The World Has Changed

Last year, around this time, I remember being very stressed because we had a million commitments on the books, but we hadn’t yet entered full pandemic mode and so we were stuck in this “will we or won’t we?” cycle with Girl Scouts, summer vacations, and the hopes of going back to school. It was like we had one foot in the pre-pandemic world of fun and friends and another in a world of zoom meetings and socially distanced outdoor meetups.

I’m reminded of that because right now, I feel like I’m living the mirror image of that. Things are revving up again around here, with school going hybrid, increasing numbers of vaccinations, and some tenuous plans for summer trips and get-togethers. Just like then, it’s stressful and I find myself having to overcome my social awkwardness to ask for what our family needs simply and without shame. I underestimated how hard this would be for me. I try to shake it off, but it doesn’t come naturally to say, “This is what we require, and if that’s not possible, then we can’t participate.”

But like many hard things, it’s been good for me to learn this skill. Social relationships have a lot of nuance and unspoken rules. But I believe we have always underestimated the resilience of our fellow humans. When my needs are put plainly and with kindness, people often surprise me with their adaptability and honesty. (Possibly I am just secretly offending hundreds of people. If this is true, I’m not really sure if I want to know.) But it’s still not my natural inclination. It’s hard to need things. It’s hard to ask people to accommodate me. And my first thought is to how selfish it is to ask others to do that.

Which, in the midst of a pandemic, is bonkers. I’m not being selfish by being honest about what is and isn’t safe for our family. But, I suppose the discomfort comes when we move past safety into some version of comfort or, at least, less emotional upheaval. My kiddos have been through a lot this year and I will admit I have gotten pretty protective of their expectations. We talk about how we will totally go to Disney World…in 2023. That cruise? Definitely going to happen…in three years. For now? It’s day trips and rental houses and takeout and swimming in freezing cold lakes instead of crowded public pools. (That last one is a bit of an uphill to school both ways kind of thing for me. “You’ll survive! Back in my day, we swam in a glacial lake that froze in the winter!”)

And that’s where the “slowly emerging from the pandemic” rules get hard. How do you protect your kid’s heart when others around them are doing things you just…won’t? How do you explain to a black and white thinker the nuances of risk avoidance? How do I explain to them why it’s fine for them to go back to school but not that friend over there?

And that’s where I have to work really, really hard to state my family’s needs simply and without shame. Because there is nothing to be ashamed of. Somewhere along the line, we were taught that being a good friend, a good community member, means always putting others’ needs first, and therefore, that needing something that imposed on someone else was being a bad person. Which is super wrong, since our needs will get themselves met, even if they have to come out sideways, full of shame and manipulation.

How can we own that it’s ok to need less chaos right now? How can we admit that our need for peaceful transitions is important? How can we make ourselves understand that it’s necessary to keep stress levels as low as possible in a world that is changing weekly, sometimes daily?

In my most self-deprecating moments, I have found help in flipping that “put others first” rule on its head. If I don’t let myself have emotional needs, I will fail to allow those around me to have them too. If I build a habit in my brain of discounting stress or fear or worry, then I might just discount those same things in someone else. This might be a screwed up way of seeing myself as a fully realized human, but it’s a step along a long path towards wholeness in a world that tells us we are never quite good enough. (That same world would also love to sell us something that will make us good enough, for the moment, at least.)

So today, I’m asking myself. If a friend came to me, stressed because they’d been invited to something that made them feel unsafe, but worried because they didn’t want to offend anyone, what would I say? If a friend asked what they should do to manage their anxiety at moving back into a world that very much did not prioritize the safety of their neighbors this past year, what would I say?

I think I would say to take it slowly. To rest up. To be honest and set good boundaries and don’t let people tell you that you have to feel scared to avoid putting a damper on their good time. And, most of all, to trust themselves. The world has changed, and we get to decide how to reenter it.