If there’s only one thing that we as a nation take away from this seemingly never-ending Covid-19 pandemic, I hope it’s the realization that we are not as divided as we seem. This virus doesn’t care who it infects, and although some communities and groups are more vulnerable than others, no one is guaranteed to not get it.

One important thing missing from the endless squabbling among politicians, citizens, and probably even dogs and cats at this point is understanding. We just don’t seem to get one another, and we don’t seem to have the patience to make the effort. It’s easier to assume we know who someone really is based on demographics or who they spend time with or which restaurants they frequent. We’re too busy and overwhelmed and exhausted and hooked on our electronic devices to really try to understand who people really are and why they believe the way they do.

But in a pandemic, do we really care who is supplying us with masks, or hand sanitizer, or the best intel on where to buy toilet paper? I doubt it. Are we going to fret over the political beliefs of those risking their lives to care for sick loved ones or keep us safe? Unlikely. We’re all just trying to get through this. That’s not hard to understand. We all, no matter what we believe or who we support, want the same things right now. We want for our families, our friends, and ourselves to be safe and healthy and able to meet financial obligations. It’s easier to remember that when we’re all trying to move the same mountain. I hope we can carry the memory of this time with us when we’ve gotten past this and returned our focus to moving our own little mountains.

Trying to force out

meaningful words when I have

just a few minutes

makes me cranky and

jumbles up my already

confused brain so kids

husband noise life just

stop for long as long as it

takes for me to get

my thoughts in order

no it won’t ever be long

enough but I like

pretending that one

day things might not be so hard

don’t we all sometimes?

I have no idea what I want to write about tonight, so I’ll just go on for a bit about this lovely coronavirus pandemic quarantine we’re having. It feels kind of strange, actually, not to write about it every day because it’s everywhere all the time. I have my half-dozen coronavirus websites that I check regularly throughout the day; it’s all that’s in the news; and truly, we can’t get away from it. The kids have been out of school since March 12, and our lives are now taking place in some surreal otherworld that seems both totally foreign and very familiar at the same time. Our house is the same, our food is the same, our cars are the same, our friends and family are the same, and our days are even largely the same (at least for my husband and I, since we’ve worked at home for years), but the world doesn’t feel the same at all.

When we lived in Romania for fourteen months, I used to think about how much later, after we were back home and life was more normal, I would look back on our time there and it would seem surreal, like a dream. That’s the way I feel about this pandemic. Someday I’ll think about what a strange, hard time this was, but right now it’s just life. We’re all hanging on questions, mostly the same ones, no matter who we are–that feels both comforting and frightening. I generally try to remember to take life one day at a time and not get too ahead of myself, and, well, this pandemic has made that a lot easier. But I can’t help looking forward to the day when it’s difficult again.

Hey, knowing self (KS), what the hell is up? I’m just sitting in front of my monitor, staring at nothing, unable to make myself think. It feels like I have to swim through a pool of oatmeal to form a coherent thought–so much work, so exhausting. Why is it so hard to get my brain going? Why am I so unmotivated? There’s nothing objectively different about this day compared to others, so why do I feel like this today?

Well, ever-questioning self (EQS), it just doesn’t matter. There can be benefits to exploring why you feel the way you do, but the occasional bad day happens to everyone anyway, and you just have to get through it, do the best you can, and know that better days are coming. And you don’t have to feel guilty about an unproductive day, because all humans have those!

Okay, yeah, I guess, KS, but how many bad days are too many? How many bad days so other people have? Do I have an average number or more (I can’t possibly have fewer!)? I know other people have bad days, but their houses always look cleaner than mine, and they do the basic things that good people are supposed to do, like send thank-you cards for gifts, RSVP on time for parties, and put blinds or curtains on their windows within a reasonable time after moving in to their house. Why can’t I make myself do those basic things?

EQS, not everyone does those things, and it’s arguable that they’re basic, and they have nothing to do with being a good or bad person. You can’t do everything all the time, and no one’s perfect. Give yourself a break. All you can do is try to do the next right thing one day at a time.

You’re really annoying, you know that? Why can’t you just leave me to wallow in my self-pity and bad-day-ness?

Oh, EQS, you know why. That never ends well.

Oh yeah. OK, dammit, you’re right. KS, can you please stick around and keep reminding me of that?

Sure thing. I got your back.

I’ve feel like I’ve been writing a lot about fear, so I thought that today I should write about one of its most powerful antidotes: courage. Actually, that’s not quite right. Courage isn’t so much an antidote to fear as something that helps you live with and even use the fear for good. But courage doesn’t make fear go away.

