Author Archives: Sherri

Authenticity

We are about to embark upon a multi-essay arc.  This arc will explore some areas of personal growth that I’ve wanted to plumb for quite a while.  And like all good multi-essay arcs, this one begins with chopping carrots.  I went to the grocery store early this morning, as has become my custom on a Friday.  Not too many folk are there before 8 am and stocking is usually good.  I got home, put the groceries away and decided to go ahead and cut up the carrots and celery.  I am, afterall, a Morning Person.  (This does not mean that I am necessarily pleasant to be around in the morning, as my college friends will emphatically tell you.  Just that I get more things done in the morning than in the afternoon or evening.)

As I chopped the carrots and celery, I was thinking about Things.  The thing most on my mind this morning was a major achievement from yesterday:  I weighed in at Weight Watchers at over 30 pounds total weight loss and reached my goal weight.  This is a Big F-ing Deal, folks!  For my entire adult life, my weight has been steadily moving in one direction.  I knew what I needed to do.  Losing weight isn’t rocket science.  It is a matter of commitment.  Not willpower; commitment.  Willpower is following a bizarre restriction diet for a period of time until you lose a pre-determined amount of weight.  Once the goal is reached, you relax said WillPower and the weight comes back on.  No, true sustainable weight loss requires commitment to a permanent change.  And commitment requires making a choice around priorities.  Making a change in your priorities requires first an understanding of what your current priorities truly are, which requires some honest introspection.  And honest introspection requires you to be authentic, first with yourself and then with others.  And so we begin.

Authenticity is not an easy thing.  Being truly authentic requires seeing yourself as you are, warts and all, and embracing what you see.  Not pretending faults aren’t there.  Not hoping some less than desirable traits will just change.  Not seeing yourself as you want to be but as you are.  Only then can you change what you want to change.  I have one of those snapshot memories with a co-worker from my Air Products days.  I was in a management role by this time and navigating through my naiveté about how The System worked vs. how I thought it worked or how I thought it should work.  It was exhausting.  This coworker was also a relatively new senior manager and put forth an image of steady perfection:  never a hair out of place; dressed to the 9’s; ramrod straight posture.  I made some comment about some common failing, like having days when you just didn’t feel like coming in and dealing with the day’s bullshit or something like that.  I laughed.  She looked me right in the eye and said, “I’ve never felt that way.”  I tilted my head sideways and looked again.  This time I saw the fear in her eyes—the kind of fear that most of us had every day that showing the littlest chink in your armor would cause the lions to pounce.  I don’t think she saw that in herself, though.  It was scary to admit that vulnerability to yourself, much less others.  But without embracing it and realizing that almost everyone else carried that fear somewhere, it would eat you up.  Remember that Mandela quote, “Courage is not the lack a fear; it’s rising above it.”

Several years ago I read the autobiography of Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court Justice.  It had a huge impact on me. Not just because she overcame a very difficult childhood and young adulthood—so many accomplished people have had to overcome so much.  In fact, that is often what pushes them to such high achievement.  No, what struck me about the book was how she did not shy away from discussing all the ways she screwed up along her journey.  She made some serious mistakes along the way and STILL became incredibly accomplished!  What a revelation!  You don’t have to be perfect.  You just have to keep trying to get better.  One of Brene Brown’s favorite lines (yes, Brene AGAIN) is “I’m not here to BE right, I’m here to GET IT right.”  Sotomayor’s book spoke with an authentic voice I had never heard before and it inspired me.  When I am self-deprecating in my writing, it’s not really about injecting humor and certainly not about patting myself on the back for overcoming something difficult.  It’s about authenticity.  And hopefully encouraging others to not be afraid of finding their own true voice and embracing their whole selves—stupid mistakes, annoying traits, trials, all of it.

So, what is the journey to authenticity like and how do you get on it?  Well, I can only share my own journey.  And it is a long and painful one.  Mine required several rounds of therapy over the years made more difficult by first having to accept and embrace myself as a gay woman.  I also had to learn to accept parts of me that, while having improved over the years, are probably never going to go away.  One is a fear of being blindsided and the related paranoia that I’m doing something or not doing something or not seeing something that is going to result in my being shunned.  This came out of one of those traumatic grade school experiences that rocked me to my core.  I know that fear is still there.  But you know what else is there?  A profoundly developed sense of empathy that has served me very well, if irregularly, over the years.  See, that’s the key to authenticity.  When you embrace your whole true self, when you accept those things about you that probably won’t totally change, then you can find ways to compensate for those traits.  You can find ways to turn them into strengths; you can surround yourself in the workplace and in all aspects of life with people who have strengths that you lack; you can put voice to those traits with others AND constantly work to improve (remember: explanation is not excuse).

Back to my weight loss journey.  It’s now a week later and I’ve maintained for the first week.  Good start!  The journey began not with me listing what I had to do differently but with understanding what was keeping me from doing those things differently.  And THAT begin with authenticity—seeing myself as I am.  The next step:  identifying what my priorities truly are and what I then want them to be.  We’ll pick that up next time.

Resilience

The picture that accompanies this post is of a wild morning glory flower from a vine that popped up in an outdoor pot a couple of years ago.  Trish and I both love morning glories and every year she diligently nurtures plants from seeds or we buy young plants from a nursery.  We plant them indoors, in our sun room, and the vines wind up a series of drift wood pieces and trellises.  The delicate flowers bloom for just one day each, opening with the sun and closing by dusk.  The vines bloom from midsummer until early fall when they die back.  They never seem to regrow, so we start over each year. 

We have never been able to grow these plants outside, but wild vines do of course exist.  The vine in our outside pot probably originated with a seed in bird poop, deposited by one of the hundreds of birds that come to our feeders.  We were stunned when the flowers started to appear one year.  Not just that the vine grew and flowers bloomed, but that the vine was so prolific!  One day we counted five blooms on the one small vine!  And it punched out those flowers daily for months.  And it came back the next year.  And the next.  That, my friends, is resilience.  I marvel at that vine.  How does it not just survive but thrive under such difficult conditions?  And that thought, of course, got me to thinking about resilience in general.  It’s a struggle to be resilient under normal times; it is nearly impossible to find resilience these days.

Last time I wrote about my current difficulties in letting go of petty annoyances (some not so little) when I used to be able to let things roll off of me like proverbial water off a duck’s back.  That’s all about coping energy, something I have coached about often over the years.  And coping energy is strongly tied to resilience.  “Resilience” has a couple of useful definitions.  The first reads, “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”  The second, “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”  The second, of course, can apply to a human as well.  Much has been written on the topic of resilience and my thinking has been formed by lots of different thinkers (ok, mostly by Brene Brown, but you knew that).  What follows, though, is not a scholarly treatment.  They are my own musings.

When I was working, I often coached people on coping energy when the stress of the work environment got to someone.  This activity picked up in frequency when we moved from Air Products to Intertek, the former a comparatively slow paced R&D environment and the latter a fast-as-lightening contract lab.  I had to do no little amount of coaching on myself as well as others!  At first, my approach was to find out what seemed to be causing the most stress on someone and then see if I could find a way to reduce that stress by removing the stressor.  It could have been a project, a lab responsibility, a customer, or even a working relationship.  After a while, I realized that approach just didn’t work.  First, the same stressors did not have the same effect on other people.  Second, once I removed one stressor, another one took its place.  It wasn’t the environment, I realized, it was something about the person.

In some cases, the person’s temperament was just not suited to the environment.  No matter what we did, it just wouldn’t work.  Those people needed to move on and find an environment in which they could be successful.  But in most cases, the issue was resilience tied to a lack of coping energy.  When I wrote last time about how I seem to have lost the capability to keep certain stressors from getting to me, I put that in the context of having had, in the past, so many high impact stressors going at once that the more minor ones were easy to deal with.  That’s not exactly the right way to put it.  The reality was that I had developed some pretty impressive levels of coping energy along with some serious resilience—and I mean that in both definitions of the word.  The question for today is: how?  How did I build that resilient nature, how did I nurture it in others, and how can I get it back today?

