We Are All Grieving
After my first week of working from home, I found myself exhausted; more exhausted than I’ve been during all but the most extremely challenging “on campus” weeks.
I felt disoriented. Why?
I began hearing from students experiencing a common set of indicators.
Focus? Nonexistent. Motivation? Absent. Organization? Deficient. Anxiety? Profuse. Depression? Plentiful. Feeling at loose ends? Seemingly universal.
For me, making the sudden switch from completely booked, externally-structured days of classes, labs, and studying (or in-person meetings all day) to entirely unstructured days has been admittedly taxing. Going from having freedom of movement to being stuck at home is a shock to my system, and it feels unsettling to not see people I am accustomed to seeing daily -- sometimes people with whom I spend more time than I do my own family. Trying to replicate those relationships over Zoom is impossible.
Sure, I can accept these challenges as realities that come along with efforts to reduce risk while living during a pandemic and say “That is just how it is for now,” but to do so I must also accept this fact: We are all grieving right now.
We are grieving our lives as we knew them. We are grieving an innocence born of the privilege of never having lived through a pandemic. We are grieving what we imagined our lives would be these last several weeks, today, and in the foreseeable future.
Have you grieved the loss of a loved one?
We grieve those people as we knew them and our lives as they were with those people in them. We grieve the innocence that accompanied the privilege of having those people in our lives. We grieve what we thought life would look like with them in the world today and in the future. Losing a person seems much easier to wrap my head and heart around than losing a bunch of abstract ideas, conceptions, hopes, dreams… yet it’s still grief.
Think about how different your life is today than you had imagined back in February. Think about how many unknowns you’ve uncovered in places where certainty seemed to exist only a short time ago.
Now think about those losses.
This is grief.
Grieving often causes people to become unfocused, unmoored. Those grieving often experience a lack of motivation or direction. Daily tasks we performed on autopilot become unfathomable. Anxiety and depression creep in. Wherever anyone reading this is in their life today, chances are we spent a lot of time and energy getting here, kind of like an enduring marriage.
What if we lost a partner of many years? We would feel lost. We have all lost the partner that was our path as we knew it.
Remember: our current struggles make sense.
Maybe having a label to attach to our disorientation helps us understand it. Naming our distress may not make it feel any better, but if we can normalize our feelings and our fears, maybe they will feel ever so slightly more manageable.
Look at the stages of grief. Where are you? Remember the stages do not happen linearly; we are likely to bounce back and forth.
Yes, healing will take time. We will never go back to the old normal. We will establish a new normal. In the meantime, we need to remember to be gentle with ourselves and each other.
Yes, there are things that need to be done each day; things we must attend to in the midst of our grief. There is also time to be and feel. I hope we all find helpful, healthful ways to comfort ourselves through our grief. I hope we all reach out to others, even if it is via Zoom, to maintain some semblance of connection.
I hope we all realize we are seldom in control of much in our lives. This is a moment in time when we cannot even maintain the illusion of control.
Yes, we will get through this. We may discover parts of ourselves we never knew existed. We may look back one day and realize this very trying time proved to be one our best teachers.
Yes, this too shall pass.
Rica Amity, PhD
Learning Skills Specialist
Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences