lie no. 38 | 04.17.20

I started sheltering in place super early—like, it was me, then San Francisco, followed by the states of California and New York. I couldn’t for the life of me understand, let alone articulate, why I was taking something I’d never experienced before so seriously.

[Ed. note: I tend to prefer the safety of sharing these insights into myself long after they’ve left the rearview mirror’s reflection, from a comfortable social distance of time and space, if you will. Hence why this story jumps around in time and place more than the NFL’s RedZone. Part of why that is? Sense-making takes time. You have to zoom in before you can zoom out. Otherwise you might miss capturing the big picture. One of the biggest dangers in design thinking, the type of research I practice, is jumping into solution mode too soon by assuming you already know the problem you’re trying to solve. There’s a temptation to treat the symptoms before making the diagnosis. Of course, in an emergency the need to act—to do something, to do anything—vastly outweighs the fear of getting false positives and negatives, of being wrong. After all, that’s usually where the biggest lessons live in the first place. All of which is to say, I may—and honestly very likely will—look back one day near or far and see something I missed here in the moment. And that’s OK. I’ve learned that people listen when I write. I’ve learned that every time I write, at least one other person looks up from their screen feeling a little less alone and a little more connected. I’ve also learned that wherever my writing takes me always turns out to be where I need to go, what I need to learn, in that moment, too—so that makes at least two of us feeling less alone and more connected. And if there’s ever been a time we’ve needed that, ‘tis the mother-fucking season, y’all. So, here goes.]

The fervor for which I followed my gut and took this virus so seriously so early on confounded me (and others).

I’ve never lived through a pandemic, at least not in this lifetime. I knew early on I wasn’t afraid of the virus, of getting sick.

I’d certainly prefer to avoid it out of sheer convenience and comfort, but that wasn’t driving my fear.

Nor was it the uncertainty of it all—part of practicing presence is about getting comfortable with not knowing.

So why then could I not for the life of me shake the nagging feeling I’d seen this movie before and know how it ends?

At first I chocked it up to anxiety and an over-active imagination. Those two—a real frick and frack—are the most notorious rabble-rousers in Rebeccaville. I mean, I can cook up a minimum of three different ways every single person I pass on the sidewalk could possibly harm me before we even get within six feet of one another—and that was back when we could get that close. And yet, I never stopped going for walks because the rational part of me knows I’m not in any actual danger. It’s not a real fear. The extra attention I pay and the extra vigilance I pack, on the other hand, is very real. What if anxiety’s gotten a bad wrap all these years—what if it’s actually a form of protection, what if it’s actually a superpower? Helluva plot twist that would be.

I pulled out of plans with friends in early March already [somehow?] knowing I was giving up what would be the last opportunity to do so for a long time. Part of me wished I could be as easy going as almost everyone else around me seemed to be.

On Friday the 13th—remember when a single day had the power to put people on edge?!—I let myself have a good cry and watched my tears turn to words as they hit the page. Matt flew to Florida for Spring Training the day before, which was the day after the NBA pulled the rip cord on its entire season on live TV, and this before and after metric for measuring time was quickly becoming my new metronome. I was worried about him, at the time less about his well-being and more about his impending grief for a loss that hadn’t yet happened—his last opportunity to see baseball live for a long time.

It was also my 14th day back from Amsterdam. Oh... heyyy, guilt. Girl, I barely recognized you! I didn’t notice I’d been counting the days somewhere in the back of my brain, monitoring myself for symptoms—not out of concern for myself, but out of concern for others.

Confusingly though, whenever I tried to explain who, exactly, I was worried about in what still wasn’t even yet considered a pandemic, what came out after family and friends included:

-postal workers I’d never actually met but had grown comforted by the routine of seeing regularly around the neighborhood over the years;

-a stranger on the street I’d recently helped out who knew a type of loss I’d never myself known who’d only just started picking himself up to start again;

-a ridiculously adorable little boy in Cambodia who threw baby powder on my face while we danced with reckless abandon outside of not his own family’s new home but that of his neighbors with the same joy had it been his own;

-the man in Indonesia who felt more like a Balinese big brother than a driver over the course of our week together;

-the twenty-something strangers I circled a medicine wheel in Sedona with;

-the Blackfeet Nation tribe of Browning, Montana, for reasons far too bizarre to summarize here;

-the other twenty-something strangers I sat with in an old monastery in upstate New York who helped me believe my stories were worth telling;

-the past-life healer who helped me learn how to go inside (no engraved invitation necessary!);