As I’ve noodled over this for the last week or so, and listened to Brene’s podcasts, what crystallized in my mind was something that should be painfully obvious (but instead is just painful):  resilience comes from looking within, dealing with what you find there, embracing both your weaknesses and strengths, and paradoxically allowing yourself to not be resilient from time to time.  I remember some of those days while at Intertek.  I felt like the world was just caving in around me.  As the GM, I had to be careful to not show that to anyone else except a couple of trusted co-workers.  But I certainly would go into my office, put my head in my hands, and just shake for a while. 

The key is to not get stuck there.  You should allow yourself to feel, to absorb the difficulties and even to wallow in it for a bit.  But then realize that it’s not all hopeless; that there is a way out; that there ARE things you control; that you CAN do something and make progress.  “Courage is not the absence of fear,” said Nelson Mandela, “but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”  Similarly, resilience is not the absence of despair but the triumph over it.  Resilient people do not ignore a bad situation or act as if it’s not as bad as it truly is.  Resilience is recognizing the difficulty, being a little afraid, and plowing forward anyway, staying focused and knowing you just have to keep going.  You have it in you!  I know you do!

But you have to want resilience; you have to work for it.  Coping energy and resilience don’t just happen.  Sometimes, going through something really difficult shows you that you are stronger than you thought you were.  Sometimes experience alone teaches you the same lesson even if the situations were not dire.  Regardless, you have to do the hard work on yourself to accept who you are or who you have become and then put in the effort to change those things you don’t like so much about yourself.  And THAT comes down to Personal Accountability, one of my favorite hot buttons.  Resilient people have taken the time to do that navel gazing, understand and accept their flaws, and lean on their strengths and those around them to make things happen.  Believe me, I have learned all this stuff the hard way.

So, now each morning I look out the window and I see that wild morning glory vine punch out another flower or two and I marvel at the simple beauty and strength.  And I remember that resilience is hard won but worth the effort.  Especially these days.

Let It Go

This post is not in any way associated with the movie Frozen or the earworm song referenced in the title to this essay.  But now you’ve got that song stuck in your head anyway, don’t you?  You’re welcome.  Instead, this post is about my recent total inability to just freaking let things go.  Trish tells me I have a restless mind; my noodle is always working.  Writing helps me quiet the noodle, hence the blog.  Lately, though, I seem to have reached some crisis level in driving myself nuts over little things that I just can’t let go.  I have a very short fuse with issues that used to just roll off of me.  I thought it was time for some exploration.

Ideally, this essay would have a nice neat little arc.  I would discuss my righteous youth with a hair-thin trigger and then tell a series of stories that weave together my growth curve through my early adult years.  The story would then culminate with some wise words from my middle aged self about how I’ve become centered and calm, sitting quietly with my hands steepled under my chin as I gaze knowingly into the sunset.  Yeah, no.

The early part is right:  I was a Righteous Youth.  And by “youth” I mean into my 30’s.  I thought I knew it all as a teenager.  Then when I was in college, I realized how little I knew in my teen years; but now in college, NOW I understood.  Then when I finished grad school and started in the “real world” I realized how little I knew in school; but now that I was working, NOW I got it.  Somewhere in my 40’s I finally accepted that I did NOT know it all; nowhere close.  And that actually calmed me down a bit.

As my job responsibilities grew, I found that things that used to really set me off (some shift in geopolitics or an election; some co-worker totally dropping a critical ball or resigning; someone cutting me off in traffic) just evoked a shrug.  Been there, done that; I knew the world wouldn’t crumble.  My active noodle was otherwise occupied with a thousand little stressors and a few heavy duty ones—many with the kind of broad impact that keeps you up at night and gives you heartburn.  It was easy to let the little things go.  By the time I retired, not much could rile me up.  Not even getting fired.  I call it “Forced Perspective”.

Similarly, I learned that I could be a good facilitator, mediator or teacher as long as I didn’t have real skin in the game or feel deeply invested in the topic.  And since I had dramatically narrowed what I allowed myself to feel deeply about, I was able to coach my way around a lot of crises.  Something has happened, though, as I’ve detoxed from my professional years.  My formally work occupied noodle has had to find other things to chew on and boy has it found things!  For instance, I enjoy non-fiction because I love to learn and now I have the time to burrow down all kinds of rabbit holes to explore topics.  Back in the day, I just didn’t have the time and energy to pursue knowledge for fun.  I was just too busy.  But now!  Now if I read a Facebook post on Andrew Jackson, well, I dive headlong into the research to learn more about the man and President and why people find him fascinating and/or repulsive.  And, for good measure, I read about the disaster that was Andrew Johnson.  It’s not always such impressive stuff, though.  I have also recently dug into the origin of hotdogs and when the Phillie Phanatic first came on the scene.  (1977, for those interested.)  This knowledge searching is fun and gratifying!  It becomes a liability, though, when that knowledge searching is inspired by current events.

As a scientist, I go nuts over assumptions—particularly unfounded assumptions people make about data.  In case you haven’t noticed, we seem to have a current issue in this country about how to put data into any sort of useful or productive context, so my frequency of talking back to the TV has increased to a rather annoying level.  It used to just be my rolling commentary on pharma commercials.  (“I feel for people with ED or non-24 syndrome, but can you put some money into lowly antibiotics research?”)  Now, it’s constant talk back regarding the data around community spread, which actions make sense based on the data, and what the First Amendment REALLY says.  Yes, I have read the Constitution. And have a pocket version to refer back to when needed.  This is all creating a bit of tension around the house.

Everything is compounded now.  It’s the pandemic along with the economy along with a reckoning on centuries-old systemic racism all layered with divisive politics in an election year that is only going to get worse from here.  I hear and read things that just make me shake my head with thoughts of “how do they not GET this?” but it just doesn’t STOP there.  I used to pride myself on being able to “listen to understand” but these days I just “listen to refute and convince”.  I seem to have lost the ability to maintain a healthy sense of perspective and I don’t like that about myself one bit.  I can’t let it go.

So then all sorts of little things start getting to me again:  when our torty cat, Bridget, sticks her face in my plate; when teenagers make too much noise in the cul-de-sac (“Get off my lawn!”); when I see someone at the grocery store with their mask below their nose; when I get tailgated (man, I really thought I was past that last one!).  Then Friday night, after another day of all of this crap, I started scrolling through Facebook.  I happened on the recorded live feed of Kabbalat Shabbat services from my old synagogue.  There was my rabbi, with his guitar.  I turned on the sound.  And watched.  And sang and prayed along.  And breathed deeply.  And just….let it all go.  Gaining perspective is a hard fight; it’s even harder to maintain when your coping energy is tapped out.  Recognize that strain within yourself.  It’s probably there, right below the surface.  Try to not stay stuck for too long.  Find whatever will help you let go.  There might be hope for us all yet.

Explanation is Not Excuse

This is an essay about rage and compassion through the lens of pain.  Now THAT’S an ambitious sentence!  I mentioned last time that lately I’ve been struggling with what to write about for this blog, but that I’ve been writing furiously elsewhere about what’s been swirling in our topsy turvy world.  I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago entitled Rage in the Age of COVID 19.  I didn’t publish it because, first, it was just too long and, second, it was entirely too raw.  I, myself, was raging and that was even before the name George Floyd became known worldwide.  Now, however, pain has laid its blanket over the rage and that has let more compassion seep in.  It just breaks my heart to see how much pain there is in our world.

