Processing the Pandemic

Posted by Malia Boyd on January 26, 2022

A29B0367 AA1C 42AD 8E70 20241367DB63 1 201 aIn March 2020, I had just found new tenants for my condo in Honolulu and moved with my 17-year-old daughter to Salt Lake City, where we knew virtually no one. We settled into a tiny apartment with only two beds and two chairs as we waited for our wordly possessions to come over from Hawaii in a shipping container. A few days after I started my new job at Evoke, the world shut down and my kiddo and I were locked in this tiny, underpopulated, under-furnished world.

We had virtually no way of making local friends. My daughter could not go to school. She quickly began to struggle with depression. My elderly father who was going to trail me to Utah by a month, was stranded alone in a Hawaiian care home until god knew when. Not long after that, my renter in Hawaii backed out of the lease and I soon began the struggle not to default on my mortgage. All of this, as I was trying to learn and perform at a new job.

About three days into the shutdown, there was a pre-dawn 5.7 earthquake in Salt Lake City. Having grown up in California and Hawaii, I am very familiar with earthquakes; I’ve been in several big ones. But I did not think earthquakes happened in Utah. So, with my anxiety already high due to my isolation and this mortal illness spreading across the planet, I naturally assumed that this earthquake heralded the apocalypse. Literally.

Every end-of-times movie I had ever seen filled my head, and I started planning the various ways I’d act and react to save myself and my daughter. I also began to worry obsessively about more realistic things like what would happen if my daughter, who has epilepsy, had a seizure? Could we get to an ER? Was it safe? Would they see us? And would we be able to get her medicine/treatment when she needed it? They were talking about shortages of all kinds--not just toilet paper and flour.

I could go on and about the mental, financial, and emotional pain we went through during the pandemic—and yet I also know that we were so incredibly lucky compared to hundreds of thousands of others in the U.S. Let’s just say that 2020 and the early part of 2021 were some of the darkest times of my life.

I employed both healthy and not-so-healthy coping mechanisms to get through it. I joined an online somatic therapy group peopled with beautiful, kind women. I took up knitting. I listened religiously to Evoke’s webinars and podcasts. I got outdoors as much as I could, walking and hiking. I quit knitting. I learned Sudoku. I sent my 17-year-old on a three-week Pursuit with Evoke to get her some support and new perspective and also to give myself some space. I ate A LOT of sugar. I watched A LOT of television. (Forty seasons of Survivor, anyone?) I took up roller skating when the weather warmed. I taught myself how to groom our dog (horrendously). I forgot Sudoku. (Let’s be honest, I hated it.) I took up crosswords.

And somehow, we made it through the hardest parts.

The second half of 2021 got better. We learned to live with the new normal. There were even a few moments when the world kinda re-opened for a bit and I got to go back home to Hawaii and feel the silken ocean on my skin again. Slowly, I sloughed off the ever-present fear and started to hope once more. I began to connect in person with new friends in Salt Lake City. I felt competent in my job. My daughter got her GED and started to work full time. We were building the new life that had been on pause for a year and a half while we endured the pervasive paralysis of Covid.

But quite frequently I would still cry over the hardship, loss, and deep loneliness we all—the whole world—suffered through. I felt lingering trauma over the pandemic and all that happened during the worst of it. Sure, I also felt resilient and excited at the prospect of a new, sort of normal life. But the sadness endured.

In fact, I brought this very situation—my lingering pandemic depression—up at my recent in-person Evoke Therapy Intensive. I worked with my therapists there and revealed to the group the shame I had over still feeling hobbled even after the worst of it had seemingly passed. My Evoke therapists and my group helped me to realize a truth: I am not yet “over” the pandemic. It traumatized me. And I will have to work intentionally to process that trauma and move through the remaining pain and stress I experience because of it.

It was also at my Intensive, when a couple of my other group members echoed my feelings, that I learned I am not alone in my “pandemic trauma response.” Many people lost jobs, homes, and loved ones. Many felt crushing loneliness and despair. Many had their lives changed permanently by this endlessly unstable situation. And just because the whole world went through it and many people are “moving on” does not take away from that pain some of us still feel. It doesn’t mean we are weaker or somehow inferior to those who have picked up their luggage and traveled ahead.

For me, though, it does mean that I want to be deliberate in my therapy sessions and my daily life when these dark thoughts arise. I want to feel the pain, acknowledge it, let it move through me, and then move beyond me. That sounds hard and scary, but it also sounds liberating and worth it: The thought that someday I will look back on these years (years!?), and say, “Wow, that was hard,” and then let that thought pass, just as if it were a cloud moving through the endless blue sky.

Comments

Thank you Malia for sharing your story. I have come to know you through our work together but learned so much by reading this. Not surprisingly, you express yourself with grace and whenever I am in you presence, I feel lucky to have you there. Carry on! With love and admiration.

Posted by Betsy Kalish

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