When I was younger, I used to think, as many of us do, that having courage meant not being afraid anymore. That I had to wait to do things I was afraid of until they didn’t scare me anymore. Now I know that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. And I knew that for a long time before I started being able to show up, at least sometimes, for myself and others with courage. Because procrastination is fear’s close sibling. Yeah, I would say to myself, I know I need to be courageous and do that thing anyway even though I’m scared to, but I’m too busy today. I’ll wait until tomorrow. That’s fine, except for the pesky little fact that we do, of course, eventually run out of tomorrows, and we don’t ever know exactly when that will happen. Cliche, maybe, but nonetheless a hard truth that I think about a lot. (I’ll save that topic for a later post, though.) So, we’re left with a bit of a problem, then. What to do? Well, for a long time, I’ve believed that some of us (many of us?) only start pursuing our dreams when the fear of not pursuing them becomes greater than the fear of pursuing them. So we may indeed be able to put it off until tomorrow, again, but we can’t stand to do that anymore.

Courage doesn’t have to mean just doing the things you need to do to pursue your lifelong dream, though. Courage can take many forms. Sometimes it’s just surviving–getting through the day after the loss of a loved one or when you are in a deep depression or difficult situation. Sometimes it’s continuing to hope when you have no reason to (hoping doesn’t seem like it should be a scary thing to do, but it certainly can be). Sometimes it’s simply showing up despite not knowing what to do once there or whether you even should have showed up.

The realization of courage is a thing of beauty, like a work of art. Our lives are enriched and our spirits elevated by its display, and its brilliance radiates farther than we can know. We should never underestimate the power of courage to effect change, in ourselves and the world around us.

I worked in the yard for about two hours today, which I have done maybe one other time in my life. It was really satisfying. I pulled up weeds and weeds and weeds and cut down four small trees. Nothing makes you feel quite as powerful as taking down a tree. Tree, you think you’re so high and mighty? Well, check your attitude, because you’re going down! You may be three times taller than me, but I have a saw and you don’t. And you have no opposable thumbs and you’re a little stiff in the joints, so even if you had a saw, too bad for you.

I didn’t say any of that to the tree. It did make me feel powerful to take down the trees, but I love trees, so what I actually did was apologize to the trees for cutting them down. I’m sure they appreciated that. Well, if you’re so sorry, you could, like, not kill us, they may have said.

We love nature, but on our terms, it seems. Yeah tree, I do like you and all, but over there, not here. You’re in the way here, okay, so no offense, but you have to go. Tree: Well, excuse me for being born in the wrong place. Nature shrugs it off, knowing it’s more powerful than we could ever be. We just play at dominion. Nature is the pro.

And now, more about fear–everyone’s favorite topic! If you don’t want to read about fear, you probably shouldn’t read this blog. I’m pretty sure it’ll come up a lot.

Yeah, so basically, I’ve let fear run my life. That’s starting to change, I think. I had to add the “I think” because one of the things I’m most afraid of is declaring something to be true, or real, or about to be true or real, or even potentially true or real. Because what if I’m wrong (see, there’s my annoying mate What If again [read post from two days ago for more on that mate])? Okay, let’s say I am wrong. Well, so what? I’m wrong. Why is the thought of being wrong so scary? Because people will think badly of me? Because I won’t be able to trust myself? Because my ego is that big?

I’m not sure why it’s so scary to be wrong, but I do know that it’s okay to be wrong. I know that even as I am afraid of it. One of the most frustrating things about being human is how we can know something in our heads but not know it in our hearts. We can know but not do, or not think we can do.

So one of the things I’ve been working a lot on is doing anyway. Doing even when it feels impossible, when I don’t know how to do it, when I don’t have time, when I might not do it perfectly. (Pro tip, that you probably already know but I’ll tell you anyway because reminders are good: You will never do anything perfectly. Perfect doesn’t exist.) Saying this is scary too, because what if I’m wrong? What if I’m not really working on it a lot? What if I stop doing scary things? What if I don’t have what it takes to do the really scary things? What if the scariness kills me?

Did I mention that I have an anxiety disorder? (I do know that to be true and real.) More to come on that. But just so I don’t leave you in too much suspense: the scariness has not, and will not ever, kill me. I know that to be true and real also.

I didn’t get a chance to write this morning (work deadline), so I’m squeezing in ten minutes tonight. I suppose I could’ve skipped it for one day, but I’m too scared to. I’m really bad at following through with things. All kinds of things. And I don’t know why. Sometimes it makes sense why I’m having trouble following through–writing is hard, cleaning the house is overwhelming, work is frustrating. But too much of the time, there seems to be no good reason why I’m not following through. And I start feeling guilt and shame. Over the years I’ve bought several presents for new babies of relatives and friends. Great, right? But I never sent them. One time I sent my friend a wedding present four years after her wedding. Four years! I kinda felt good after finally doing it, but I kinda just felt ridiculous and embarrassed. So what’s this buying-gifts-and-not-sending-them thing about? Hell if I know. It’s just not that hard to wrap stuff up and take it to the post office. And so now I have this stuff and every once in a while I come across it among all the clutter (yeah, I can’t seem to follow through with decluttering either) and I feel guilt and shame all over again.