I am not trying to solve any big hairy problems in 1500 words (ok, closer to 2000 this time).  I promise.  What I want to do is try to understand, hence the title of this essay.  I am not going to excuse anyone’s behavior, be they looters or police or white supremacists or antifacists or just angry everyday people who end up doing unexpected things.  I want to try to understand them.  I’ve written before about the importance of making sure you know what the real problem is that you’re trying to solve.  Well, striving to understand is the first step toward identifying the right problem.  In fact, it’s a prerequisite.  And a little compassion along the way makes the whole process possible. 

I am not, by the way, going to discuss peaceful protesters.  They require no explanation nor excuse.  They are exercising their First Amendment rights.  (Even that has its limits, though.  You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, meaning you can’t hide behind the First Amendment to incite a riot and violence.)  That doesn’t mean you need to agree with them.  It just means they have a right to protest peacefully in public places without fear of the government limiting what they say.  That’s why the neo-Nazis and KKK can march peacefully and legally, if they are able to keep their rhetoric in check.  “I may not agree with a word you say,” paraphrasing Evelyn Beatrice Hall in Friends of Voltaire, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  The First Amendment also does not say you can say anything you want without consequence.  Private companies can set up their own rules and do.  Twitter can take down a tweet or flag it if it violates their policies.  That is not a violation of the First Amendment.  It does remind us all, though, of the need to accept the consequences of our actions—be it speech or otherwise.

Understanding my own rage  As I noted above, I’ve been raging a lot lately about COVID 19.  Injustice Rage.  In the beginning of this pandemic, we were all scared to death because of the rapidly changing situation and lack of knowledge.  We all felt vulnerable.  We all (mostly) obeyed stay at home orders.  We all got judgey on people who disobeyed those orders.  We were in it together.  Then more data started to come out regarding the disproportionate impact of the virus on the elderly and on certain minority communities.  Especially for the latter, the issue was a combination of lack of access to good healthcare (which can lead to compromised immune systems), poorly funded education systems (which can lead to poverty), densely populated communities with few basic services and often the need to continue putting themselves out there as minimum wage service workers.  Immediately we began to see how little financial cushion people in service roles had, many of whom lost their jobs and swelled the unemployment ranks along with food lines.  My heart broke, but my rage built.  How many blows do people have to take?  How can you be expected to succeed with a metaphorical knee on your neck?

My Injustice Rage morphed into COVID Rage, though, when I began to see the protests to reopen (after a couple of measly weeks of being asked to stay home to break the chain of contagion).  Look, I didn’t like not being able to get my haircut or go to the gym, either, but what really got to me was the Entitlement Rage.  I saw small business owners who were really suffering and I understand their rage.  But the camouflage wearing, gun toting angry men who also were waving Confederate flags and sporting swastikas?  What THAT said to me was, “The virus is not affecting me.  I’m not elderly and I’m not black or latino.  This is America which means I should be able to do what I want.”  That lack of caring for community really got to me.  It also pissed me off because the defining characteristic of these hard hit communities is not race:  it’s poverty and systemic disenfranchisement that happens to be overly pushed on people of color.  You know what?  These same systemic issues are keeping lots of white people living paycheck to paycheck as well. Yet much of the time these white communities blame and victimize immigrants and communities of color who are suffering the same problems instead of blaming the people and systems that do the victimizing!  In fact, they tend to vote for them! The debates over reopening continued and tensions and my rage rose.  And then George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman.

The Rage of the Rioters and Looters  Let me first say that the rioters and looters are not by any means a homogeneous group.  Some are just bad people looking to take advantage of a situation to blow off steam and steal.  Some are there specifically to incite because the riots advance some ideological aim.  Some are peaceful protesters laboring under strain that I can’t even begin to imagine. 

I was just a little girl when the Stonewall Riots happened in New York in 1969 but I can understand how a bunch of gay and trans people who just wanted to have a night out with people like them got damn tired of getting raided and thrown in jail for just being themselves.  “I’m just being a normal person and having a good time that isn’t hurting anyone!  You wouldn’t be doing this to a straight person doing exactly the same thing!  WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!”  At some point, you can’t hold the rage in anymore and you fight back. 

Have you never just had ENOUGH and lost your cool?  Imagine that stressor not being focused and short term but being with you and your kind for generations.  Imagine it happening day after day after day, year after year after year.  Imagine it happening to you and everyone like you but NOT happening to others, who looked different than you, doing the exact same thing.  Imagine all that rage of the injustice mixing with the exhaustion.  “If the color of my skin is seen as a weapon,” read a sign I saw at a protest, “I will never be considered unarmed.” If police see dark skin and immediately think “bad person,” harassment (or worse) is going to happen.   My parents taught me to respect authority but they never had to sit me down and have The Talk that said, “Even if you do everything right, you still have a high probability of being mistreated.”  If I’m a black teen and I’m sitting in my car doing whatever stupid stuff teenagers do in their car and I’m hauled out and harassed by police when my white friends aren’t, I just might get so tired of it and so frustrated that I start mouthing off.  You just. Get. ENRAGED. You don’t want to lose your cool but when something snaps, it snaps. 

And if you are in the midst of a crowd sharing and amplifying your emotion, you might end up busting the window of a police car, or a storefront, or going into a busted store and grabbing something just because you can, or setting something on fire.  Just to feel some power; some control.  Explanation is not excuse, but it’s the first step to identifying the real problem and solving it.

The Rage of the Police  Just as looters and rioters are not a homogeneous group, neither are police.  Some are frankly racist and corrupt and they are not routinely rooted out because of longstanding cultural and systemic issues that lead other police to be complicit.  And sometimes extreme force is warranted.  And cops do indeed get shot and killed on duty. 

I want to focus on your average cop, though.  Imagine that you have a job that requires you to regularly go into unknown and volatile situations.  Your training has taught you that you are an officer of the peace and you’ve been trained to deescalate tense situations, but you’ve also been armed with military grade gear and been conditioned to consider yourself a warrior.  You’ve been shot at or know colleagues who have been.  You take a serious risk every day you go to work and you never know if the next call you go on is going to be your last.  Add to this the fact that consistent defunding of a range of social services has placed a very broad array of response needs on your shoulders—everything from dealing with mentally ill homeless to rounding up stray dogs.  Any situation can turn deadly dangerous in seconds.  Your fear can heighten your sensitivity.  And when you are being taunted, that fear can combine with anger and become rage that makes you react.  You shoot someone who you thought was threatening you.  Or you push back on a taunting protester.  Or you use the defining characteristic of race because that’s what you can see.  You do whatever you feel you have to do to ensure your own safety.  “Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6” said an officer I heard interviewed recently.  And these are people who have been trained to control their emotions and deescalate!  Explanation is not excuse, but it’s the first step to identifying the real problem and solving it.

I must say, though, that what disturbed me most about George Floyd’s death was that the officer with his knee on Floyd’s neck was not raging.  The casualness, the hand in the pocket, the lack of concern about being filmed, the utter calmness on his face.  THAT is not rage.  THAT has neither explanation nor excuse.  That is criminal.

I have been accused in the past of being wishy washy or oppositional by countering people’s arguments with what I see as the perspective of the other side.  I don’t do that to be argumentative.  I do it because no one is 100% right nor 100% wrong.  We need to learn to understand, truly understand, someone else’s position because we must do that to find common ground.  Remember, YOUR world is not THE world.  So, in these difficult days, start by understanding the source of your own rage.  Then, find the compassion to understand the source of others’ rage.  There is always pain behind it.  Explanation is not excuse.  But the solution comes with alleviating pain, not causing more of it.

