If I were going to note a theme down in my COVID diary, it would be how my approach towards feelings have changed and morphed, often out of my control.
(Sidenote: I haven’t been keeping a COVID diary, in spite of it being encouraged for artsy-writey people and actually keeping a diary/journal on the regular anyways. Maybe it’s an offshoot of a rebellious streak, maybe it’s just laziness. I’ll let you, dear reader, decide.)
I find myself spending a lot of time at the poles of feeling lately – Too Much and Too Little. Sound familiar or am I the only one?
Too Much is standing on the beach and watching, in real time, a tsunami of emotion rearing up as it hits the beach as a solid wall of feeling. There’s no where to escape and no time to get there even if there was. All that’s left in that moment is the few seconds it takes to think “Oh, this probably is going to be rough” and then…
Too Little is a general feeling of numbness, like laying on your arm sleeping and being unable to do anything with it once you’re awake. Except that’s all of you.
One is a live wire, the other is a burnt out circuit. And there doesn’t seem to be much in between.
As someone who’s been wrestling with the idea of balance in life for the last couple years, this has been particularly hard to cope with. I think it’s mostly because a lot of it feels out of my control. There’s only so many levers that I can get my hands on, so many buttons and knobs that I can adjust to determine my input from the world. There’s knowing too much, but there’s also knowing too little – and neither of those extremes solves anything.
But it’s also a personal thing. It can come down to all the stuff that’s been sitting in my own personal emotional mulch pile. (How many metaphors will he use in this blog post ladies and gentlemen? Who knows! Stay tuned!)
Wish I had some great how-to point that’d cinch all this together and send you off with a 5-step program to fix your life. It’d sure as hell make things easier for the guy writing this. Maybe it’s enough for me to say this: I’m rooting for you. I’m rooting for all of us.