What A Pain In The Neck

If you would have told me three weeks ago – heck, even two weeks ago – that on what is normally my much-cherished work day at the hospital, I would instead be driving from park/outdoor space to park/outdoor space with my laptop in Arlington looking for an illicit place to set up some sort of mobile wi-fi, then looking for a bush to pee in after drinking my Venti Iced Latte that I waited 30 minutes in a parking lot for at the mandated Drive-Thru Only version of “America’s Third Place,” – all the while stiffly turning my head like Joan Cusack with her neckgear in the ’80’s totally un-PC film classic “Sixteen Candles” due a strained neck arising my appeasing my 40+-pound daughter in her insistence I carry her home from a far corner of our neighborhood yesterday – of course I would not have believed it. But here we are, world. I can only imagine the millions of other incredulous stories everyone would have if writing this sentence for themselves “If you would have told me three weeks ago…” Shocking. Stunning. Numbing. Still unbelievable. And more, much more, we are told is coming. It seems as if I write mainly as an outlet, I will post a blog entry because frankly, sitting here in a parked car on a residential street in Arlington, eyeing the last half hour of my childcare-covered free time, there is nothing else that I can do. Nothing that could perhaps be as therapeutically effective for me mentally than writing a blog post, trying to share and somehow make sense of this world as the foundation beneath us crumbles by the minute, upending one coping mechanism after another until the fractured material we are standing on is unrecognizably and alarmingly unstable. I’ve seen the comparisons of what we are going through to the formal stages of grief, and that resonates strongly with me. Last week, I went through denial, then anger, then bargaining – embarrassingly, I will admit that tears streamed down my face when the Starbucks barista informed me the chain would be closing indefinitely, THAT was my breaking point – followed by sadness and finally reached acceptance a week ago. The first few stages are occasionally and consistently bubbling up, but acceptance then gently pushes them back down. Acceptance is a good place, and a new one as well. As someone who has struggled with an anxiety disorder my whole life, one silver lining of all of this is certainly the shattering of the illusion of control we generally carry in our everyday lives. In a weird way, being forced to realize you have no control over so many aspects of life can bring a humbled – I try not to think if it as resigned – peace. I will still do my best to be there for my daughter, as she melts down and acts out worse than ever under the stress of all this. I will still try to support my husband as he fights to keep his job, a job he only just started but loves so much already. I even suspect I’m actually a profoundly better listener and spouse than I was a few weeks ago. I will still try to be there for my friends, so many of whom are in harm’s way because they, unlike me (I had to take a break from working in the hospital due to having asthma – another huge loss) work in healthcare. And I will read the stack of books that have been waiting years for me to get to them, and spend the time I always wanted to on writing. But I have a sense of calm, an eye of the storm within me, knowing that the world is not in my control and it never, ever was. I will do what I can do. No more, no less. For an anxiety-ridden perfectionist, that’s actually kind of miraculous. Stay safe, everyone.