Pandemic Quirk #10: Compounding Disinterest

In normal times, life on Orcas Island entails bumping into all kinds of people throughout the day, having interesting and meaningful conversations, and living in uplifting community with one another.

If you’ve ever gone to church or studied the bible with other people, there’s a common phrase – a “God-shaped hole in your heart” that nothing else can fill.

If I’ve learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that there’s a humanity-shaped hole in my heart that nothing but people can fill. And if that hole remains empty for any longer than a few days or weeks, it will adversely spread into every other aspect of my life.

We’re now going on almost a year of isolation from one another. It’s like an ultramarathon with no end in sight – it’s the ultimate endurance event, and we’re all holding on as patiently as possible. Some out there are breaking.

It’s been going on for so long that I can even forget why I feel so strange; why I feel so unlike my usual self. It’s kind of like my period – it happens every single month, yet it can still sneak up on me and I have to say, “Oh yeah, that’s why I’m feeling what I’m feeling.”

If you’re feeling like you don’t recognize yourself sometimes, I thought I’d write this to remind you to be gentle with yourself. To remember, “Oh yeah, the pandemic is why I’m feeling what I’m feeling.”

When I say that I don’t recognize myself, what I mean in general is that my usual excitement for life has waned and my natural motivation for various activities is almost nonexistent. Here’s what I mean in particular…

I’ve always loved doing any kind of art, my whole life. I’m totally uninterested in art altogether now. Drawing, painting, collage, calligraphy, even the simple act of printing (I normally love the simple act of writing words on paper) – they all feel tedious. I’ve always loved studying the bible. I still study it, but it feels like I’m going through the motions and having a hard time accessing the usual depth I’m normally able to thoroughly enjoy. I usually dream of my next ambitions and take steps toward making them real. All of my dreams are in a bit of a holding pattern. Will the things I want to do be irrelevant once the world is ready for me to bring them to fruition? I love to think about traveling. Right now, even the incredible refundable tickets I see aren’t luring me to buy them. Oddly, even though family activities are the one area completely open to us, I’m not as interested in those either. Reading aloud to my kids has always been a love of mine. It’s not as enjoyable right now. Teaching my kids how to do things has been my life. Now I sometimes catch myself being irritable about it. At this point, I can’t even say I get much out of movies, eating, or any of the usual sensory delights.

I also don’t recognize my usual self when I look in the mirror. I could swear there’s something that’s changed in my face. I spend almost no time talking with others outside my family. Up to five or six hours a day can go by that I don’t see another human being. That’s a lot of time that I no longer spend chatting, smiling, laughing, and using facial expressions. In other words, the muscles in my face that also shape the way I look spend many hours of the day unengaged. When the face shifts from daily stints of smiling and lightheartedness to a full year of inactivity for large amounts of each day, I think it shows in the mirror. My smile looks different. My cheeks look different. My structure isn’t quite right. I don’t recognize the me I’ve always seen. What does that say about how those physiological changes are affecting the emotions? A smile is powerfully infectious, not only for others but I’m sure for the smiler’s body systems as well.

Going without the spark that humans bring to every aspect of life sure has its consequences on every system in the body, for which the descriptions above are evidence. Then add to that the multiple levels that can compound each other, if you’re not careful.

I’ve been emotionally stable during this strange time, and I’ve set my sights far ahead for the kind of endurance I’m going to need to muster. In other words, maybe I’ll be one of the last to get the vaccine; maybe we’ll be wearing masks globally for a long time still; maybe more pandemics will happen and it will be many years before normalcy returns; maybe normalcy the way we know it will never return. If I don’t think this way, I will not be as enduring as I would if I set my sights on spending this summer tanned and bubbly, exploring the sights in sun-kissed Tuscany.

But some life things can happen and compound each other, blowing past your prepared mindset and making you think, “Who am I? What is life?”

The compounding happens really fast when you lose yet one more thing on top of what you’re already coping with having lost. In one fell swoop last March, we lost our workplaces, our colleagues, our children’s ability to go to school, our family boundaries, our daily routines, our cherished moments of thinking time, our down time, our ability to visit family members far away, our gym time, our outlets for our passions, and our ability to commune with each other – to laugh, to cry, to hug, to snuggle, to sit on the couch together and talk for hours.

That’s a lot to lose all at once. So the loss of more, even seemingly minor things, here and there as time goes by can be heavy beyond what we can carry.

Take the simple concept of sunlight – more like the lack thereof. Here in the Northwest, we can go weeks and even months without daily sunlight. Grayness pervades, and the lack of Vitamin D already takes its emotional toll on the psyche regardless of a pandemic. January and February are the hardest months. As temperatures slowly rise, you can hope that sunshine will accompany them, but sometimes March, April, May, and even June can leave you rainy, moldy, and chipper-less. Add COVID’s woes to the mix and whoa – breathe in, breathe out.

Take the simple visual of empty streets. Winter is a time of quiet introversion here. You normally don’t see lots of moms running with babies in joggers or hordes of multi-sport athletes training up and down the hills for their upcoming races here. You’d think you would; it’s the perfect place to be athletic. No; sometimes you’re the only one out there. In these pandemic times, when my tank could be so easily filled by one little interaction on the street, sometimes another human being just doesn’t materialize. I have to make it happen by stopping in the store – guaranteed I’ll find a beating heart in there and an insignificant yet all-powerful interaction.

Take a little injury. I just had one. I was in bed for the better part of three weeks. I didn’t even see my own family members downstairs unless they came up to visit me. Life went from isolated to nearly alone for almost all of the daylight hours.

(These are tiny compared to the bigger losses happening – losing a loved one, losing a job, losing a hard-earned business, losing the ability to put food on the table, losing a home itself.)

No matter what the trigger, when you’re docked an emotional level beyond the heaviness you’ve already been dealt, it’s significant. It’s also all relative; what’s small for one person may be huge for another.

I don’t say all of this to add to the hardship out there. Quite the contrary. I say this because sometimes you just need to know you’re not alone in your emotions, no matter how small the triggers may be. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Be kind to yourself. Don’t judge yourself harshly. Acknowledge the inarticulatable weight of all of the elements the pandemic has removed from your life. There’s a lightness that accompanies acknowledgment.

Keep on rolling with the punches. Being flexible. Enjoying what can be enjoyed and making healthy choices in the meantime. It’s not your fault if you don’t have the usual oomph you normally have for the activities you normally love. Don’t let it tempt you to go negative about it. Just flow right now and love the people in your midst. Be gentle with yourself and gentle with them.

That final point is a good reminder for me too. Aside from forgetting why I feel so different in all aspects of life, I can also forget that every single person out there is also having their own compounding challenges. This is global, and a lot of people have it a thousand times harder than I do.

May you give grace to yourself and grace to your spouse, your parent, your child, your neighbor, your pastor, your children’s teachers, your employer, your employees, your doctor, your cashier, and every person you pass on the street hidden under a mask.

We may be on the same pandemic path, but we still haven’t walked in our fellow journeyman’s shoes. Perhaps the best thing we can do when we feel disjointed is think on our neighbor’s plight and pray for healing to enter their bones.

I can’t wait until the day I’m sitting elbow to elbow in a crowded theater, or walking through a crowded festival, or visiting a crowded city – maskless! I dare not dream when that will be, but that’s one dream that hasn’t lost its luster for me.