I titled this blog post the rollercoaster because it accurately describes my days and how I’m feeling about life right now. During this coronavirus season, sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down. Often I’m feeling gratitude for the ride and what it will teach us, and other times I’m a little scared wondering when it will end. If it will end. Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and scream and other times, I’m on cloud 9 surrounded by my family. Can anyone relate?
I vacillate constantly. I want to be productive and organize my house. I make a plan to do it the next day. The next day comes, and I’m tired and feel unmotivated to start. I tell myself tomorrow I’m done eating sugar, and then tomorrow comes, and I can’t resist the m& m’s.
I listened to Glennon Doyle on Instagram today and decided that these up and down feelings I’m having are actually ok. This is hard. I have a senior in high school. And we’re grieving at our house. Grieving the loss of his last two months of high school, not being able to go to prom or graduate at Red Rocks (at least not on the scheduled date of May 14th). My daughter was wrapping up her first high school poms season, and there were celebrations to be had and tryouts for next year to get excited about.
Don’t get me wrong, I am loving the family time. Loving dinners around the kitchen table. I love that we are binging on Netflix together, sitting in the hot tub every night and taking lots of walks and bike rides. We’re laughing constantly and all of that is so so good. I even love that my kids are doing school from home. (I always wanted to be a home school mom.) But all of this is part of my rollercoaster.
My ten year old, who has been as happy as can be quarantined with his whole family, crawled on my lap yesterday and said, “Are we going to come through this?” It made me pause and realize that as content as he is at home, he is also experiencing some anxiety. We all are.
I was thinking about my Grandma Marsh yesterday and just wondering what she would be thinking if she was still alive and experiencing all of this with us. My Grandma was ahead of her time. She was writing in a gratitude journal before anyone else was even talking about gratitude journals. She also kept regular journals. She actually didn’t keep them for her kids or grandkids. She kept them for herself. In fact, she threw them away without consulting her grown children because she had read through them and didn’t see a reason to keep them any more.
I know traditional journaling is not as common anymore. We have Facebook and Instagram and blogs where we document our life. But as much as that documentation might be for us, it’s also for others. It’s to show others what we’re doing, to communicate and stay connected with friends and family. But a journal can be just for ourselves. It can be our way of recording and processing all that is happening right here, right now.
As I was thinking about all this yesterday, I thought my Grandma Marsh would be writing this down. She would be journaling about this time in our lives. And I decided that I want to do that, too. Here’s why and perhaps it’s something you might want to try, too.
Journaling isn’t just for us to record the day’s events. It’s a way for us to process our thoughts and feelings. It’s a way for us to literally dump our brain onto paper. Sometimes I say I have a loud brain. When I have a loud brain it takes me a long time to fall asleep. I go to bed thinking, I wake up thinking, I find myself stressed and having conversations (often not productive ones) in my head. I get distracted, can’t focus on the task at hand, and I’m forgetful.
When I can’t sit with my own thoughts, I’ve noticed that I turn to a numbing strategy, I pick up my phone and I scroll. Sometimes it’s Twitter (when I really want to numb) and other times it’s Instagram and Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy connecting on social media and learning new things from people. But when I pick up my phone to numb my thoughts, it’s not about connecting. It’s the opposite, it’s disconnecting, it’s mindless scrolling. Right now during “coronavirus season” my numbing strategy is mindless snacking.
What if journaling could help? What if it could help us feel and process the rollercoaster right now? What if we spent a few minutes every day writing down what’s on our minds? What if we wrote down our emotions, the reasons we’re grieving, the moments that we are loving during this time with our family but also the stressful ones? Fears, hopes, dreams. All of it, every day. These words aren’t necessarily meant to be read by someone else or even by you. They are a form of therapy. A way for us to process all that is going on in our hearts in our heads and in our bodies.
This is just an idea. Something I am going to start doing to document this time in our lives, to process my rollercoaster. To feel it all and be ok with owning and sitting in my rollercoaster. I’d love for you to join me if you think journaling might help you, too. After all, we’re all in this together. Thank Goodness.