When You Just Don’t Know What to Write About

It’s late Friday afternoon and my publishing deadline is Sunday.  I have no idea what to write about for this post.  It’s not that I lack topics.  I just lack topics that I actually want to write about and that you might want to read.  There is no overlap in that Venn diagram this week.  Writing is therapy for me, so it’s not that I haven’t been writing.  I’ve been writing furiously.  And, trust me, you wouldn’t want to read any of it.  Not if you like and respect me and want to continue to do so.  I am therefore doing what writers are supposed to do: just start writing.  My goal as a writer is to find language to express feelings and emotions.  When you are able to put words around something you sense, you are on the road to awareness and reconciliation.  I’ve got lots of stuff nudging at me.  Let’s see what comes out.

I’m guessing that you, like me, are getting dang tired of this pandemic.  I’m tired of the upward curve on deaths in the US that does not seem to be plateauing even after reaching 100,000.  I’m tired of the mental mood swings that run the range from gratitude that I have the means to stay home and enjoy doing it (most of the time) to raging at the injustice of how this virus is attacking our most vulnerable (both physically and economically) to fear that I’m not as safe as I think I am to frustration at how really, really badly I need a haircut to boredom with the same activities to self-flagellation around my own privilege and hubris.  And I’m tired of feeling tired.

The Pennsylvania Governor is set to move my county into the Yellow Zone next Friday, which brings with it many new freedoms.  Don’t really know what those freedoms are beyond some limited outdoor seating at restaurants but I am assured there will be more freedoms.  Will I really do anything different?  The Y won’t be open yet.  I doubt the in-person Weight Watchers workshops will start back up this soon.  Will I finally be able to go to DSW and get new “running” shoes? (I don’t really run.)  I know that whatever I’ll be doing, I’ll be wearing a mask and harshly judging (and avoiding) those who don’t.  I won’t be getting my hair cut.  I won’t be booking flights anywhere anytime soon.  And I won’t stop being wary of strangers that get too close (not that I was ever really comfortable with that, anyway).  I guess the bottom line is that I won’t feel “safe” and that is what I really want.

But enough of this Debbie Downer stuff!  There are also a lot of really GOOD things going on!  People are showing kindnesses to one another in very heartwarming ways.  We are taking care of each other and while we aren’t making everything all better, we are at least remembering our—and others’—humanity.  Let’s count up some of those good things.  For one, my family is now doing a weekly Zoom call.  I started Zooming with my Mom a month or so ago because I just wanted to see her face.  For Mother’s Day, a couple other family members joined in.  Last week, almost all of us were on the call and we’ve decided to make it a weekly thing.  Not a requirement, mind you.  But we now actually might get to see each other’s faces all together more than three times a year.  This is one of those pandemic workarounds that hopefully will outlast the virus.

I have discovered a local food pantry that I am now regularly supplying.  They have a list each week of what they need most and when I go to Costco, I pick up a few things along with my own list and drop them off.  This food pantry existed before the pandemic and will continue afterwards.  There has always been local need, it’s just more urgent now.  After the pandemic passes, the food pantry will still be needed and now I have a local outlet I can regularly support.  That makes me happy!

Speaking of Costco, when I went for my biweekly run yesterday, guess what?  Kirkland toilet paper was back!  Huge piles!  Like “normal”!  It didn’t even look like they were limiting amounts.  There were a bunch of us standing around the mountainous display just smiling.  Or, I think people were smiling.  Masks, you know.  But you can see it in their eyes.  “Feels like we’re getting back some semblance of normalcy!” I said to no one and everyone.  There were mumbles and head bobs of agreement.

Masks, by the way, have quickly become the fashion accessory du jour.  My Facebook feed is littered, now, with all kinds of nifty designs and breathable, washable fabrics.  I feel like buying more than the utilitarian ones I have now.  We’re going to be wearing these things for a while (or at least I hope so).  I want one of the ones that seem designed for working out.  I want at least one gator.  I might get one imprinted with an owl image.  One for the Philadelphia Eagles.  Maybe the Phillies.  The possibilities are endless!  AND, I don’t really need to put make up on if I’m going to be wearing one.

I’m saying Thank You a lot more these days, too, and I’m seeing others do it as well.  That’s something else I hope sticks around.  We’ve made “essential workers” heroes during this time.  Why weren’t we appreciating them more before all this?  The servers, the grocery store clerks and stockers, the garbage dudes, the mailmen.  People are actually seeing them now.  And appreciating what they do.  And saying Thank You.  Please don’t stop that.  Ever.

Tonight is Treat Night.  Trish and I do this every couple of weeks, usually on weigh-in day.  We split a cheesesteak for dinner along with a piece of pizza each.  There is usually a beer or a glass of wine.  To prepare for this, we eat “zero point” foods the rest of the day.  And we still go over our point allowance a bit, but it’s just one day.  I used to chow three pieces of pizza without taking a breath and barely remembering the taste.  Now, I savor that half a cheesesteak and that piece of pizza.  I love every bite.  It’s plenty of food.  It tastes delicious.  I am much more aware of food that I never really took a lot of notice of before.  Don’t get me wrong:  I love the way we eat now.  I’ve lost a bunch of weight and feel better and truly love the food.  I just have more appreciation for delicious food, any delicious food, because I am so much more mindful about eating.  THAT is something that I want to see stay after we have a vaccine and the extreme awareness we have around COVID-19 fades.  I want to see people stay more mindful about the people around them—family, friends, service providers, everyone.  Being kind to each other.  That would be a good outcome.

I feel better, now.  I’ve put words to some of those feeling nagging at me.  I’m guessing they’ve been nagging at you, too.  I guess I had something to write about after all.

Change

As we navigate through the stages of this pandemic, I’ve noticed a recent shift in discussion on the news shows.  They are clearly showing the strain of finding new topics to discuss, but this is a good one:  As  states and municipalities slowly relax stay-at-home orders (except here), people are asking, “Which of the changes we’ve had to make through this time of shut down are actually going to stick?”  Studies on “change creation” indicate that it takes, typically, 6-8 weeks of dedicated practice of a new habit for that change to become permanent.  Those studies don’t typically talk about that “dedication” being forced upon you, but the outcome is the same.  We’ve been “shut in” long enough, now, for some of the changes we’ve made to our daily lives to become permanent—if we choose.  Noodling on this concept has gotten me thinking a lot about the process of change.  (Needed disclaimer:  as with many of the concepts I write about, this topic could be a few PhD theses, none of which will be mine.  Much has been written on the topics of change management and change creation.  I am presenting only my own poorly researched observations.)

There are a lot of common sayings regarding change:  “Necessity is the mother of invention” (attributed to Proverbs); “The only thing constant in life is change” (attributed to Heraclitus); and “You go first” (OK, that one is mine).  Change is around us all the time, yet it is human nature to resist change—even change that would be considered in our best interest.  It’s not so much that we think that what we have is good enough or preferable.  It’s just what we know and whatever this “change” is, it’s something we don’t know.  That brings to mind another saying: “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” (another Proverb).  A great example of that is the computer I am typing on right now.  This Lenovo laptop is probably 5-6 years old.  In “computer years” that’s about 90.  It’s heavy.  It’s wonky.  The battery power sucks.  It can take forever to boot up.  Occasionally, a demon takes the thing over and I have to remove the battery to kill it. Now, I have enough money to buy a new laptop.   I am no technophobe; it’s not a big deal to me to switch over to a new system.  Why don’t I do it?  Well, there’s my well documented tendency to procrastinate.  There’s the fact that Trish keeps telling me I should get a new computer, which creates immediate resistance.  More than anything, though, I don’t do it because while there are things about this laptop that bug me, they don’t bug me enough that I feel the unknowns associated with getting a new computer are worth the aggravation and risk.  I know it will be better “on the other side”.  I just don’t want to go through the tangle of the change.

