Covid-19 Anxiety-Trying to find the balance between More and Less

As a highly sensitive person and ambivert, my life has been a constant balance of trying to balance my desire to be conscientious and my need to have a lot of down time. Both great HSP qualities, but also ones that can cause stress. My pre-COVID-19 life felt stressed, anxious, and constantly on the go. While I recognize I had designed my life with less time commitments than most, the time commitments I did have, often left me exhausted and overwhelmed. I felt constantly “on the go”.

The time obligations that non-HSP’s make all the time can feel stressful, anxiety producing and overwhelming for those of us that are highly sensitive. For me, the time related deadlines of everyday life, like running the kids to the bus stop, getting to meetings on time, or having to be constantly aware of the family schedule…birthday parties, holiday cards, organizing house affairs, setting up house appointments: bug people, water people, home repairs, felt like balls that I was constantly dropping, watch as they roll down hill and splash into a pond…all while I am still trying to figure out if I should keep juggling or chase the ones I dropped.

In all fairness to my HSP side, some of this is probably because my family frequently ran late when I was a kid. We showed up late almost daily to school my entire childhood. The shame of walking in late, embarrassed with teacher comments of “Again” probably do not help with this issue. There is no one to blame for this, my young mother had 3, eventually 4 kids and although married, mostly functioned as a single parent, until she eventually became one.  With little help, I am surprised we only ran 15 minutes to a half hour late…I get it, especially as a mother in my adult years. However, running late has been a trigger my entire life, well not so much the running late, as the comments and judgements made when one is running late.  Somehow, running late generalized into not just late with places, but also those day to day commitments we all experience. GOD FORBID, I don’t get a card out in time. I beat myself up, and don’t bother sending it. I literally have Easter cards sitting here from two years ago…somewhere at least….

Image by @aronvisuals, running out of time

Then comes COVID-19. It forces me to take a step back and relax. My kids are no longer in school, the deadline then becomes moving from the bed to the couch and making sure they are online “on time”, if they can make it. If not, that is okay, you can watch the recording. When you show, even if you are not on time to a “Zoom” meeting, people are patient. Technical difficulties, internet issues, electronics acting up are all things we experience. Now, many of us working from home are juggling kids, animals, our jobs, and a multitude of other things that we have been juggling all along. However, suddenly, people are more patient. Pre COVID-19, if your kid popped into a meeting, it made the headlines. Now, your kid pops into a “zoom” meeting, it is kind of expected, people laugh and we move on. Here we are, all in the same storm, being more tolerant of what is happening in each other’s boat.

In some ways, COVID-19 has helped me be more patient with myself. In some ways if feels better. While I am having less physical interaction with the stay at home, I feel I am having more peaceful interactions. I am less stressed overall. Deadlines don’t feel so overwhelming. I am not in trauma reaction mode worried about getting places and doing things “right and on time.” I am still conscientious and working with ethics, but without the day to stresses and deadlines, I feel more relaxed. Without starting my day off with the bus time stress, the hustle and bustle of where I need to be, my world feels more relaxed. My time with others feels like more.

My state is in phase 2 of opening up. I am not ready yet. It’s not that I don’t want people to get back to work, I feel for my fellow people. I get the economic impact has been huge. It’s just, I AM NOT READY YET. I don’t want to go back to the hustle and bustle. I don’t want to start my morning off with deadlines and stress, balls being dropped and rolling down the hill. So there-in lies the problem,  I have not quite figured out how to have my kids go back to school, begin to see people in person, and not put myself back in that stress.  I know there are things that will need to shift, I just don’t know what that is yet. It is becoming clearer, but it is not there…and I am not ready yet. I don’t want to go back to the way things were. I  don’t know if I can, not without having a visceral reaction. So, I sit here and try to figure out my next steps.

I have this thing in my practice, where I try and look at the gifts of all negative events or traumas. For me, the gift of COVID-19 has been to see how life can be, if I slow it down and make some shifts. My fear of making those shifts is dissolving the longer I am spending time at home. I, like many other mothers, have needed more balance in my life for a long time, and maybe we have as a planet. I can’t go back to who I was before COVID-19…and I feel like I am saying this not just for myself, but for many. I feel like I have been a caterpillar crawling around, doing my thing. COVID-19 came and I created my cocoon,  started my change, my transformation. I am beginning to come out of it, but I am not quite through it yet. I will re-emerge, the same but different. More beautiful in many ways, seemingly more fragile in others. As I am pondering my emergence, I have not figured out what flowers I want to fly to first.  I am still needing time for my wings to dry and learn how to use them.