This is Hard

Americans love signs. We broadcast what we like, what we believe, or what we find amusing on t-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos, yard signs. Once, on a country road, I came upon a house whose owner had turned the entire roof into a ‘Trump 2016’ sign. Putting up a sign allows you to tell the whole world what you think, even if nobody asked.

A few months into the pandemic, a sign like the one pictured above appeared on a street near my neighborhood. I drove by the sign often and every time I saw it, I felt the same mix of anger and disgust. The emotion only varied in degree. One day I might roll my eyes, another I might tip my head back and scream in rage. Imagine a nurse driving by this sign at five in the morning on the way to an ICU flooded with COVID patients. Is this sign more likely to encourage or irritate her?

Life during the pandemic has been hard. We are better off honoring that fact rather than covering it over with rainbow stickers.

Personally, I have become suspicious of anyone who is not prepared to talk about the challenges they have faced during the pandemic. When people tell me, day after day, that they are “doing great” I assume that, at least in part, they are lying. In the face of ongoing social isolation and a shifting pandemic storyline that generates massive uncertainty, always saying you are doing “great” is a clue that you are either uncomfortable being truthful about your emotions or that you are one of those life-like robots from Westworld.

Certainly, we’ve all had our moments of “great” in the midst of the pandemic. We would do well to appreciate those times and to create more of them. What the sign-poster fails to understand, however, is that positivity is not a practice, it is an outcome. Positivity is not something we can turn on automatically, like a light switch. Not authentically, anyway. But this sign implies that even as you sit in traffic with your mask still on after a trip to the grocery, running late to make dinner for three children who are struggling with remote school and spending countless hours of free time in front of a screen because you don’t have the energy to work, maintain the house, and parent 18 hours a day, that if you try hard enough, you can feel positive. And if you don’t feel positive, you are probably doing something wrong. Here’s your rainbow sticker!??

In the initial months of the pandemic, I had the sense that because I was healthy, and because my family members were healthy, and because I was still employed, I had no right to feel poorly. I didn’t feel that I should be “positive” all the time, but I felt that any difficult emotions I experienced were probably just self-pity. What right did I have to feel bad when so many were facing unemployment, serious illness, or the loss of loved ones?

Then a sitcom made me cry. Not just cry, I sobbed. It was November 2020. The show was the AppleTV+ workplace comedy, Mythic Quest. The specific episode was an add-on, shot after the end of season one. It was meant, to give us a glimpse into how the characters were handling life during the pandemic, and the emotion that the episode generated in me caught me completely off guard.

Sitting on my couch, sobbing at a sitcom, I could no longer avoid the simple truth that, employed or not, healthy or not, living in a world ruled by COVID-19 was hard. At times, really hard. I made my way to the bedroom where my wife was reading and I confessed: “This is hard.”

There is a great deal of research that shows that naming our emotions, often called “labeling,” is good for our mental health. Think of the release you feel when you are really irritated and, after trying to hold it in for a while, you finally allow yourself to say, “I’m so angry!” You get a hint of relief, even if you are talking to yourself. There are a few theories about why labeling works, but we don’t need to understand the science in order to gain the benefit of naming our emotions. Sobbing over a TV show was evidence that the pandemic was taking a real toll on me. Admitting it helped me to feel better. It was honest and it was a relief. So, I made a point of reminding myself from time to time.

This is hard.

I gave a talk on this very topic for the European Relocation Association’s Spring Summit back in May. At that time there was a genuine sense that the light at the end of the tunnel was very near. Unfortunately, sometime over the summer, the pandemic finish line was moved. The chart below shows the global COVID caseload on May 21, the day I gave that talk for EuRA. I don’t think anyone on the call could have anticipated what came next.?

I remember in the early weeks of quarantine, spring 2020, taking a walk with my daughter and a friend of mine. My daughter, who was eight at the time, shared her disappointment over not being able to see her classmates. My friend briefly acknowledged my daughter’s sadness. Then, within seconds,, she switched to an upbeat voice and said, “But we’re going to get through this!”

Her forced enthusiasm was like a verbal smiley sticker slapped over top of my daughter’s sadness. I don’t think any of us ever doubted that we would get through the pandemic. What we didn’t know is how long we would be asked to hang on, and what we would lose in the interim.

If we hope to arrive at the other side of the pandemic well, I believe we first need to honor just how hard it has been. Pause for a moment and consider what we have missed. Birthdays, weddings, conferences, holidays, reunions, graduations, concerts, church services, vacations, and sporting events. Some of us have missed the funerals of loved ones. We’ve missed countless lunches with friends, nights in crowded bars, and quiet afternoons alone in a café. We’ve missed chance encounters with strangers, the uncovered smiles of shopkeepers, and being blown away by a busker with a guitar in the subway. We've lost colleagues to layoffs. We’ve missed nights of laughter with our partner because we were just too tired, so we went to bed without speaking. We’ve missed seeing our children act in plays or dance in recitals or play football. My daughter was eight when the pandemic started. She is ten now. One of my favorite singer-songwriters succumbed to COVID. The seats at the Olympics were empty.

We’ve lost 4.5 million people.

The catalog of all that has been taken from us is staggering. While it is important, necessary even, to appreciate our lasting health or our good fortune at making it through, acknowledging our losses is also necessary. ?

This is hard.

And because this is hard, we need to allow ourselves some days when we are a bit less driven and productive than we might typically prefer. We need to understand that there is a reason we lose our patience a bit more quickly. We need to know that there is an explanation for the fact that we are often more tired at the end of the day, and that even though we know we should go to bed, and we say we are going to bed, we cannot bring ourselves to turn off the TV. We need to give ourselves a break and, while we’re at it, we need to give our kids, our partners, our colleagues, the over-worked barista, and our stressed-out clients a break as well. ?

We need to take more walks, call more friends, get more sleep, and delve a bit deeper into our favorite hobby. You know what works for you, so do it and then do more of it. Deep into this lingering pandemic, what could be more important than taking good care of yourself?

As with all challenges, we will be different people on the other side of COVID. I believe we can be better people. We can be more patient, more compassionate, and gentler with ourselves. We can be more appreciative of the countless, tiny blessings that grace our every day. In order to reach that point, we first need to admit to ourselves, or to someone we trust, that this has been hard. By recognizing what we have lost we honor our perseverance. We do so not out of self-pity, but simply because it is true. And because in doing so, we free ourselves to step fully into the inevitable light at the end of the tunnel. It is approaching. Let’s get ready.