A few months ago, I started having weird dreams, and I know this sounds far fetched, but one morning I told my husband that though the dreams were kind of scary—not quite nightmares, but still disturbing—I felt like the message was that we were about to experience some kind of threat.
I remember saying, “I don’t think we’re going to die or anything like that, but something is coming for us.”
EEEEEKKKK!
Let me be clear I had no idea that Covid-19 was headed our way. I never could have imagined a scenario in which we would be quarantined in our homes for weeks on end. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I thought, but it wasn’t this.
My dreams aren’t THAT vivid.
Nonetheless, a threat is a threat, and humans respond to threats in predictable ways. You know these already, but I’m going to list them again here:
Fight
Flight
Freeze
I have to give a shout-out to Chanel Dokun, a certified life coach, who clarified these responses for me.
She said everybody has a go-to response. And that now, especially, a lot of us are experiencing something called “emotional flooding.” Maybe you feel this way, too—overwhelmed, unable to take in and process information; stuck in a repetitive thinking loop, and losing empathy. If this is you, you are not alone.
How are you handling it? Are you fighting? Fleeing? Or freezing?
Allow me to tell you a story:
One gray morning, I was walking the paths along the back nine of the golf course near my house. My friend and I started early, just after daylight but before the real golfers made it back that far. And of course we saw wildlife—birds, squirrels, chipmunks—the usual stuff.
But on this particular morning, something unusual ran out from the woods at us. A bobcat! Or what I thought was a bobcat. I stood rooted to the spot, assessing the situation, getting my bearings, and trying to decide what to do (is this a bobcat? Is he going to attack me? ).
But my companion wasted no time. In a flash, she had circled behind me, grabbed my shoulders, and used me as a shield against the attack.
Some friend!
Don’t worry. We were totally safe. Turns out, the “bobcat” was just a loose Golden Doodle, and it only wanted to lick us to death.
But the perceived threat was real. She fought; I froze.
Freezing seems like the least helpful of all the stress responses. Am I right?
If you fight, you might be able to overtake your attacker. If you flee, maybe you’ll have a chance at getting away. But if you freeze (like me) then you’re only in luck if you’re being attacked by a black bear. In that case, I’ve heard rolling over and playing dead work really well.
Covid-19 is a very real threat.
But it’s not the one that stopped me in my tracks six weeks ago.
My email inbox is making me crazier than my fear of getting sick.
That’s the thing that’s causing the real emotional flooding.
Every single company I’ve ever interacted with on any level has suddenly jumped into action mode. I am getting all kinds of invitations to join them online. And I don’t want every minute of the day to be scheduled with zoom calls and virtual trainings. I don’t need another disclaimer outlining “our response to Covid-19.”
All along, I’ve just been trying to figure out my own response, so I started using the DELETE button a lot!
Can you relate?
I didn’t want to be online MORE.
And believe it or not, I also didn’t want to be online LESS.
I simply wanted to leverage the time ON MY OWN TERMS.
So I made a plan that worked for me.
But the plan that’s working for me isn’t the plan that’s working for everybody else. Case in point: the ice cream I ordered for my nephew’s birthday was somehow lost in cyberspace, and then even though I spent all kinds of time researching the “mystery of the missing ice cream,” I forgot to call the kid and actually wish him a happy birthday!
(Palm to face) I’m the worst.
After six weeks of shelter-in-place, I’m ready to get back to business-as-usual, too. I mean, it’s been real, but let’s be honest—there is no substitute for life with human beings. We may be flawed, but the computers are the real problem.
Did anyone else have this poster hanging in a public school classroom in the 1980s?
“To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.”
Ironically, the guy that quote is attributed to most often wrote a famous book called The Population Bomb, in which he proselytizes a dark future as the result of overpopulation.
Fighting and fleeing require a ton of energy. But as my friend Laura says, “Busyness is not a business!” And right now, conserving energy seems like a smart move.
Plus that word—FREEZE— means something else. When you freeze something, you’re preserving it for the future. (Remember that wedding cake you ate on your first anniversary?)
A few years ago, I met this old guy who had lived in our community his entire life.
His motto was “I’m 95 and still alive!”
We loved listening to his stories of the “olden days,” of walking three miles to school and getting there early to light the stove before the other students arrived, of growing his own food, and even building the very house where he still lives today.
But the thing he loved talking about most was his dead wife, Jeannie.
His eyes glistened with tears at the very mention of her name. And she had been gone almost eight years! He loved to talk about how they met and how wonderful she was. In his eyes, Jeannie was a saint.
I remember thinking, “Wow! I hope I always feel that way about my spouse, too.”
Six weeks of social distancing and sheltering in place has provided our family with a lot of togetherness. Families raising teenagers don’t typically get to talk about family time like it’s a family value. But for us—being at home with one another day-in-and-day-out has been invaluable! It is an unexpected gift.
So if your response is to freeze-like me—don’t beat yourself up over it.
I have a feeling that when we are 95 and telling our own stories of the olden days, they will not include how many new clients we got or how many house projects we finished. I think we’ll be telling the story of how we spent time at home with our people, how we talked, and read, and did puzzles and cooked and ate together. How we called our friends and wrote letters and sent surprises in the mail.
That computer quote I mentioned earlier is actually a riff on an earlier quote by literary figure, Alexander Pope. He said:
“To err is human; to forgive divine.”
And I love that because there will never be a time when I’m surrounded by people who love me more than the ones I’m with right now. We can sit around our table and have the best conversations, and we can also face off in our living room, shouting and pointing fingers. We can be the best of friends and the worst of enemies—all in the span of about two minutes!
But I think we’ll all be okay if we can resist the urge to fight or flee.
And just stay.
For the time being, everything else is just background noise. We’re going to mess up. The computer and everything else will get on our nerves. Stay and forgive. Stay and love. Stay and make peace.
I hope that when this is over you can say your people got the very best you had to give. Because the best story is always the one that begins and ends with you.