How this pandemic is teaching me to feel my feelings & get familiar with my pain.

The last time I had this much time to think & be alone was in the Summer of 2018 when I went on a 6 week sabbatical to Europe. My employer offers this benefit after 5 years of being with the company. I thought, if I could take six weeks off and have nothing but time — I would grow as a human & my life would be so much better for it.

Prior to the sabbatical, I had been in a deep pit of anxiety & depression for about 6 months. I was ready to feel like myself again, and this trip was going to be the thing that would bring me back. As you can imagine, the expectations were high.

Before leaving, I wrote down my goals:

• learn to make pasta
• learn a bit of Italian
• write
• enjoy the company of myself
• be present and stop worrying about things I had no control over
• leave people who weren’t good for me
• heal from my childhood
• delete social media (and the subsequent need for validation)
• and most importantly: get to know my feelings, get acquainted with them, feel them, and invite them in.

Did I accomplish these goals? HA [just chuckled to myself].

No. No, I did not.

Honestly, it was probably the hardest 6 weeks of my life. (You’d never know that from my Instagram, which I deleted for a whole 3 days. Everyone except for my closest friends & family thought I had the time of my life because I did a hell of a job making it look that way.)

I did NONE of the above. What did I do instead? Well, let me paint you a little picture of how that 6 weeks went down.

• I drank a lot of Aperol Spritzes, and Gin & Tonics, and Wine and pretty much anything else I felt like because I am just enjoying the local fare & doing what Europeans do all day anyway.
• I overate. I mean hey — it’s Europe right? People here eat all day. They enjoy life. That’s just what you do in [insert any city I happened to be in].
• I got on dating apps, met people who made me feel bad about myself, and you know how the rest of that story goes. Maybe this will be the person who finally makes me feel worthy of love!
• I clung. Not only did I not leave the people in my life who were making me feel bad, I did everything I could to “strengthen” those relationships by trying to prove my worth through various forms of communication. Aha! I’m going to make them see my worth because they just don’t know I’m worthy yet.
• I slept. A lot. At weird times. And not in the “I’m going to sleep and rest my body” kind of way. No. It was a “this hurts too much and sleep is the only thing that will make this feeling stop” kind of sleep. I never felt rested.
• I spent thousands of dollars trying to outrun the impending dark cloud of depression. I cancelled plans, I changed flights, I upgraded hotels, I flew to random cities — just trying to find a place that hurt less. I’ll just outrun & outspend & out-travel my feelings because they won’t be waiting for me in the next place.
• Did I mention I ate & drank a lot? Again, I’m on vacation. YOLO, am I right?

And let’s be clear — I wasn’t even by myself for the entire 6 weeks. Nope. I was with friends & family FOR HALF OF IT. I only spent half the time by myself. But it didn’t matter. I was miserable, and I did everything I could to make the pain go away.

It was a massive failure of trip, and honestly — I’ve never been more disappointed in myself. I didn’t complete any of my goals, I wasn’t returning to the states and my life as a better human who was well adjusted and cultured and full of new insight. No. Instead — I was still me, just more triggered and full of self-loathing.

Some of you may read this and think “Oh, poor you! You had to go to Europe for 6 weeks and feel your feelings. Get the f**k over it.” And you’re not wrong. Well, you’re actually kind of wrong. I was just being nice. And here’s why.

First of all — comparative suffering is a pointless exercise. Author Brené Brown did a wonderful job explaining this on a recent podcast (she starts talking about this at around the 15 minute mark). Please listen to it. It’s enlightening, and true, and I’ll let her, the expert, explain. But I will say this — I refuse to go down the shame slide of “it could be so much worse” or “other people would kill to have your problems.” Sure. But this is my reality and I have to accept it & deal with it. Shaming myself will only prolong my healing.

Second of all — it doesn’t matter if you’re on a beautiful sabbatical in Europe, or sitting on the top of Everest, or curled up in ball in your bathtub. Feelings are feelings, and they follow you everywhere. It’s like that old adage: wherever you go, there you are. That is a fact.

My 6-week trip to misery & back is an example of something that many of us do every single day. It’s the reason alcohol consumption is on the rise, and people continue to get more obese, and people are getting more STDs than ever before. Because every day, everywhere — people turn to things outside of themselves to numb the pain & make the feelings go away. They turn to food, alcohol, sex, shopping, Instagram… all to just get that quick hit of validation or satisfaction or simply to distract themselves from what’s going on inside themselves.

And it’s understandable. It is HARD to be human. Full stop. Very few of us learned when we were kids how to even identify our feelings, let alone know what to do with them when they come knocking.

So what’s this got to do with this crazy pandemic?

Well, to start — this is my 43rd day of quarantine. The 7th week starts tomorrow. I thought about that this morning, and realized I have been ‘sheltering in place’ longer than my 6-week trip to hell.

For me, at least, this pandemic has been another sabbatical of sorts. Of course, I use that term very loosely. I’m still working (I don’t take this for granted and I’m very fortunate). I still have to tend to my responsibilities. I still have to function as a responsible adult and be present in my current life. This is clearly no vacation.

But I say sabbatical as a way to compare this ‘shelter in place’ or ‘quarantine’ as a form of a break — a break from the things I do every single day that keep me busy. And by busy, I mean all the things that keep me from facing & feeling my feelings.

No more nights out with friends at bars. No more 3 hour dinners at restaurants. No more dating. No more shopping (who am I kidding? I have spent more online in the last 6 weeks than I have in the past 5 years). No more spending hours at the office. The list of things I can’t do go on. You know them all as well as I do.

