What Has the Pandemic Taught You?

Today, I was on a call with my coach and I was talking about how I was so not-proud of myself for what I accomplished during the pandemic thus far. I had a big, long list of things that I wanted to do and deliberately focus on but was telling myself that I did not do them — and therefore failed. I was acting as if I failed. All of my self talk was around failure. As we talked more, and as I pulled the weeds out of my own head, I started to realize that while everything did not look the exact, picture-perfect way I expected it to look when I wrote up my pandemic plan, I WAS doing a lot of what I said I would do. In fact – I have done so much and explored so much of who I am in a way that I not only could have not predicted, but I also couldn’t have put it on paper a month ago. I just wasn’t there.

 

After we got off the call I realized that while I have been telling myself that I’ve done nothing this whole time – I actually have been finding who I really am underneath the busyness. In pre-pandemic life there was always another trip, another project, another to-do, another action. More more more more more. With the majority of that put on pause I not only have been sitting in inaction on some of my goals, but I have had severe anxiety. Like…you-can’t-eat-for-6-days anxiety. It isn’t every day, but it comes in waves and the wave is strong. And the majority of the time, I’ve hated myself for this and judged myself for feeling the way I feel. 

 

BUT — by sitting in the anxiety and desperately wanting it to stop as much as I’ve wanted to figure it out, I have uncovered so many parts of myself that I thought I healed. So many parts of me that I thought I was all good with. But no, I was just covering them up with more “to-do’s” and no “to-feels.”

 

I have found this part of me very scary to face and deal with and I created many distractions to take me away from it. But the anxiety kept coming back because I wasn’t done doing the hard work. I was not in alignment with who I was. Instead, I was running from who I was.

 

And the more I thought about it, the more I really did have to celebrate about who I’ve been in this pandemic.

 

During this time I have also found that I can run miles on miles if I put my mind to it and commit to it. I can even grow a few abs. I can stick to macros. I can actually like hiking. I can struggle parenting but also love my child to death. I can ask for help. I can feel really good in my body for the first time in my life. I can have fun with people I feel close to. I can really own my feelings. I can be proud to be the person who is open about how she feels. And most importantly – there is a woman inside of me that really, really, wants to just have some fun and enjoy the life she built instead of constantly working toward the next thing. In order to have that fun, I have to actually allow myself to let go and shed some of the protective layers I built to keep myself safe, small, and a worker-bee.