Let’s take a bigger, more critical issue for this nation: healthcare.  (Yes, I am going there.)  It is well documented that we spend more per capita on healthcare for worse outcomes than any other developed nation.  We are spectacular at expensive, heroic emergency care yet horrible at preventive care.  Our system of hundreds of different healthcare providers has led to an explosion of administrative costs relative to patient-facing costs.  And, of course, there are millions of Americans (27.5 million in 2018, about 8.5% of the population) without any health insurance at all.  Of those who have it, about 2/3 have private insurance, either through their employer or the commercial market and the other third are on programs like Medicare and Medicaid.  The one thing in common?  Most everyone complains about whatever healthcare system they have.  They complain about out-of-pocket costs.  They complain about availability.  They complain about the bureaucracy and red tape to get things done.  You’d think people would be clambering for some sort of change that would make healthcare simpler, less expensive, and more effective.  (DISCLAIMER: I am not endorsing any particular solution this problem.  I have my opinions, but I will keep them to myself.)  There are people truly suffering out there!  “Medical bankruptcy” is a real thing, for one, and lack of access to good care literally kills.  Why aren’t more people agitating for change?  Because for the vast majority of people, the system they have is good enough based on what they expect from it.  “The Devil You Know.”  When will change happen?  One way is when a critical mass of people are so horrifically underserved by the current system that only change is acceptable.  That’s what’s known as a “revolution”.  And it’s quite rare (and often bloody) for change to happen via revolution.  The other way is for leaders to show courage and compassion and press for change in the face of resistance.  Yes, it has happened.

During my work years I took many a course on “change management”.  I know all about the 20/30/50 rule: whenever you are trying to drive change, 20% of the people will be with you from the beginning; 30% will never accept the change fully; 50% are watching you and waiting for you to convince them to join the 20% or the 30%.  (Our natural tendency is to focus attention on the vocal negative 30% instead of the silent, convince-able 50%.)   There is another piece to change “creation”, though, that I’ve never heard discussed in these corporate settings—probably because it would make people too uncomfortable.  I have found that to move people to a particular change, you have to first propose something so out there and so unfathomable that the change you really want sounds reasonable in comparison.  Think about how merchants often present pricing on their products:  “You’ve seen cookware sets like this sell for $100, $200, or even $300!  But we will send you our outstanding set for the low, low price of only $40 (plus shipping and handling)!”  As you were watching the commercial, you may have been thinking “I’d pay $20 for that.”  If they had thrown out that $40 price tag, you’d think “no way!”  But by setting out that multi-$100 comparison, the $40 looks like a bargain.  We, um, used to do a version of this in setting customers’ price expectations for new products.  We never intended for them to pay the top price.  But the “middle” price, our real target, would have looked too expensive without it.

Creating organizational and cultural change is frankly no different.  That’s why negotiations never begin with what you really want to get.  And it’s why us more moderate thinkers need to be grateful for the radical fringes.  They push the boundaries of broad thinking so far out there that the more moderate changes we advocate for look reasonable.  Without that “out there” agitating, any change would seem “too much”.  Each time we achieve a moderate change, we need to push those edges out again.  That’s how progress happens.  Move the needle.  Get comfortable.  Have people that make you uncomfortable again.  Move the needle.  Think about the social and regulatory changes that have happened just over the last half century that are now the lowest level of acceptability but that were unthinkable not too long ago.  Want to go back to polluted drinking water and air that makes you choke?  Fifty years ago, that’s just how it was and any regulatory laws to change it were considered business-killing.  Guess what?  Businesses innovated, the air and water cleared, and those same businesses are more successful than ever.  “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Want invention?  Create necessity.  (Yes, I know regulations can go too far.  See last time’s essay on Balance for thoughts on that.)

So how does all this rambling about “change” relate to what we’re going through today?  We are navigating a huge disruption right now.  We’ve been shut in for a couple of months where I live and we have at least another few weeks to go.  And nothing facilitates “change” like disruption.  We have been forced to change how we do a lot of things out of necessity.  More people are working from home.  There is more of an emphasis on distance learning.  Both my Mom and I have learned how to use Zoom.  People are using online shopping for things they never did before, like groceries.  People have been starting up new businesses to support the needs of homebound customers.  This disruption has driven a lot of change, but most of that change has been around adoption of capabilities that were already there.  Telemedicine, as an example, has been around for a while.  But it has become more of a norm now that people have learned to navigate it.  I anticipate it will stay high on the menu of choices of consuming medical care. 

Some changes will stick, some will not.  We will almost certainly think about our lives “before COVID-19” and “after COVID-19”.  We are at an inflection point.  This is where real progress can be made.  Give some thought to what you’ve learned about yourself during this pandemic and which of these changes you want to make permanent. What have I learned?  I’ve learned that there are some changes that I fiercely do NOT want to stick.  I have learned how much I miss giving my Mom a hug.  I miss workouts and casual lunches with my bestie.  I miss the communal groan in a spin class when the instructor tells us to do something we don’t want to do and then we all do it anyway and share the joy of a tough workout.  I miss in-person connection and will work hard to remember to value community.  We’ve all stretched ourselves throughout this time.  Let’s make sure it was worth it.

Balance

Pandemic Diary Day….?  I’m not sure what day.  Like most people, I have a lot of time to think these days.  The thoughts are not always deep and insightful.  Often the thoughts are things like “What the heck is the tune that they use for the Sponge Daddy jingle?  I know that tune, but just can’t place it.”  I am embarrassed at how many times and ways I’ve tried to Google that.  My thoughts are also along the lines of “Why on earth do people throw such random trash out of their car windows?”  These thoughts happen on my walks around the neighborhood.  Or when I accompany Trish on one of her trash pickup activities along the roadway.  What IS it about those 5 Hour Energy shots that must make people immediately toss them out of the car window when they drink them?  And don’t get me started on why people think cigarette butts are biodegradable.  But I digress.

Sometimes I do start stitching together thoughts that end up in an essay and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about “balance”.  The visual I chose to use with this essay is not a set of scales, like you often see with a blinded Justice (anyone else have an issue with Justice being blinded, like someone is trying to pull something over on her?).  The scales imply that balance is a static activity.  You load two opposing “things” on the different pans and wait for the scales to steady.  Then you can see which one is obviously “better”.  That works well if you are measuring something physical like a weight.  It’s not a very helpful analogy when you are weighing actions and consequences.  I’ve written about choices and consequences before.  Today I want to talk about how to balance competing priorities/needs/wants.  And to do that, I need to use the visual of a pendulum.

Achieving balance, in my mind, does not result in a static state.  We’d love it to be static.  “I am finally in balance!” you think on a good day.  Until it’s not a good day anymore.  Balance is a dynamic process, constantly swinging through that elusive balance point but never staying there.  My goal is to try to keep the amplitude of the swings as low as possible.  I like things to be steady.  I do have a tendency to motion sickness after all.  Have you noticed that there are others that seem to like to swing that pendulum as far to the extremes as possible?  They love those swings.  Well, bless their hearts.  (Anyone from the South knows what I mean by that.)

“Balance” in this context can take many forms.  There is balance in your diet; in your emotions; in your relationships; in your problem solving process.  The difficulty in achieving a sense of balance is accepting, as Brene Brown says, that you can carry two competing truths in your mind and not have to choose between them.  Let me give you an example.  We have previously established that Trish has no spatial skills when it comes to loading dishes in a dishwasher.  I will open a nearly empty dishwasher to find one small bowl—ONE bowl—sitting smack in the middle of the bottom rack.  Usually lying diagonally across a couple of rows of spokes.  This trait, to me, is not a positive one.  I do not like it.  But do I throw up my arms, scream something about closest-packed-configurations and go running out the door?  No.  Well, not yet.  And that’s because she has a few other characteristics that I find quite charming and lovable and, on balance, I can tolerate (and rearrange) the dishwasher.  That’s an easy one to balance.  The negative issue is of much less importance to me than the positive issues so I can reconcile the dishwasher thing.

