Right Now … This Is The One Thing I Can Do.
I am not sure even what to say or how to put words together or even if I can put words together if they will make any sense, but I think I am going to try and see what comes of it.
For these last few weeks, I have been paralyzed with fear - with anxiety - with anger – with frustration. with the unknown - with the unreachable.
I keep asking myself what can I do? Where I can step up? How do I help this world, my community, my family? Should I share the ways I take care of myself like running or working out in my basement, or how I have been journaling every day to put some framework to my thoughts, or how I hug my dogs and my cat and my husband a little bit longer and a little bit harder these days. Yet, it all lands flat for me right now. What do I do when my husband asks me should he go to work and risk getting sick or should he stay home and we deal with the financial fallout of putting his health over money? How do you answer that? How to you help your friends whose small businesses are hurting or for friends who have lost their jobs all together? How do you not endlessly worry about family and friends on the frontlines in the hospitals going in every day knowing their risk of exposure is high? How do you help the incredible public employees you work for as they continue to stand up and show up in this crisis? Some of them begging for us to stay home telling anyone calling for services to provide crucial information so they can protect themselves when they answer those calls. while others, had to just in a few shorts days change their job description all together from teaching in a classroom to teaching from home. How do I help them? How do I support the state employees helping all of our citizens who have lost work and are trying to get services to help keep them and their families afloat? What do you do? What do you say?
Each day seems to bring with it a new deluge of information and new decisions to be made based on that information. For those like myself who try and gather as much information and data as they possibly can to relieve a growing and building anxiety inside themselves, this time has been an ongoing anxiety attack for days on end. I cannot get enough information to quench the anxiety and the more information I gather the larger and more brutish my anxiety grows. Nothing seems to lessen this growing and yet ever changing feeling of being overwhelmed with the state of the world and overwhelmed with how it will impact my life, the lives of those I love and cherish, and the lives of millions I will never meet.
I have come to the raw and real conclusion at this moment, the one thing I can do right now, the absolute one thing in my control, is to stay sober. While gratitude abounds from my heart that I have a roof over my head, I have clean water, the people I love the most in this world are at this moment safe and healthy, I cannot diminish that I sit here, in today, in the midst of it all, 816 days alcohol-free. For someone who for decades used alcohol to dull, to escape, to numb all fear and anxiety and pain and panic away, it seems like if there was any time to do so it would be now. The unknown makes me feel so out of control and the alcohol could help make me feel less out of control … if only for a moment. And the thought of that one moment seems like the relief I so desperately need right now.
Yet I know the promise of relief and of peace and stillness that I think it will give me -- it will not. It will set fire to the anxiety, it will bruise my sense of safety, it will diminish my capacity to feel my true emotions, it will not allow me to hold space for my husband so that he can also process what is happening to him and to those around him, it will dull my gratitude and my ability to recognize my own resilience.
Staying sober is what I can do right now. It is the one thing I will do right now. It may seem so little in comparison to what others are doing at this moment, and yet, I know it is the most courageous thing I can do for myself. And in doing so, I will be able to find ways to help those around me, to be present to what is happening in the world and in my community, to be there for the people I love the most in the world. Staying sober is not easy on any day, let alone a global crisis. It hurts, it is painful, it is lonely and I feel like sometimes I want to scratch my way out of my own skin. But for my life and for my family it is crucial I sit in the pain and the hurt and allow it to wash over me without trying to get rid of it through a drink. So today, I don’t make any promises to stand up or stand out at the moment, but I do promise that I will be brave enough and resilient enough to know that when I am ready to stand up or stand out or simply show up, I will be sober when I do. I will be proud that I remained sober when all my anxiety is telling me to do is to push it down and numb it away. I will be proud that I felt every single thing I am feeling and survived it.
So for right now … that is the one thing I will do.