I know we all have our issues, but for me, sometimes it’s easier to deal with them if I can see why I have them. The getting-gifts-mailed obstacles are invisible to me, so I keep running into them.

I’d like to introduce you to my two brainmates, What If and If Then (you may already know them–they tell me they have lots of clones). Really, it’d be more accurate to say I’d like to warn you about them. They seem to be closely related, and they’re definitely equally diabolical. They’ve been with me as long as I can remember, although as I’ve gotten older they’ve been louder and rowdier. Totally inconsiderate.

Their favorite activity is to team up and fill my head with scary, useless thoughts: What if I get the coronavirus and die? What if I write this and it’s horrible and people who read it think that I have no talent and they laugh at me? And this one is frequently recurring: What if I say the wrong thing to my friends and that causes them to not want to be my friend anymore? And What If can cause a special kind of terror if its cohort, Too-High Cortisol Level, is around. The two of them combine, get my body ramped up, and become Panic. Then What If is pretty much all I think about, and the thoughts generally end in misery or death: What If I can’t sleep? What If these feelings never go away? What if I’m miserable forever? What if this anxiety kills me?

If Then is not quite as evil, but still very annoying. If Then can cause me to question myself, other people, and my relationships: If I were a better person, then I would have more empathy for this person. If so-and-so loved me, then he/she would have talked to me longer. If I were closer with so-and-so, then we would share more intimate details about ourselves.

Not surprisingly, the loud, rude behavior of What If and If Then keep me from knowing another mate who’s always with me: The Present. This mate is where it’s at. It has all the real action, and from my limited experience, I’ve had a lovely time hanging out with it.

Now I have to go, because I’ve gone way over my fifteen minutes. So even though What If and If Then are trying to keep me here–What If I don’t say all this right and people don’t understand? What if people don’t like it because it’s silly? If I were a better writer, then I could say what I meant more exactly in this limited amount of time–I’m telling them to go piss off. They’ll sneak up on me again, as they love to do, but I’m getting better at ignoring them. They don’t like being ignored and tend go off and sulk in a corner.

And then, when it’s finally quiet, I remember, and I say, Hey Present, where you at?

Yesterday a friend sent me a video of Glennon Doyle’s morning meeting from a few days ago. The meeting’s about how to avoid deathbed regret. Glennon says the only way she knows to avoid it is to try to avoid bedtime regret. When she was first starting out writing, she told herself that she would write for an hour a day in her blog and then hit publish at the end of that hour, no matter what. So that’s my goal for the  next month. Except I’m aiming for just fifteen minutes. Because an hour ain’t happening, y’all. I am way too terrified to commit to an hour, alone with my brain and a kajillion words that I can choose from.

I’ve always wanted to write, and I have off and on for most of my life. But there’s been way more off than on. I want more on. Way more on. I’ve always known that I was a writer (and that is super scary to admit, because judgy people, and judgy me, and now I feel like I have to actually do it), but nonetheless I’ve spent a lot of time in my adult life trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I’m mostly a freelance copyeditor and a little bit a freelance writer. I fell into copyediting, though. It wasn’t really the plan. So I keep thinking, What am I really supposed to be doing with myself? Because it couldn’t be just writing. What kinds of stuff am I supposed to write? How will I find the time to write? I can’t make a living off of writing? I mean, what the hell, it’s not like I’m going to be some sort of J. K. Rowling and make loads of money from my writing. So I keep questioning.

But what I know, on some level, on some days more than others, is that the answers to all my questions don’t really matter. I just have to write, no matter what else I do or don’t do. As if I wasn’t already sure that I’m supposed to be a writer, Glennon said that you know you’re a writer if you question whether or not you should be a writer and if you’re jealous of other writers. Check and check. I’ve tried waiting until I’m ready, but like with a lot of things in life, that doesn’t work. I just have to do it anyway. It won’t kill me. I never felt ready to have kids, but I knew I didn’t have forever to get that done, so we just had some kids, bam bam bam, and it was insane and I felt woefully unprepared and like I was failing all the time, but I am here, and my husband is still here, and the bam bam bams are still here. And we’re okay, and sometimes I even feel like the bam bam bams are wonderful creatures to behold. And I still feel like I’m failing a lot. But the kids love me anyway. So it can be with writing. My writing won’t ever love me, but I can forgive it for that. I can do it and that won’t kill me and I’ll probably get some satisfaction out of it, even though it won’t be perfect.

It’s been longer than fifteen minutes. I didn’t do it perfectly! I broke the rules! But I made up the rules! I can break them! Now I’ll hit publish. Bye-bye, bedtime regret.