Managing

Every three months, give or take depending, I have a med check with my psych, and we talk about how I’ve been doing. She always makes me rate things on a scale of 1 to 10. Depression? Anxiety? Sleep? Check, check, check. I hate that part of the appointment, because it’s hard. How do you rate something that’s so fluid? But I especially hate it right now, in the middle of this pandemic. I don’t know how I feel one minute to the next, let alone well enough to be able to assign a number to it.

What I’ve realized though, is that despite how I rate my feelings, I am managing. I’m managing. No more, no less. I see all these people and their quarantine hobbies… their sourdough bread making, and their new exercise regimes, and their foreign language learning, and their freshly painted living rooms, and that’s… not me. And that’s okay.

I recently saw someone on Facebook asking others about their new hobbies, and she said, “There’s no excuse not to be learning something new right now!”

But there is an excuse.

Things are hard right now. Things are different. Things are uncertain. Things are new. It’s okay not to be productive right now! Really, it’s okay not to be productive anytime, but it’s especially okay right now.

It’s okay if you’re not doing a new hobby.

It’s okay if your house isn’t spotless.

It’s okay if your laundry has piled up.

It’s okay if you’ve been watching Netflix like it’s your job.

It’s okay if all you’ve been doing is breathing in and out.

It’s okay if, like me, you’re just managing.

I have had some bad days over the past five months. I have had some very bad days over the past five months. (Fun fact: medication is not a panacea.) But I’ve had good days too – which is exactly what I tried to tell my doctor when she pushed me for a number. Ups and downs are normal and healthy, which is why toxic positivity gets under my skin so much. It’s normal to have bad days. It’s normal to have bad moods. It’s normal to have moments of screw-you-I’m-not-putting-on-pants-or-leaving-the-house-or-doing-anything-you-deem-productive-today.

And a lot of days, days like today, are neither bad nor good. They’re just… days. Days, like Matt Haig says up above, to “be and feel things and get through and eat crisps and survive and that’s more than enough.”

Life will be normal again one day, What on earth this new normal is going to look like, I have no idea. But it will come. Until then, it’s okay to just hang on. It’s okay to just manage.

It’s okay to just be.

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2 Responses to Managing

  1. Well said. “Managing” is OK. God neither condemns us if we can’t get out of bed one day, nor praises us if we run a marathon the next. He loves us, on either extreme and in between.

    And in reality, I think it is the in-between—the managing—in which we touch the most lives with his love and grace.

  2. Lisa from Iroquois

    Nailed it again. Thank you for reminding me.

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