It's ok to not be ok

Whether it be from words of encouragement from your friends, some inherited philosophy, or good old fear, there is often this rush we all feel to feel better. To be okay again. To have gotten over it. To move on. To be fine. 

This habit has been particularly popular during the craziness that is this pandemic. Be it doctors returning to work or students adjusting to zoom university, during the midst of it all, I think we often become desperate for a little bit of calm and stability so we adjust and tell ourselves we’re fine. 

Or at least, that’s what I did. 

I remember when COVID-19 seemed to me a laughable problem to the strong, ever intelligent US. Then in almost the blink of an eye, COVID-19 was taking over every headline, every news story, every meme, every social media post, and every email from school. All that you were reminded of was that there was a pandemic and the world was trying to figure out how to deal with it. 

It was crazy, it was uncertain, and it was overwhelming. 

But, overtime - and a quite impressively small amount - the world started to adjust and so too did we. We got used to pressing the spacebar everytime we wanted to speak in class online, we got used to Instacart supplying our weekly food, we got used to living without a majority of our belongings stuck in our college dorms. We listened, we followed the steps, and we adjusted. 

So, I had assumed that if my learning style and attire could adjust so quickly and if I know this adjustment will be needed for the foreseeable future, my emotions should be good to go. The pain of saying goodbye to a four-year chapter of my life in another state, the disappointment of the abrupt ending of in-person relationships with many college friends, and the annoyance of not being able to learn in an environment actually conducive to learning ( unlike the sounds of dogs barking, vacuums moving, and pressure-cookers whistling in my house), should have subsided. 

We don’t process it. We rush it.

Why? Because we want to expedite the departure of the fear and uncertainty. Because we want to feel happy and “normal” again. We don’t want to let the pain, disappointment, and annoyance prevail. Nope.

We want to move on, so we tell ourselves we have.

But, pretending to feel fine comes with consequences; we start to randomly cry in the middle of the day, we find ourselves overly frustrated at the tiniest things, we struggle to look at old pictures without getting emotional about how things used to be.

And during these moments, our emotional side is trumping our logical, so we have no clue where all of this anger and random sadness is coming from.

We sit there and think to ourselves, “But I’m fine. I told myself I’m fine.”

That is exactly what I told myself with my confused expression as I sat in the parking lot of Publix at 8 pm with tears rushing down my face. I mean the grocery run was great- no problems, no mean workers. I had adjusted to using gloves and a mask between isles and staying 6 feet away from every shopper. My body, my habits, all of them had adjusted, the world i.e. Publix had adjusted, so why was I sitting here crying? 

At the time, though utterly obvious, I had no idea this emotional episode was linked at all to my mind’s determination to convince myself I was fine. In my head, I really was still fine. 

Then, a few days later, my friend called me crying in the middle of the day and asked me if this was “normal.” I asked her what was bugging her and she said it’s not just one thing it’s just sort of an overwhelming feeling. As she described her situation, I realized it sounded familiar -- it was mine too. 

That’s when it clicked. 

That though you would just love to trick your mind into skipping the processing part and the messy, not so happy part, eventually you’re going to feel it. Randomly and annoyingly so. 

So I told her yes, this is absolutely understandable because let’s face it our reality took a 180 in just a few months. Though our flexibility and adaptability have been tested by the world and ourselves, just because our actions changed, the confusion, the anxiety, the stress, the worry, the fear all of it would still be there.

And that is “normal.”

I don’t know if it’s thinking that once we accept this not so happy state, we’re giving into it/ are somehow weaker because of it or that once we do enter this state, we don’t know when we’re getting out of it, but there’s some avoidance around it.

And in every experience, every struggle I’ve had in my life, the rate at which I accepted the issue and the rate at which I started to feel truly fine again was correlated. 

As soon as we allow ourselves to feel instead of fight, the pressure goes away. The pain, the disappointment, and the annoyance and all the other not so happy emotions will be there, but this time we allow ourselves to sit with it. 

So though I wished I had learned to accept my emotions earlier on in the pandemic, COVID-19, if it has done one good thing, is teach me this lesson; it’s ok to not be ok, it’s ok not to know when things are going to end, and it’s ok to feel so overwhelmed that you have no idea what you are going to do, and the quicker you can tell yourself to accept these things, the quicker you’ll allow yourself to find peace again. 

You can rush telling yourself that you’re feeling better, but feeling better, really, genuinely feeling better, will always require a process. Fast or short, it requires time. 

If you allow yourself to accept this, the next time you face a situation that scares you, you know the first step isn’t to tell yourself “I don’t need to be scared, i’m ok”, but “if I get scared, that’s ok.”