Extending grace
Disclaimer: I’ll do my very best to avoid any triggering words like ‘lockdown’, ‘coronavirus’, ‘pandemonium’, ‘pakuromo’, ‘panny’ or the likes — but I can’t make any promises.
It’s been a really difficult time, man. As I’m typing, I’m wondering whether it’s worth going into, or if it’d just be easier to trust that you can probably empathise.
This isn’t March 2020, we’re not taking walks by the river anymore. We’re not strolling to the high street during our lunch breaks. We’re waking up to dark morning in a sea of clothes, working through our lunch breaks until the sun sets and returning to the same sea to do it all over again.
Weekends feel like breaks between meetings and I spend most Sundays waking up in a panic, thinking it’s already the start of a new week. When Frank Ocean said “there may be smiles, but a few”, I felt that. Spiritually.
I’m an extrovert (an ENTP supposedly), and I’ve made peace with the fact that I need people. I need my people. Seeing them less has taken something from me — more than I care to admit here and now. The part of me that depends on people felt embarrassed that I was struggling with the idea of staying home.
I was past the point of cabin-fever jitters. At my lowest, I found myself napping every two or three hours to end the days faster. And sure, thousands more people die, some closer to home than others. But the problem with staying in or out for me is, one way or another, my health is deteriorating.
Still, in the midst of it all, I still have goals I want to achieve. I promised myself I’d be more intentional. I set expectations without thinking of contexts. Who cares if my way of living has been completely altered? My prime years aren’t waiting for things to smooth over. Who do I think I am trying to take a break? Time hasn’t stopped — the bread still needs to get got.
I know life is hard. Harder than usual. I know how taxing being away from my loved ones has been, and I know how my unhealthy work/life balance has become. Somehow though, when my friends express how rough the last few months have been for them, I always seem to know just what to say. I always remind them that we’re in the middle of a panoramic, and it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to feel unfit, or tired, or lazy, or uninspired. I empathise, daily. How then is it possible that I can’t extend that same grace inwardly? How is it that I can only be understanding to everyone else’s hardships, and not my own?
I’ve never had many goals for myself, but I’ve always held myself to an impossibly high standard. I don’t know where the pressure came from first, but at some point, I woke up and felt like I just needed to have my shit together. I was the daughter that was trusted to have it all figured out. I was the black girl with the white middle-class friends that had something to prove. I was the imposter in new spaces doing ten times more than everyone else, trying not to get caught for being a fraud. In all the things I tried to gain, I never granted myself the right to exhale.
But in life, if you don’t hear…you feel. I’ve spent years punishing myself, and now that life as we know it has ground to a halt, I’ve been forced to finally listen to my body and her decade-long woes. Everyday, I have to remind myself to unclench my jaw or to relax my shoulders. The idea of *actual* rest is so foreign to me that my worries follow me into my dreams — and this isn’t poetry — I often wake up at 3am to be reminded of that one thing I couldn’t finish.
I can’t say I haven’t improved. Unticked tasks don’t seem catastrophic all the time. I’m putting effort into sleeping — and actually sleeping. I’m dwelling on mistakes less, and I’m saying ‘it’s okay’ to myself more.
There’s no cathartic conclusion here. This post is as tumultuous as the reality we’ve been living in for the last ten months. To put it simply, I’m working on me. I allow myself to make errors and not let it stain me. I force myself to affirm that I deserve rest. I deserve all of the great things available to me, and grace is part of that. I say it to myself everyday, and I’m hopeful that I’ll start to believe it soon.
