The economic impact and dangerous symptoms created by COVID-19 caused a surge of fear, rage and confusion that covered the entire planet. Tragedies that happen every day continued to happen every day, but the emotional weight of them could no longer be avoided. This is an overwhelming time. You may feel hopeless, helpless, and lost... It's certainly understandable given everything that's been going on.
Recognizing an issue is only one step towards addressing it. In order to address the issue it is vital to recognize your individual accountability in how you feel and how you behave. It is notoriously difficult to be self aware, but this is probably the most important time in your entire life to get your shit together.
You can't change what happened in the past, but there are ways to improve your quality of life today. I'm not talking about the fallacy that being positive can fix everything. That notion is utter bullshit. What I am talking about is an honest, long-term dedication to being stronger emotionally than you are right now. Life is a mix of the mundane and the horrendous. In order to experience joy, we must be willing to accept suffering as a condition of life. As Brene Brown wrote, “The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows”.
Being resilient has a positive effect on every aspect of daily life because it increases our ability to problem solve and mitigate uncomfortable situations. A resilient community is built by resilient individuals working together. There is no path to community resilience without personal accountability, compassion and honesty. If we avoid our pain, we avoid the solution to that pain.
My mentor has a phrase that she brings up when people are actively avoiding their trauma. She says, "the only way past it is through it". Using avoidance as a primary means to cope with distress leads to maladaptive behaviours and poor mental health. The only way to become resilient is to go through our difficult emotions.
Emotional resilience can be described as an ability to successfully adapt to situations that cause extreme distress. Building resilience takes time and intention, as well as an ability to recognize and utilize resources. Resources can be internal or external, general or personal, medical or non medical. For people in chronic pain and/or suffering from mental illness, prescription drug intervention may be a necessary resource. Even if you are vehemently against Rx medication, many people use them safely to mitigate their symptoms successfully under the advice of a doctor. Alternative medicine is often treated as a public joke due to misinformation, but it includes many drug-free, evidence-based therapies such as Acupuncture.
Medicine is as much art as it is science; there is very rarely one treatment to resolve all of an individual's symptoms. What works for one person will often not work for another, and what is traumatic to one may not be to another. There is nothing more personal to you than your quality of life. Do not let another person define how you feel about yourself, your limitations, or your struggle. You are the authority on your quality of life, and not a single other person; not even your doctor.
Suffering is an inevitable part of life, but its up to us to make the decision to be better to ourselves so that when joy presents itself, we are ready to accept it.
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