Humans are super adaptable. This can be seen as a great thing, but I think there are also dangers to this. I wonder if in adapting to a new situation, there is an inevitable forgetting that must happen. A forgetting of how things were.
I’m fresh out of therapy and we ended on a note of recognizing what a year of seriously adjusted socializing could do to us. I’m not going to go into the science of how human beings are social creatures yadda yadda yadda. That’s not my forte. But on a very personal level, I realized this is what this year has meant to me.
I struggle socially. Having social anxiety has never been the phrase that’s hit home for me, though I’m sure to others what I describe sounds like just that. I struggle with imagining that people don’t like me. With believing that there is something so wrong at the core of who I am, that people cannot possibly want to be in relationship of any sort with me.
This is something I was thankfully very aware of by the time that COVID and the social distancing that came with it came to be. My awareness of it allowed me to (mostly) catch myself when my brain was going too deeply into this world of its creation. It allowed me to reach out for support when I needed reminders that this world was one of my brain’s creation. Was not necessarily the reality.
But I fear that there will be longer term implications. I went from socializing with all sorts of people a few times a week, to socializing with a small group of people a few times a month. I went from having ample “data” to fall back on when I needed proof that this one awkward hangout was not proof of my brain’s entrenched thinking. Now, it takes a bit more hard work to “mine the data.” Though there is less of it to mine, that decrease means that every missed connection, every small oversight, feels like it holds more weight. And at a time when we’re all so overwhelmed that it is easier than ever to not be fully present with people when we do hang out. Easier than ever to miss responding to a text.
It is no surprise, then, that I have had bigger and more frequent breakdowns in the last couple of months than I have in a while.
What worries me is how normal this all feels now. And how little we know about when and how it will change. What worries me is all the people who didn’t have a chance to develop this awareness before we went into lockdown. What worries me is our inability as a culture to talk about mental health. I fear that when this is all over (if this will all ever be over), we will all have shared a collective trauma that we have no language to talk about on any large scale.
Sure we are adaptable. We have mostly shifted to doing things a new way. But I worry that we forget what that means. I worry that we forget what we’ve lost. And I worry that we forget to grieve and process that.
tmd 