to stay with the struggle.

This is a lesson I first learned on the meditation cushion, a lesson I first learned working with physical discomfort as chronic back pain often turned a simple meditation practice into an exercise in working with agony.

Sticking with the practice despite the discomfort turned out to be a useful training, even if I did not fully appreciate its value at the time.

The truth is that life is uncomfortable.

Reading the news breaks our hearts each morning. Disasters, big and small, plague our existence. We lose the people we love, we give our hearts away and have them thrown back in our face, we put everything we have into our dreams and fail anyway.

This truth is the very nature of what it means to be alive and human.

The only thing we get to control is our response to difficult circumstances.

Do we numb out and stuff our feelings down deep inside of us so that we don’t have to experience our own discomfort?

Do we lash out and blame others, pointing the finger anywhere but here, certain that our pain must be someone else’s fault?

Do we run — fleeing the job, the city, the marriage certain that if only we found the right job, city, or relationship that it would ease our discomfort and finally make us happy?

The truth, as best I know it, is that none of these strategies ever really work.

We can’t numb away our discomfort without numbing away our joy.

Blaming others brings no lasting peace because a part of the problem still in some way lies with us.

Running brings no escape because our demons follow us wherever we might flee.

The truth, as best I know it, is that lasting freedom comes only when we choose to stay with the discomfort, when we choose to stay with the struggle.

If I could wish one thing for you, it would be this: that you might have the strength and the courage to not abandon yourself in your moments of distress.

I believe that choosing to stay with yourself through the agonies of physical pain, illness, heartbreak, terror, or shame is the kindest thing you could ever do for yourself.

I believe that choosing to stay with ourselves through the storm is at its very essence the way we reclaim our true power.

Because when we practice living this way we develop the ingredients necessary for courage.

We develop the willingness to acknowledge that we are struggling, without judgement about whether or not it is reasonable for us to struggle.

We develop the capacity to engage with our difficult emotions instead of hiding, blaming, or running — to instead hold space for our struggle, to breathe with our difficulties, and to remember what it is to struggle and at the very same moment to feel safe.

We develop the capacity to bring our own kind attention to our hurts, to our heartbreaks, to our unmet needs. And in doing so, we learn that our own kind attention is the most basic ingredient of true healing.

We learn to engage with our struggle instead of trying desperately to escape from it and in doing so we develop the readiness, the skills we need to stand directly in the face of life’s fiercest winds and roughest seas and stand rooted in ourselves and ready — not to flee — but to transmute fear into aliveness as we laugh into the wind and the rain streams like tears down our cheeks.

It is my belief that this knowing is the essence of freedom and that, if you stand ready to face life’s fiercest storms, you stand ready for anything — awake, and alive, and firmly rooted in your power.

This is my wish for you.

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. If this post resonates with you but you aren’t quite sure how to really apply it, I’d like to invite you to consider the option of private coaching with me. While the concepts that lead us to freedom are in some sense universal, the barriers are often very individual and working privately with a coach can be the most effective way to overcome your unique barriers and see real results. If this interests you, click here to schedule a free conversation with me and learn more about what I offer my private clients.

The breakdown is also the breakthrough

Years ago at a college party someone remarked to me that drunk people walk like this: fine, fine, fine, fine — oh sh*t, falling. Parties were really never my scene, but that image stuck with me and I remember it to this day because it seemed like a really good metaphor.

I think for a lot of us life goes something like this: fine, fine, fine, fine — oh sh*t, falling apart.

I know it goes this way for me sometimes.

Sometimes that’s just the way things are. Sometimes life is unexpected and hard and we didn’t want it to be this way and then suddenly it is and we’re falling apart. Sometimes it’s all beyond our control.

But sometimes I think there’s something else at play — sometimes I think it’s the same for us as it is for the drunk person: we’re trying so hard to prove something (that we’re doing okay, that we’ve got this, that we’re fine, no really) that we don’t see our downfall coming until we’re landing on our face.

The truth is that pretending works for a while — right up to the point where I start to feel a just a little more confident, start to think that maybe this time I’m going to get away with it… And then it catches up with me and I trip spectacularly over how not-okay I’ve been all along.

