Just now, the sun is shining, and ABBA is playing though my speakers and I’m feeling light.
I’m trying to hold to all the good just now. It’s amazing how grateful one can become for seemingly simple pleasures that we mostly take for granted on the good days. Just this past week, I have thought how wonderful it is that we still have trash service.
I told my therapist that this is me firing on all cylinders- I have experienced my anxiety at this level exactly 3 times now- when Nick was in Iraq, when I lived through my divorce, and just now. It’s interesting, looking back at those times- Nick being in Iraq was the scariest time in my life. I can remember fighting back tears nearly every night as I drove home from work that year, promising myself that I would not allow myself to get accustomed to the idea that he was gone. I insisted to myself that I wouldn’t think of the house as mine, that I wouldn’t experience anything without him that came even close to joy. But, of course, I adjusted to him being gone because your body won’t allow you to live in such a heightened state of panic for long stretches of time.
I hold that thought now, and remind myself that eventually this (whatever this is) will become normal.
The girls and I have established a bit of a routine the past two weeks- everyday includes games (most especially endless rounds of Clue), a walk around the loop, and a movie (we take turns picking- Betsy is on a huge Brat Pack binge just now, which seems just about right and thank goodness because Felicity picks things like Angry Birds 2). Weekends are full of books and movies and cleaning-all in my wheelhouse.
Routines are my lifeblood. Adding in taking my temperature in the morning and watching Mike DeWine at 2 in the afternoon gives me some notion that I’m checking off the boxes of what I’m now responsible for.
Living with anxiety makes you question always if you are overreacting- after all, that is what anxiety is, being unable to parse out what is an actual worrisome event, and what is not. But this time I’m trying to lean into my anxiety, realizing that there is truly nothing that I can do but follow the advice of people trained in living through an epidemic, praying over bits I can’t control, and holding tight to the notion that eventually this will end.
Four years ago, no one could have convinced me that I would ever get over Nick leaving. I couldn’t imagine a day of not missing him. I couldn’t even imagine a day of not wishing that my life would just go back to what it used to be.
I don’t wish that ever now. My life as it is now is ten times better than my life ever, ever was in all of those years that I was (quite happily) married.
Holding those two contradictions- the notion that I adored being married to Nick Johnson and yet I am a better person divorced from him- those contradictions define who I am. If I have learned nothing else in the past four and a half years it is that your emotions are messy and complicated and they don’t always line up with reality.
Life just now is scary- I’m scared for my girls, for my parents, for the economy. I have read accounts of people who are sick that frighten me to my core. I worry for the doctors and nurses and what this could look like. I stress over politicians taking measures that I fear could be too little.
I could be wrong, of course. I pray that I am. In the meantime, I will be so grateful for what I have, and hold tight to the idea that we are all in this together.
