The trauma of losing our normal
From the looks of my social media feeds, it appears that the world is in some kind of collective grief right now, specifically the first stage: denial. There is so much talk of “getting back to normal.” People are comfort-eating away the quarantine, just waiting for normal life to resume. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped yet that there is no getting back to normal. Normal doesn’t exist anymore. Having spent the past decade in various stages of trauma, and different stages of moving through it, I feel like I’m watching all my friends pass through this place. And for once, I’m kind of a step ahead.
I think anyone who has been through grief or trauma can identify with this feeling. For so long we have been swimming on our own in our sea of grief, talking about it in hushed voices, reaching out through semi-secret networks to find some sanity in a world where grief is not part of everyday conversation. Now we watch as the entire world is grieving, and handling it in a myriad of different ways, and for once I feel like I have a deep understanding and connection with this. Like, I know this. I know grief. I know bargaining. I know trauma, and waking up in the morning with life just completely turned upside down, and no clear understanding of how it got there. This whole thing is in my wheelhouse.
When I lost my son in 2010, I had no notice. It came from out of the blue, a shock followed by intense pain and numbness as I struggled to work out how a perfectly healthy pregnancy could turn so tragic overnight. For the first few weeks I would wake up in the morning and forget for a minute what had happened, thinking I was still pregnant. Or even worse, that I had given birth and had a baby. Then I had support groups, and friends reached out once they heard, but it took me years to process through all of the emotions. I bargained, I comfort-ate chocolate, I struggled to understand, I read books, I cried, and I held out hope that I could just get pregnant again and easily erase the pain of the past year. Things would get back to normal. 2010 would be written off, and life would resume as planned. And then I miscarried again. And I realized, there was no going back. There was no do-over. I was just going to have to figure out this new world, with this new pain, and this loss.
And in 2015 I broke my shoulder slipping on ice in Chicago, and life changed in a ten seconds. I still don’t have full use of my right arm, and won’t until I’m older and get a shoulder replacement. I would look back and retrace my steps, trying to replay the day so I walked a different way, didn’t make that extra stop for coffee, and instead walked up a different set of steps – ones that had been salted in the main entrance. In my fantasy, I go back to my hotel room, order room service, and wait out the blizzard watching the first week of The Bachelor. Instead I fell, spent hours in the ER, threw up on myself because of the pain and the drugs, which no one noticed for about 20 minutes because it was the last quarter of the Superbowl. And I watched The Bachelor finale two months later sitting in my passive motion chair, which I sat in for 6 hours a day before starting rehab post surgery. It would lift my arm up and down, at various angles and speeds, and it was my job to sit in it and let my arm be stretched.
Through those two I realized that there was no understanding. There was no explanation. Sometimes shit just happens. Life changes forever. And there’s no getting it back. Normal doesn’t exist anymore. Not for you, not for me. It’s up to us to find new normals in this. Waiting for normal to come back is useless. Just like we’re never going to fly on planes the way we did before September 11, this moment is not going to leave us unscathed. It’s going to scar us, just like my shoulder is scarred. Our collective normal is gone, one of the casualties of this virus that won’t get an obituary or a funeral.
Tomorrow I’ll write part 2 of this blog post, which is about how to find peace in a world that has changed forever. But for right now, I just want to validate your pain. If you’re feeling grief and not even sure why – no one you know has been sick or died – your grief is still valid. Your world has changed, too. You have anxiety and fear, and your life changed in a minute. And if anything, it’s made even worse by the fact that we’re all in it alone.
We are truly face to face right now with being lonely and alone. Humans are social creatures. We aren’t meant to social distance. Our species thrives on community. Many of us are alone completely during this time, and that’s not something that sits well with us.
So look, it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to wonder what the hell happened in the past month. It’s – pardon the expression – normal. And while I can’t promise you that things are ever going to go back to the way they were in, say, December 2019 (they won’t) I can tell you that you are going to be okay. We are going to be okay. As a society, we are going to be fine.
I’ll be back tomorrow with some ways that I’ve found peace in times of trauma and grief.