I’ve been thinking about this recently in the context of chronic pain (but the lesson applies more generally) — because about a month ago I spent a week walking in Wales with a friend and experienced seven glorious, pain-free days and because my back wasn’t hurting and I was tired from walking, I actually slept. Which is to say that by the end of the week I actually felt kind of amazing.

It’s been a very long time since I felt amazing. So long that I had mostly forgotten what amazing feels like.

And then I came back to Boston and my back started hurting and I stopped sleeping well (the two go together for me), and all of a sudden there I was: tripping over how not-okay I was and fraying apart at my edges.

I’m not even sure that the last four weeks have been worse than “normal” — I think maybe it’s just me that’s changed. Because I’d forgotten what it was like to feel good, until suddenly I did.

In the end it doesn’t matter: the truth is simply that I am in need of a new “normal”, that I am no longer willing to push on as I have been.

Somewhere in the last four weeks my strength for fighting through being in pain ran out. All of my toughness disappeared on me.

This is what the breakdown looks like.

It’s not always loud and messy and tear-soaked. Sometimes it’s quiet and gentle.

But here’s the thing: I’ve fallen down and out and over enough times now to know that the breakdown can also be a really, really good thing.

Because reaching the end of your rope is always immediately and immensely clarifying.

You thought you still had some wiggle room, but then suddenly there it is: the end of your pretending leaves you with nowhere left to hide from your truth.

It’s terrifying and terrific: the breakdown is also the breakthrough. Or at least it can be if we’re willing to let it be both.

I used to be so afraid of falling apart that I never learned how to let the breakdown become the breakthrough. Whenever I felt myself falling apart, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I held on to anything I could reach as tightly as I could, to try and keep the pieces of myself together.

But in order to get to the breakthrough we have to stop pretending.

We have to hit the bottom and let ourselves shatter a little.

We have to stop to take a really good look around, instead of immediately getting up and heading on our way — hoping that no one noticed our stumble.

The breakthrough demands our curiosity, our willingness to linger, to take stock of what hurts and what’s broken and what are we no longer willing to put back together.

What is true for me today is this: I am no longer willing to be tough on pain.

What is true for you will inevitably be different. Your breakdown and your breakthrough are yours, and yours alone.

But you’ll know when you’ve found the truth you’re looking for because it will land in your body with a thump, an almost-visceral sensation that lies somewhere between a punch to the gut and an enormous sigh of relief.

And if you thought that getting to this knowing was the hard part, I have unfortunate news for you. The truth is that knowing is only the first step that makes the journey possible.

Insight without action is really just another form of hiding. And (because the truth is always a paradox…) there’s really nothing wrong with hiding.

It’s okay to be not-ready.

Just be honest with yourself that not-ready is where you’re at. Say: not today, but maybe someday — and let yourself sit with that.

Someday you’re going to be ready and, when you are, you’ll get to face the scariest part: the part where you take your knowing and you use it to reshape your life around some new principle you’ve never lived by before.

For me, today, that new principle is this: I want to be soft with pain. Wherever pain shows up I want to meet it with gentleness.

None of this will be easy. Change never is.

Our lives aren’t designed to accommodate the messiness of our human needs. 

To be soft with pain I’ll have to make changes at work and at home, I’ll have to have uncomfortable conversations with managers and untangle old habits to make space for new ways of being.

Being soft on pain demands that where pain shows up I will pull up a chair and give pain its very own seat at my table. It demands that I carve out new spaces in my life, to make room for pain to be present and to allow pain to have whatever it needs.

And the very worst part: I have no idea if any of this will be “worth it”. I have no guarantee that any of this will “work”.

After seven years of chronic pain, I live perpetually in a state of both really believing that not feeling this way is possible, and not really believing that any particular change will be the one that finally makes a difference. (I keep making them anyway, because you really never know…)

But what I do know is that I’m tired of fighting with pain and I can choose to put my weapons down.

The pain may or may not go away — but I can choose today to end the war.

Because today I am willing to admit that sometimes our strength lies not in our toughness but in our softness. In our willingness to lay down our arms and let what is true for us right now matter more than any story we might have about who, what, or how we are supposed to be.

At the end of the day, this is always the real breakthrough: the moment we choose to end our war with reality and turn instead toward allowing what is to shape us into the people we are ready to become.

Much love,
Jessica