My Post-Pandemic (spoiler warning, not) Crisis - Part I

When the COVID-19 pandemic blossomed back in the spring of 2020, I was all-in. Sometime in the first weeks of the crisis, Talking Heads "Life During Wartime" crossed through my listening life and it became the mantra of the next two years. We were on a war footing and I was ready for it. 

 

 

Darkly, I suggested that my life already looked like lockdown, so welcome to my misery, the rest of you. Darkly, I suggested that I was pre-pandemic'd - that the isolation, unhappiness, struggle of my regular life provided some level of protection. Darkly, I quipped that its only PTSD if the trauma were in the past. 

 

I was, truthfully, coming off a period of death and loss. We lost mom at the tail end of 2016. My brother Tom, who I think hung in there while mom was alive,  succumbed to a life of alcoholism in June of 2019, capping two months of crisis as his body failed - lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, cancer in a series of cascading events that took us through 3 extended hospital stays, two aborted returns home, and a final trip to hospice. And finally, my little guy Elo, my beloved doggie companion, passed away at 16 in October of 2019.

I had blogged a bit about grief in March of 2020, thinking I was ripe to go down into it. A week later, the world shut down. Grief would have to wait.

 

Regardless of the hows and whys, I rose to the pandemic occasion. I (along with a few key others) stepped up to save my yoga studio - starting to livestream classes (for free, via Facebook) in the early days of the crisis. Taking advantage of the downtime to knock off some big projects (a 10'x20' storage locker that had been un-opened and paid for 10 years was emptied, 40+ bankers boxes of files were sorted and shredded). I built a live-streaming program, a stretch goal for the studio for many years that we never seemed to know how to get started, in many stage,  that continues to this day. I had enough money to live on, I had no kids or family to take care of, I was comfortable. Bring it on.

At the same time, I saw the pandemic as an opportunity to extract myself from a slew of obligations and commitments that I seemed to fall into and be unable to escape. My folk fest was a two week slog that I had long ago stopped enjoying - too busy to socialize and hang, too busy to listen / watch music. Ballooning felt like work. Playing in the band felt stagnant, and seemed to serve my band-mates more than it served me. And the levels of entangling and over-commitment in the yoga studio and with studio owner Barbara specifically felt oppressive and stifling. When it all went away suddenly - well, Deus Ex Machina. Good riddance. 

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I  was starting to go down. Blood pressure, weight, blood sugar, cholesterol - my body was struggling. I was dying, did not really see a way out, and did not really care. All at the time I was the only person left on the sinking ship of the yoga studio, bailing frantically. We recovering catholics have a Jesus aspiration - no greater love than to lay down ones life for ones friends. And dammit, I was gonna save the studio or die trying. 

Somewhere along the line I noted to Barbara, when the pandemic starts to lift, when things start to open up, that's when I am going to go down. And sure enough, as we ticked over into 2022, my struggle became outward and palpable. I was angry, I was resistant, I was a petulant ass. And, because I was still the one on the bulwarks, leading the fight to save the studio, I was beyond reproach. Fuck you and your advice. I don't see you stepping up....

In June of 2022, as part of the resurrected teacher training program (a program that I steadfastly refused to staff, but got drawn into regardless), our final sharing circle required the naming of an "unreasonable" - something that the trainees could identify as a task to stretch their limits. Things like tattoos or sky diving, or getting married, or breaking up, or getting pregnant, or changing careers, or shaving ones head. My 2022 Unreasonable: to quit teaching yoga. 

It was, in hindsight, a cry for help. And it worked. 

Within a few weeks, Barbara staged an intervention in the form of a lunch date, and I tearfully revealed my pain, my fear, my belief that I was so disconnected from my physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological health that I was close to death. She, no stranger to personal crisis and healing, got me started down the road - both towards getting health insurance (in process) and getting into therapy (well underway). 

Post-pandemic therapists were hard to find. A mutual friend (former yoga studio manager) was now a practicing therapist; she had a colleague with some availability. I'm a cash client (having more money than insurance at the moment) which I am sure did not hurt my chances. And so I was back in therapy. 

And that, friends, is the end of Part 1.