More tricky can be balancing competing priorities of different constituencies, like family members or work colleagues.  I remember a scene from The Wonder Years, with the narrator talking about his parents and how they negotiated differing preferences.  The example was tile for the kitchen floor.  He didn’t like her choice; she didn’t like his; so, they compromised on one neither of them particularly liked.  Or there is the example of balancing spending needs in a business against profitability.  You need both, but not one to the exclusion of the other.  Or, as noted above, balancing your diet.  If you swing the pendulum too far to the “good but tasteless” side, you risk swinging the other way too far to “bad but delicious.”  Trust me.  I have done this experiment.  And so have you, I would guess.

Here’s one that’s a bit tougher and that we are all struggling with right now.  We’ve got this crazy virus circulating that we don’t know a lot about yet.  We know that it seems to be highly contagious and that people can spread the virus without showing symptoms.  We know that a majority of people who pick up this virus will show no or mild sickness but that a small percentage have a horrid reaction, end up in the hospital, may be on a ventilator for weeks, and many die.  Our first very valid reaction as we were learning about the virus was “Ack!  Everyone stay HOME!”  In parts of the country, hospitals were becoming overwhelmed and we had no treatment, no vaccine, no way to stop this thing besides staying away from each other.  But then, people started suffering in other existential ways:  millions have lost their jobs, we have lost trillions in economic value, and we’re facing an economic recession that may take a long, long time to recover.  We’ve got to get people back to work and start shopping again!  (Remember, our economy is 70% consumer spending.)  How do we balance those two very valid, very serious conditions that are in opposition?

This, people, is when we can hold two competing truths in our minds.  We can respect the need to minimize spread of this disease as well as the need to open our economy.  What I worry about are the pendulum swingers—the ones who see “opening” as meaning back to the pre-virus norm of packed beaches, restaurants, theaters, ball parks with no restraints.  I also worry about the ones who say we must stay in total lockdown until there are no more cases of this virus anywhere.  Neither are constructive.  It is not an affront on your liberty to wear a damn facemask when you go out.  Nor is it an attack on the Second Amendment to limit seating in a restaurant.  Nor are we all going to die if golf courses open up or I go get my hair cut (as long as we take reasonable precautions like said facemasks and minimizing contact).  We just need to be smart about how we “reopen”.  Nudge the pendulum toward the balance point and be ready to nudge it back the other way if needed.  Recognize you will not get everything you want but neither will others who are pushing the pendulum in the other direction.  And above all, pray that we can keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed so that if you or someone you love is in the unfortunate small percentage that need them, our healthcare workers will be there and ready.

Our goal is to constantly strive for balance, recognizing that you will often approach balance and even be “in” balance for brief moments, but more often you will be looking for data to help you ease toward it.  It’s about holding those two opposing truths in your mind and knowing that it is ok to, say, like a particular political candidate enough to vote for them but not agree with everything they say or have done.  Similarly, you can find something you like and respect about someone you don’t particular enjoy working or spending much time with.  It’s not hypocritical.  It’s pragmatic and balanced.  And you can love someone dearly and still curse softly at how the dishwasher is loaded.

Observations from Self Isolation

I’ve been trying to motivate myself to write for the last two weeks.  Writing, normally, is therapy for me so I’ve been surprised at the difficulty.  Lord knows I could use some therapy these days!  I’m starting this essay on Friday, knowing my posting deadline is Sunday.  Nothing like a self-imposed deadline to get you started!  I just haven’t felt like writing about leadership topics.  Rather, it is hard to make these topics more humorous and based on the response to my last two essays y’all want to laugh, not think.  Wait.  That didn’t come out right.  My clearly intelligent and discriminating readership would prefer to laugh while they think.  So, instead of delving into a single topic, today I am going to share with you a number of observations I have made about myself and the world over the last few weeks and how I might in the future weave some of these into essays of their own.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gone off of Prozac  Let’s start strong!  Like many a Woman of a Certain Age, I had some difficult times with inhuman hormonal swings several years ago and at the insistence of my doctor (“Don’t be afraid of chemistry, Sherri.”) went on Prozac.  I stopped a couple of years ago when various internal chemicals and my life evened out.  My coping energy has generally been fairly strong as of late.  These past few weeks, however, anxiety has come roaring back.  As usual, it has expressed itself by keeping me from sleeping which, in turn, messes with other rather important bodily functions leaving me tired, cranky, lazy, and bloated.  This state is different from my usual tired, cranky, lazy and bloated condition by the addition of feeling both helpless and angry.  I am a joy to be around.  Why am I feeling helpless and angry?  Read on.

Hair Salons Should be Essential Businesses  It is the little things.  I remember when I lost power for four days after Super Storm Sandy.  Electricity is something you really take for granted until you don’t have it.  Those were four miserable days.  Thank goodness for a fireplace and two very warm cats.  When the power came back on, I channeled Scarlet O’Hara yelling, “With Gd as my witness!  I will never take Electricity for granted again!”  I am replaying that emotion now with respect to my hair salon.  It has been 43,200 minutes since I’ve been to the salon.  Not that I’m counting.  It is not, as you might guess, about hair color.  I am one of those lucky few (thanks, Mom and Dad) who is graying late and in a nice salt-and-pepper way, so I don’t color.  No, it’s the Waxing Room of Torture that I miss.  I have taken to plucking hairs that should never have to be removed one at a time.  The concept makes Trish literally gag, so I can’t even tell her about it.  I’m sure she’s gagging editing this paragraph.  I have written to the CIA, explaining in detail how they can now do away with water boarding and just use strategic plucking.  Although I’m guessing this is prohibited by the Geneva Convention, too.

I Have a Righteous Streak a Mile Long  “Really?” says everyone who’s ever known me, rolling their eyes.  “I’ve never noticed.”  OK, but I come by it honestly and I’m clearly not alone.  We are all self-isolating.  And we are doing it for a rather altruistic reason:  in most cases, it’s not so much about us getting COVID-19 ourselves, but making sure that we break the chain of contagion thus keeping our health care system from totally crashing.  Yes, most people have very manageable symptoms.  But this virus is contagious enough and enough people are asymptomatic long enough that without us all staying home, this thing would pass through the country/world like wild fire.  Even the relatively small percentage of people that have a serious time with this illness would be enough people to totally overwhelm hospitals.  Think about that: we are staying home so that people we don’t know won’t die.  That is incredibly selfless and community minded.  And American culture is diametrically opposed to those two characteristics.  But we DO believe in fairness!  That happens to express itself as “If I am going to stay home 99% of the time and wear an uncomfortable face mask when I do go out, then I am going to judge like hell the people that DON’T do that!”  This is partly why lines at gun stores have been a mile long.  This and the fact that Pennsylvania inexplicably closed the liquor stores. If there ever was an essential business!  Anarchy is just one bad day away.  Thank goodness the sun is out today.  “The Individual vs. the Community” will undoubtedly become an essay in the future.

The Average Person Does Not Understand the Scientific Process  I have previously indicated that I would like to write a series of essays entitled “Everything I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned in Freshman Chemistry” and an explanation of the Scientific Process will be a key part of that.  Let me give an example: Having a gut instinct about the efficacy of a drug combination to fight COVID 19, based on a few anecdotal cases, does not replace a well-designed study.  Why not just try it?  What do you have to lose?  Remember thalidomide?  That’s a drug that was found, anecdotally, to reduce nausea in pregnant women.  It was then prescribed widely for this problem, until they realized that a high percentage of babies born to women taking this drug had horrific birth defects.  This is also why I can’t stand “sound bite” journalism.  It is very easy to find isolated examples to prove whatever point you want to make.  A well-designed study that proves cause and effect is critical. And don’t get me started on people who read one article, written for non-scientists, and are now self-proclaimed scientific experts.  Stay in your lane.