-the waiters in Amsterdam who refused to serve me what I wanted until I learned to use my voice to ask for it;

-the waiter in San Miguel who reminded me trust myself, to trust my knowing;

-the Midwestern shaman in Mexico who helped me learn to listen for and hear my own voice;

-the concierge in Hong Kong who never judged how I chose to spend my limited time, instead, always put his whole heart in service to help me spend it how I wanted, and for helping remind me it was mine to spend, after all;

-the stranger who slid into my DMs for the briefest of time to ask the briefest of questions: how was your day? In turn, helping me understand the power and value of human connection;

-and I’d be supremely remiss if I left out the stranger in Saratoga who misaddressed some emails and helped kickstart my education in the importance of interconnectedness—if only we would ever stop long enough to pay attention to it.

Well, OK. My worry for the whole world seemed like a good enough explanation to me for feeling like a constant Petri dish of paranoia and panic—it also made me feel more disconnected to those closest to me. It’s confusing to feel more connected out there than you do at home.

A few days passed and a push alert from an astrology app informed me, “[My] lust for the apocalypse needs to be examined.” 

Uh, come again? I flipped my phone over to hide the screen out of instinct, as if someone was going to see it and I’d be outed as a monster. I never did open that alert but I couldn’t shake its message. It was imprinted on my mind, maybe even branded across my forehead—because my iPhone stopped recognizing my face afterward. Sure, I could probably chock that up to the toll of quarantine life, or simply imperfect technology, but I knew there was more to it.

Last October, while riding a bus through a rural part of Cambodia I made this observation in my notebook:

“My iPhone does this funny thing when I travel abroad—it stops recognizing my fingerprint and I have to reset it. Could be because my hands have been inside my gloves all day in this heat, but it’s happened before at key moments and I don’t really believe in coincidences anymore. It happened atop Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, after I left the shaman’s office (?) in Mexico, on the tarmac after landing in Amsterdam, and now, after a day of construction here with Habitat. It’s as if my own unique marker changes shape ever so slightly beyond recognition. Figuratively this happens as well. I never go home the same person I was before I left, changed ever so slightly. The difference is my iPhone forces me to acknowledge and take the time to reset, meanwhile, I go right back to life as it was before, business as usual. I always end up frustrated and angry after I get back and things suddenly look different to me, rather than realizing I’m what’s changed. I’m the one seeing things differently than I did before.”

Last week I went up to my roof deck in need of a good privileged-white-woman cry in a move that had quickly become my new flight when I wanted to escape an old fight. As I laid there, my spine rebelling perpendicularly against the grain of the wood, gravity carrying the tears across my cheeks instead of down them, it hit me: I was back on that damn dock in The Bahamas. I was staring up at a sky full of stars—the same section of sky I used to have to get out from under to see beyond this part of the solar system.

While the world was all sing-songy about being alone together, I was pissed off. When I started self-isolating way back in January 2018, a month after quitting my job unexpectedly and turning my own world upside down, I’d done so alone alone.

Oh.

I’m not lusting for the pain and suffering of others or myself. I’m fearful for all the people being forced into stillness. Stillness is scary enough when entered into voluntarily. Stillness requires readiness, willingness and surrender. When I was finally ready to stop sitting in the stillness consuming me last year, I went out for a walk into the world—not to escape the stillness, but to surrender to it. In doing so, I found my way back home feeling more connected to the world around me than ever.

And I was right earlier, it is confusing to feel more connected out there than you do at home. What I got wrong—or misunderstood or forgot—is that I am home. I had seen this movie and did know how it ended: Whenever I abandon myself, I disconnect from those closest to me.

I spent the past couple years breaking open and grieving piece by piece of my life that no longer served me. I just never thought to stop and grieve the loss of the sum of those parts, my former self, the one I now saw reflecting back at me every where I looked. I’m not mourning the loss of normalcy. I’m craving a new normal.

I simply forgot to reset.

We’re taught to resist what we don’t like, what we don’t agree with. We’re taught that when we resist, we have the power to change—in spin classes, in marches, in society as a whole. What if we’ve been doing it all wrong? What if what we need right now isn’t to resist, but to reset?

What if we remembered what we already know? Fighting—ourselves, others, our institutions—isn’t helping us, it’s actually slowly killing us. Loving—ourselves, others who can actually love us back—might be the reset we all need. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I’m hoping my own reset this week might help me see it a bit more clearly and I hope you’ll follow along as I figure it out.