…or how I found a way to stay sane in a sea of insanity.

If someone would have told me in 2019 to invest in masks and toilet paper, I would have told them they were nuts. But here we find ourselves, six months into a global pandemic in currently the most rudderless country in the world, lead by a lethal combination of idiots and criminals.

While I consider my situation to be exceedingly fortunate, my family is healthy and safe, I can work from home, and we have access to grocery stores and doctors; the stress of the pandemic has definitely affected me as it has everyone else.

About five weeks into the quarantine in April, I had to travel to another state on family business and ended up stuck there for seven weeks by myself. The situation was exceedingly stressful and my reaction to this stress took some very alarming directions. My communication with my wife and my work were strained, my outlook on the future dimmed and lethargy began to set in. Instead of doing things that could potentially shorten my stay, the lure of doing nothing was winning the fight.

I told myself, “It’s a pandemic, everyone is doing the best they can. This is self care. I am working tons of hours, I deserve to take it easy. I am just coping.” I had a long list of excuses for my bad behavior, but I knew I was off, I knew I wasn’t handling it well. It wasn’t just one thing, it was EVERYTHING.

I firmly believe in self care, but what I was doing was anger and laziness mixed with gin and tonic. 2020 was supposed to be a big year for me. I was turning 50. I had plans, goals, places to be. All of that was on hold indefinitely. Although I wouldn’t say it out loud. I had optimistically hoped that by July we might have some semblance of normalcy, which made it worse.

As June began to near July, even though I was finally home, the reality of how long our journey with Covid-19 would be began to set in. I knew I had to do something or the fear and anxiety were going to crush me.

I needed to take a step back…

I needed to make this whole thing mean something different.

I needed to reframe it.

I do this all the time, mostly unconsciously, to handle daily stress, making lemonade out of lemons, mountains back into molehills. But this time I stepped back and consciously reframed my situation (not to be confused with conscious uncoupling, which I think is a celebrity thing).

I thought about what the situation currently meant to me and how it was making me feel and figured out a new way of looking at it.

Outside of the fear of the illness itself, most of the pressure and anxiety of the current situation is generated from our lack of control of the quarantine timeline and what we are being forced to give up. Weddings and graduations disrupted, all this time wasted and none of us are getting any younger. We all just want to get it over with but we have no idea how long that will take.

I asked myself the question, what is the opposite of this?

I decided to look at this time not as wasted by as eminently valuable. I began to think of this time as being a retreat from the normal grind of day to day life. Yes, there are inconveniences and yes it can be scary, but it also provides lots of good things too, if you look for them.

Due to the fact that we really can’t go anywhere, I haven’t had the opportunity to spend this much time with my kids in years. I don’t currently have a commute (unless you count walking downstairs to my desk in the family room), this frees up time to workout or read or work on projects. No I can’t go to the gym, but I can get creative with how and where I exercise. The gym never has squirrels, rabbits or the occasional deer, like my local park does.

I began to think of it like training camp. What can I fix or improve before this time is over and we all get to go back to our old lives? The possibilities of looking for the good in things is limitless if you come at it from the right angle.

And just like that, a majority of the anxiety lifted. The change hasn’t been instant or permanent, I still find myself doomscrolling and internalizing the next rolling crisis (They found The Plague in California….yeah!), but working from this new frame for the situation gives me the leverage to handle it and move on.

tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

William Shakespeare – Hamlet

Shakespeare gave us the formula for reframing in Hamlet. We are the ones who decide what something means, the power is squarely in our hands. We can decide that anything can empower us regardless of what someone else thinks.

I say none of this to downplay the seriousness or tragedy of our current situation. What I am saying is that we can choose not to let it overwhelm us, we can choose what it means via reframing, and we can choose to take action.

Do the 2020 two-step, take a step back and then take a step forward into possibility.

Featured Image: Person Sitting on Wooden Frame by fall maple