Speaking of Correlation vs. Causation  Did you know that there is a strong correlation between number of shark attacks and people eating ice cream?  Well, clearly then, people should stop eating ice cream if we want to prevent shark attacks! (Actually, they are both correlated with warm weather and people taking a swim in the ocean.)  Check out this one:

Clearly Scripps needs to be very careful of the words they choose in the final round!  Just because two events or actions are correlated doesn’t mean that one caused the other.  Just because a couple of people took a particular drug and recovered from COVID 19 doesn’t mean that the drug caused the recovery.  This relationship is oh so important in all aspects of our lives!  (Fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing already know this maxim.)  Expect this to show up again.  And remember, if something seems simple or obvious, it just means you don’t know enough about it.  See also: self-proclaimed scientific experts, above.

The Center is Relative  There is so much more about basic scientific principles applied to life that I want to explore.  The Law of Unintended Consequences.  The Importance of Significant Digits.  The Dose Makes the Poison.  But I will touch on just one more here:  The Theory of Relativity.  While we are all trying hard, kind of, to not politicize this pandemic there sure seems to be a lot of complaining tied to political party.  What I find interesting is that almost everyone considers themselves Centrist in their thinking.  Most people can easily find others who are both to the right and left of their own position on any given topic.  As such, by definition, they are “centrist”.  (“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right and here I am: stuck in the middle with you.” Bragging rights to the first person who identifies those lyrics!)  And, your own ideas seem so eminently reasonable to you that they MUST be centrist and anyone who disagrees is either an idiot or a maniac. (Who gets THAT reference?  Clue: comic from, um, the 80’s?)  Just chill, people.  The center moves around a lot.  It is relative to where the majority is at any given time in history.  No one ideology has all the right answers.  And in complicated situations like what we are wrestling with today, there IS no one right answer.  There are just different pathways with different consequences.  We are all right and we are all wrong.  “Balance” is another topic I’m sure I will dive into.  We don’t need to open up the whole country at once; nor do we need to stay in 100% quarantine until 2025.

Which brings me to my final thoughts.  Last night I had a Zoom happy hour with my college friends (the famous crew from Miami).  We were all talking about hitting a “pandemic wall”.  We’re tired of the constant stress of the unknown and uncertainty.  I will leave you with a thought from my friend, Jackie, who said “learn to relax into it.”  So perfect!  Control what you can control.  Breathe and relax into the rest.  And wear a damn face mask when you go out!

Be safe out there.

Transitioning to Self Isolation

[Author’s Disclaimer:  Any comments by my editor are hers and hers alone, unedited by me. 😉 ]

When I first began blogging, I shared my thinking around the five steps involved in transitioning to retirement.  You can check out that critically acclaimed three part series here, here and here.  Ever the scientist, I have continued my work in this area.  This research, which involved overhearing at least one conversation and tirelessly scanning through Facebook, has found, amazingly, that those five steps apply equally well to transitioning to Self Isolation.  To do my part in being of service to others during these difficult times, I share below these five steps to ease your mental strain as we move into April 2020—sure to be a month in which we will need some humor.

As with the Five Steps of Transitioning to Retirement, you are required to move, in order, through each of the Five Steps to Accepting Self Isolation.  Residence time in each stage will be different depending upon your particular situation and you might recycle here and there as stressors change, but you WILL go through each of these stages in turn. 

Step One: Detox  Detox in Self Isolation is not wholly different from detox in retirement in that you are for the most part separating yourself from your work environment.  The physical difference causes all but your limbic system to shut down and I’m sure that if I had access to a functional MRI, knew how to use it and interpret the scans, and was able to get within six feet of a willing volunteer, I could prove that.  Suffice it to say that I’ve seen enough evidence to support this theory:  not waking up until 8:00 or later; extensive savoring of morning coffee; pajama bottoms and slippers never coming off (please rotate pairs and do some laundry); and, high activation barriers to really engaging in work.  Depending on your work situation, number and age of children, and access to various streaming services, you will spend different amounts of time in this stage.  As with retirement, though, allow yourself to sit and drool a little while.  It’s good for you.

Step Two: Endless Vacation  During Self Isolation, this stage takes the form of Home Work Projects.  We are all, apparently, incredibly industrious elves just waiting for the opportunity (meaning “time”) to tackle a range of organizational and home improvement projects.  It has not been desire that has stopped us, no!  We have just been pulled away from home too much.  But, now!  Now we can take our commute time, shopping time, socializing time, exercising time and focus it all on the hall closet!  How’s that working out for you?  Yeah, unlike during the transition to retirement, this stage is often really short.  It doesn’t take long to figure out that time was indeed NOT the barrier to cleaning out that closet. And that’s okay. To continue to avoid these tasks, move on quickly to Step Three.

Step Three: What Day Is It?  This is the toughest stage, both in transitioning to retirement and to Self Isolation.  Even though I’ve been retired for coming on four years now (wow!), I had built enough structure into my days to at least remember to put the trash cans out on the right night.  But now, all the days seem to run together.  No matter the day, there are press conferences on TV on a continuous stream.  My workouts are down in the basement and frighteningly similar (meaning “not very taxing”), which is why I prefer the YMCA.  I had gotten in the habit of putting on real clothes every day; now I’m back into continuous sweat pants.  Thank goodness for the discipline of the Weight Watchers eating plan or I’d be in serious trouble.

The third stage, when you are feeling lost, is the one I believe most of us are struggling through right now.  It’s hard to concentrate even though there is a lack of quality distractions.  Underneath it all is the nagging uncertainty of how long this will last and how bad this pandemic will get.  Everything starts to get on your nerves and, yes, the mail truck is a daily bright spot.  I’m interested to see how history treats this time period.  In the meantime, know you are not alone in your frustrations and struggles. 

Remember, though, the reason we are doing this: it’s about trying to lower the load on our healthcare system by reducing the spread of this crazy contagious virus.  We are actually doing something for the good of the community ahead of what we sometimes feel would be better for ourselves.  Pat yourself on the back for that!  Go ahead and have some ice cream.  Or a drink.  Or an ice cream drink.  Or two.

Step Four: Catharsis  I’ve struggled over whether or not “catharsis” is the right word to use for this stage.  The definition of “catharsis” is “elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression”.  Maybe something around a “Eureka” moment is more what I was after.  But as I look at that definition, I think I had it right all along.  Once we bring the nagging discomfort to the surface and put some verbiage to it, we can move on to that Eureka moment.  That’s when you find the right pattern to your daily life under Self Isolation.  There’s a little work, a little play, a little teeny tiny bit of productive activity, a little learning, a little fun.  You get a beat to it all.

Step Five:  A New Normal  Normal, but temporary nonetheless.  Here are some of my suggestions for getting to this stage.  First, make sure you get a good belly laugh each day.  If you pee a little bit, all the better.  Second, go outside and breathe a while.  Take a walk around the neighborhood.  Hey, you have a great excuse to cross the street and avoid the neighbors you don’t want to see.  “Social distancing,” you yell as you smile and wave from a distance.  Enjoy it while you can.  Finally, set little daily goals.  Begin, please, with “bathe”.  Work up to that hall closet.  You might just find a few new habits that you’ll want to keep once we’re through this whole thing.

[Editor’s Note:  Okay, we’ve already established that Sherri is the “smart” one in this couple, uh, and also the “nice” one.  But here, folks, is the real poop on how to survive “Social Isolation”.