I’d argue that pre-pandemic, I spent 85–90% of my waking hours doing all the things I just listed above. Every day. Even weekends. I was over-scheduled. Over-stimulated. Over-everything. I was over-avoiding, if you will. That means that the 10% I had with nothing going on has now become about 80% of my time. That means, 20% of the time now is spent taking care of my responsibilities (working, cleaning, cooking), and the rest of my time is open. 80% of my time is time I have to sit with all of those feelings I’ve been avoiding for 33 years.

In retrospect, my sabbatical in Europe seems like a piece of cake. At least I could sit with humans, even if we weren’t speaking. I could go to restaurants & bars. And museums. And get on planes, and trains, and think nothing of it. Like I said, I had many things to turn to and take the pain away.

While there are still things to do that will take the pain away, I’m running out of outlets. I’m bored of Netflix. I don’t want to drink a lot because it makes the next day feel harder than it has to be. I have learned to cook, but I only have energy & interest to do so maybe 4 nights a week. I’m growing tired of being on video calls. There’s no one around to argue with, or sleep with, or cling to.

For the first few weeks of quarantine, I kept myself busy. But as the weeks pass and my interest in the things I listed above wane, I am faced with the thing I have spent years avoiding: myself.

Cue: Wherever you go, there you are. Or in this case, whatever you do or don’t do, there you are.

The things I have used to distract myself are gone.

I now have long periods of time where i’m not doing anything. Just thinking. Feeling. Listening. Being.

And I’m not going to lie — sometimes, it hurts like hell.

I listened to another Brené Brown podcast (yes, I love her) where she interviewed Glennon Doyle, another amazing writer & teacher, on what it means to feel your feelings. This wasn’t the whole point of the podcast, but it was part of it. And it has really stuck with me.

They both discussed their multi-decade sobriety, and how since being sober, they have learned to be ok with the idea that you can not only “survive your pain”, but that you actually need it.

Glennon goes on to say that if we “don’t transport ourselves out of that pain, that we transform ourselves. It’s one or the other. Transport or transform. But, if you stay [in the pain], you become the version of yourself you were meant to become next.”

It hit me. I’ve been transporting myself out of my pain — with food, alcohol, relationships, you name it. Transporting, not transforming.

Brené builds on this idea and says that “learning to become from pain and stay in the pain and feel everything is…the pre-requisite for being able to discern different kinds of pain.”

I was a little confused by this at first. But because she’s brilliant, she clears it up for me.

“This is not becoming pain that I’m in. This is self-betrayal pain that I’m in. But you have to be intimate with pain to understand what you have to sit in and what you have to pull out of with different choices. But that requires an intimacy with pain.”

For my entire life, I have viewed pain as something that is just part of life; something that is necessary; the price we pay for being alive.

And sometimes, that is true. There is a pain that comes from just being a human. There is pain from loss — whether it be a loved one, or an animal, or a relationship. It’s the “price of love”, Glennon says. But then — there is another kind of pain: chosen pain. This is the pain that comes when you abandon yourself; when you do things that do not bring you joy because the pain of facing whatever it might be is harder; the pain of denial, avoidance, the betrayal of yourself and your true north.

For me personally, my inability to discern the difference in my pain has cost me years of my life when I could have been choosing joy & freedom. For me, this has shown up in a few different scenarios:

• Denying my bisexuality for over 30 years (granted, I did not choose my sexuality, but my denial of it cost me years of freedom).
• Staying in relationships that weren’t good for me & seeking endless validation in other people
• Staying in jobs that were toxic
• And finally, in denying myself the right to a healthy body by turning to food & alcohol for comfort.

(I could think of a few more but that feels like enough acknowledgement for now.)

Looking back, I was choosing pain over joy & freedom. Yes, there was a massive amount of pain that you have to endure first to get your self out of these situations. The problem is that I was transporting myself, not transforming myself, and those things took longer than they should have — and some of them I’m still dealing with. I have been dodging the pain of feeling what I need to feel.

In one of Glennon’s final thoughts, she described her experience at one of her first AA meetings. It was the first time she had spoken and she explained to the group that she felt like she was doing something wrong because the whole process was just so hard for her. After the meeting, someone came up to her and said, “It’s not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re finally doing it right.”

Glennon closes with “feeling it all is really really hard. But there’s one thing that’s would be worse than feeling it all and that is missing it all. But the feeling it all is how you don’t miss being human thing; this becoming thing; this being alive; this love thing — that we’re doing here. And it all starts just being still, and letting being human happen to you.”

This pandemic is hard. We miss our people, and our jobs, and our communities. And that is pain that is real, and necessary, and it sucks. It is collective pain we are feeling together (which makes it a little more bearable for me). But as I sit and I look at this collective pain — I see a stark difference between the pain I’m feeling as a human who’s living through a pandemic, and the pain that I’m choosing to endure because feeling it would be much harder. The pain that’s coming from my denial, my refusal to feel, the abandonment of myself.

So now, I am forcing myself to feel the pain because my feelings are trying to tell me something. It’s time I start listening.

[PLEASE NOTE: I am not suggesting that everyone sit in suffering & deny real pain that comes from mental illnesses like anxiety, depression, bi polar disorder, etc. Those are very real conditions that have to be tended to. You are not weak if you cannot “push your way through the pain.” I just know myself, I know the source of my pain, and it’s deeply personal to me & only me. Only you know what’s best for you. I’m just sharing my own experience, honestly — as a form of medication for myself. It helps to write and share with others. If you need help or are having a tough time that seems unbearable, please know there is help out there. You can reach out to me, or contact one of the many hotlines meant for people like us who are struggling. You are not alone. ❤ ]