We can't "positive thinking" our way through 2022. Let's find what really feels good.
I wasn't prepared for how mad I would be about the new round of COVID mayhem.
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I wanted to write something upbeat for the new year. I did. But I don’t have it in me right now.
Maybe next week, maybe soon. But not today.
Today I’m going on day thirteen of isolation/apartment jail with my partner and toddler.
I’m in a kind of fugue state that might be brought on by a virus, or might just be the bending of space and time that takes place when you have hardly felt sunlight on your face or seen another person for almost two weeks.
Like a lot of people in New York, I knew we might get hit with Omicron, but I really hoped that it would be after Christmas. Alas, we got a message on the evening of Dec. 23rd that our toddler had been exposed at her preschool.
I thought, “Okay, we will isolate for a few days and then take a test and see what happens.” I sent messages to friends and loved ones to cancel our Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day plans. “I have done this before for months and months on end,” I told myself. “A few days won’t be a big deal.”
Halfway through the next day, as the specter of Christmas Eve alone with sushi delivery grew nigh, I knew it was going to be a big deal.
I wasn’t okay spending the holidays alone—again. I wasn’t okay with skipping Christmas dinner and Christmas cheer and traditions and friends and loved ones and spending it alone in my house with no human contact AGAIN.
I wasn’t okay with the ingredients for my favorite cranberry party dip going bad in the fridge, and bottles of bubbly drinks left unopened, and having no reason to even get dressed much less celebrate. And I wasn’t okay with my three-year old not seeing any family, or even playing with another child, for the entire holiday break.
As the initial dismay crashed over me, I could feel the old 2020-2021 pandemic thought patterns trying to bubble up: “It will be fun, you can just cozy up together at home! You will probably make some special memories making the best of it…” but these thoughts were struck dead before they could even form a proper thought bubble. My body wasn’t having it. “NOPE—NO MORE OF THAT. GTFO WITH THOSE LIES.”
My body flicked off my psyche’s attempts at looking for the bright side in this COVID resurgence mayhem like so much lint from its collar.
My body has grown more cynical, maybe, but also I’m starting to think, more wise. It has tried the silver linings thinking for a couple years now, and while it may have served its purpose for a time, that time is now over. Now my body is flinty—it wants what makes it really feel good, and it rejects the fake crap.
If you feel like something has shifted for you, too, I’m here with you. I think part of what has shifted for me this time is that everything is out of control and chaotic again, and there’s this ongoing sense that we are supposed to somehow solve all this individually and pretend it’s okay. My body is telling me that it doesn’t feel good to keep doing that.
Case in point: The short story of our family’s descent into Omicron mayhem over the last two weeks, a story that is playing out for thousands of others at this moment, involved scrambling for tests after we were exposed, finding a few precious kits that were obtained as though they were expensive street drugs, then developing symptoms, but still not having enough tests to properly test the symptoms.
We resorted to driving around town looking for testing tents with shorter lines since the ones in our neighborhood have three-to four hour waits. We found one—and still hadn’t received the test results almost a week later.
By the time all of these hijinks had played out we had spent a week of the holidays isolating and test scrambling, only to finally get a positive result on New Year’s Eve Day. So, then we cancelled our New Year’s plans too, and are now growing beards and eating food off the floor as we grind through another week of isolation—wondering if the first week was even necessary. (My partner and I are vaxxed and boosted, and my toddler’s symptoms are mild and we are okay, but also—not okay).
Many families are going through a similar process at this moment as they try to return to school or work. Somehow it falls to individuals and families to scramble and try to solve all of this—to keep society functioning.
And by the way, as with vaccine equity issues before, it’s often the richest and healthiest that have ample test access, while the sick and vulnerable line up on the sidewalks with their kids, as reported in the Atlantic by Dr. Benjamin Mazer. Fortune reported that Google has caches of tests that it mails out in copious amounts to its employees as a cushy job perk, like the pandemic version of on-site massages—it even sends tests to employees who work remotely from home.
So yes, my body snuffed out any hint of “silver linings” this experience and convincing myself that it was going to be good, as I scrambled to find tests for my toddler amidst government failure and corporate nasal swab gluttony. (To be fair, I have previously benefited from my own university’s unlimited walk-in testing services, and when campus reopens, I will think twice about using a swab unnecessarily while others line up at the COVID van).
I think my total inability to power-of-positive-thinking my way through this means that some of the “toxic positivity” awareness that has been trending might—just might—apply to me.
Health journalist Simone Scully describes toxic positivity as “the assumption that despite a person’s emotional pain or difficult situation, they should only have a positive mindset.” It involves dimissing negative emotions and “responding to distress with false reassurances rather than empathy,” according to The University of Washington Medicine blog.
Eventually this leads to maladaptive emotions like shame, and “results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience,” as Scully writes.
Toxic positivity is highly associated with anxiety and depression (because subverting and dismissing your emotions never works in the long run), and to this chronically anxious person, that makes a lot of sense.
Compulsively dismissing negative experiences also allows people to be individually and collectively taken advantage of or exploited, because instead of changing or challenging our circumstances, we convince ourselves that we could always have it worse.
So I think I’m going to try killing my own false reassurances going into 2022, and instead I’m going to try to do what actually feels good. And one benefit of the grind of the last couple years is that I have gotten better at knowing what makes me really feel good, instead of the things that I force on myself as productivity goals or punishments (see, some silver linings are real!).
Some things that feel good to me are walking in the woods with my toddler and partner, watching for woodland creatures and foraging for mushrooms. This sounds cheesy and made up, but we spent a weekend doing it earlier this year, and it was some of the best days of my life. Reading fiction makes me feel good (I’m looking forward to my friend Jessamine Chan’s soon-to-be blockbuster novel “The School for Good Mothers” and Lauren Groff’s “Matrix” as soon as I’m out of COVID jail).
Making brunch and serving it to people that I love makes me feel good. Good coffee and overpriced pastries make me feel good. Pilates and yoga make me feel good (I could use the cardio, but running makes me feel like garbage, sorry runners!).
Here's to doing what feels good in 2022, and here’s to no longer pretending that what feels sh**ty is okay. God knows we all deserve to feel better this year.
Instagram: @matriarchyreport Twitter: @laneanderson @allisonlichter
So many great points here! Yes, we want to generally have a positive outlook BUT it’s also crucial to our mental health and to finding meaningful solutions to acknowledge how bad things are and feel. Things will eventually get better for a lot of us but for many people it sucks right now.
Yes yes YES (I scream, while masking in my own home because I have COVID and no one else does and I'm DESPERATE to keep my kids at school). With you.