Step One:  Detox  Contrary to the title, you should be imbibing in your “drug” of choice to get through this—chocolate, fried foods, wine.  Or chocolate covered French fries dipped in merlot.  Whatever.  JUST DO IT (thanks, Nike…)

Step Two: Endless Vacation  I don’t know how you feel, but I’ve had more fun in some Third World countries I’ve visited than I have in this last month!  Hell, even my African dysentery incident seems like a picnic to March 2020.  But I digress….  My home improvement projects have included painting every room in the house.  Not sure any of them needed it, but the disarray drives Sherri into a different room—and we both pass out by 7:00 pm from the fumes.  Try it.

Step Three:  What Day Is It?  Only 1 day counts—Sunday, for CBS Sunday Morning and an afternoon of Sunday paper reading/puzzles.  The New York Times Crossword has kept our marriage together. Not because we do it together, but rather because this is the only way I feel adequate and convince myself I am not intellectually stultifying Sherri (yes, getting back into therapy is on my post-COVID list).

Step Four:  Catharsis  This is when the wine and paint buzz hits.

Step Five:  New Normal  Don’t know WTF this will look like but I’m sure glad I have a life partner that can laugh (and wet her pants) with me!

Stay Safe Everyone!  Trish, the dumber, meaner Editor]

When an Introvert is Told to Stay Home

The other night, as Trish and I were watching the evening news, our State’s Governor was shown imploring people to stay home as much as possible to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.  I know that staying home is a challenge for a lot of people, especially if you have young kids who should be in school or work at a job that is not amenable to working from home.  However, at this pronouncement, Trish and I looked at each other and suppressed (sort of) wry smiles.  Telling two introverts to stay home is not exactly a hardship.  Herewith, a little lighter side of the impact of the coronavirus.  We could all use a bit of a laugh right now.

On Sharing the Same Space  Our house is not huge but it’s big enough.  Big enough for us to be in totally different parts of the house and not see each other all day.  Except we don’t do that.  For some reason, the four of us (me, Trish, the two cats) always seem to end up in the same 10 square feet and we’re mostly ok with that.  It’s like the Anti-Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Take this morning, for instance.  Since we all ended up in the upstairs bathroom brushing our teeth together (the cats weren’t brushing; just assisting), we all decided to go into the basement and get in a workout.  The Beloved YMCA is closed, so we had to figure out our own thing.  Trish was on her recumbent bike.  I was on the treadmill.  Beau was on the yoga mat.  Bridget was losing her favorite Blue Ball behind some boxes.  Then Trish was lifting some weights, I was doing abs on the yoga mat, Beau was still on the yoga mat, Bridget was whining and furiously looking for her Blue Ball.  Did we need to be in that small space together?  No.  Did we get in each other’s way? Yes.  Were we ok with that?  Yes.  Did I find Bridget’s Blue Ball? Yes.  Did she lose it again in 2 minutes? Yes.

On Going to the Grocery Store  About the only outing we seem to be taking is to get fresh food.  I, fortunately, had gone to Costco and bought toilet paper because we actually needed it the week before the COVID hit the fan, so our focus is actually food.  We sometimes go together but I mostly do the grocery shopping because I enjoy it.  We have been on Weight Watchers, with gratifying success, since the start of the year so we shop mostly for produce, beans and spices.  I went yesterday for the weeks’ needs.   We were traumatized shopping in the “corona frenzy” last Friday morning, so I was a bit anxious.  The lot was not crowded, nor was the store, as we all sized each other up from a safe distance.  While there were signs of an on-going riot in the paper goods and spaghetti sauce aisles, the produce section continued to be a fine place to practice Social Distancing.  I strolled to the lettuce area, dismayed to see nearly empty racks of bagged greens.  Then I heard a voice around the corner say, “I got all the bags of spinach.”  I followed the voice to see a woman and her teenaged son reviewing their prize of about a half dozen bags of spinach.  I asked, “Did you take ALL the spinach?  Could I have just one bag?”  She didn’t want to give me one, I could tell, but she also couldn’t say no.  I thanked her and rolled off to get peppers and zucchini.  I didn’t even want spinach.  It was just the principle.  I saw her later when I was looking for ricotta and she was grabbing the last package of sliced cheddar.  I looked at her.  She asked if I wanted the bag of cheese.  I said no, but thank you.  Maybe I should have taken it.

On Going Stir Crazy  While I have established that we are both (all four of us?) Introverts Who are Happy to Stay Home, when you are somewhat REQUIRED to stay home it’s a bit different.  The one regular activity that we miss like crazy is our almost daily treks to the local YMCA.  It’s not just the exercise, although Trish misses her water aerobics as much as I miss my spin classes.  It’s the community of friends we miss, as well as the change of scenery.  After a morning at the Y, spending the afternoon reading and writing was a luscious indulgence.  Burn a little incense, make a cup of tea and I was in heaven.  Now, after an hour of reading (if that), I get nudgy.  To deal, we are taking walks around the neighborhood (with appropriate Social Distancing when we come across other people).  We had a neighborhood conversation yesterday with no one leaving the end of their driveways, and just yelling a bit to check in with each other.  Stuff is getting organized, although it still requires a little push for me to act.  But there is ONE thing that gets us excited every day.  The sound of the mail truck is like hearing the intoxicating melody of an ice cream truck.  “The MAIL!” one of us will exclaim, and we wait at the window until the truck is a few doors past ours to not look too anxious.  I create a distraction by “accidentally” kicking one of the cat bowls so Trish will clean it up (she’s obsessive about that) and I run outside.  It’s not like anything good ever comes in the mail anymore; nor are we forbidden to go outside and breath fresh air.  It’s just….good lord, I don’t even know WHAT it is!  But Sunday’s are hell.

On Getting on each Other’s Nerves  Lest you think our lives as near shut ins are all rainbows and unicorns, there are times when I have to go north and she needs to go south.  Little things start to rub.  I, for instance, eat too quickly and then get the hiccups.  I also talk back to the TV, particularly Pharma commercials and (increasingly) press conferences.  Trish has still not grasped the concept of recycling and I’m constantly fishing things out of the garbage to rinse and put in the bin.  Additionally, the logic this woman uses (or doesn’t) when it comes to loading a dishwasher is beyond me.  Who puts a small bowl in the middle of the empty bottom rack?  I also find it annoying that she so quickly came up with a list of things I do that annoy her.  Seriously, though, we do get on each other’s nerves at times which is not unexpected in a situation with the constant underlying stress of uncertainty.  In fact, I recently read that as the quarantine restrictions are being lifted in China that divorce filings are sky rocketing!  Yes, this is a time when we must all give each other a bit of grace!

What an amazing time this is for us all!  I cannot think of another instance when the entire world was dealing with the same crisis all at the same time.  This is different from being aware of a crisis.  The world responds when there is a hurricane somewhere, or we send all kinds of thoughts and prayers when there is some tragedy.  But those crises are all localized, even if the awareness is global.  This time, though, the crisis itself is global and we are connected enough to see it all unfold in real time.  We are seeing more and more instances of how this crisis is bringing out our collective humanity, which is heartening.  I, for one, have been vociferously thanking everyone working at the grocery stores when I go to shop.  Facebook is filled with things like free concerts from musicians, virtual art shows, famous actors reading books to kids, and all kinds of nice stuff—instead of all that nasty crap that had filled my News Feed so much that I was spending virtually no time on the app.  Finally, Facebook is doing again what it says it was built for—bringing people together.  My Mom’s Rabbi said in his video sermon this week that maybe this virus can be seen as the Universe sending us all a “timeout”.  Let’s use it for that.  We don’t need all the chaos and messed up priorities.  We need the humanity.  Please remember that when the shelter-in-place orders are lifted.  Trish and I put in our wedding vows that we would make sure we gave each other a good belly laugh every day.  It’s more important now than ever.