I recently connected with a girlfriend over happy hour. I ventured from my home, excited to have an evening out on the calendar. My girlfriend met me after her first day back in the office.
As we conversed on the patio, I felt calm, focused and intrigued by all the energy and activity around me. My friend confessed she was feeling sensory overload. Not only was it her first day back in the office and amongst her co-workers, it was a job she’d begun during the pandemic, so she was meeting colleagues in person for the first time — both people she worked with and folks on other teams she’d never met. It was a much different, more scattered energy than she’d experienced for several months of working at home in yoga pants.
We talked about this adjustment — how “back to normal” is really stepping forward into something entirely different from what normal used to be, and we bring with us a collective trauma of having been through a pandemic (are we through it, though?) — something that changed us all in ways we may not yet fully understand.
And we’ve processed these changes on a rolling basis over many months, at first eager and curious about working, schooling and everything from our homes. I had colleagues who lived alone and were isolated; I enjoyed a new routine of playing cards with my teens after dinner each night. Proms and graduation ceremonies were cancelled and we began wondering when we might emerge. I sent my daughter off to college with her anxiety and strict new rules amidst all of this.
Each of us will go forward with new understandings about ourselves and what we want, and it’s important to recognize our deep truths. Some of us are eager to get back to work in an office, and some of us have found a productive rhythm in working at home. Some of us are vaccinated; others cannot, have not yet or will not. Some of us have recognized a shift in priorities — or perhaps a long emerging swell of something made more clear and stark by what we’ve witnessed and experienced over the past 16 or so months.
Whatever is emerging within you, acknowledge your feelings, sit with them, surrender to any new understanding about yourself and your place in the cosmos. Know deeply there is no right way or wrong way to have changed or processed what may have changed within you. Have grace for yourself and others around you, who may be processing differently.
As we each finished a glass of wine and our nosh, my girlfriend couldn’t contain her urgency to return home to a quieter, more familiar energy. I could have easily stayed longer, enjoying our socialization, so I stopped at the market on my way home to be in the energy of others for a bit longer. In the end, we both found a way to honor what we wanted in that moment.
What do you want now? In this moment? In this era?
(c) 2021 Angela Rae Bushman
Angela Rae Bushman 