Have you ever had one of those weeks where it felt like the universe was screaming a message at you? Like EVERYTHING that you were reading, listening to, engaging with kept culminating to the same thing? Ugh. I had that week this week. And it felt like everything was coming down to change.

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” – Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

But as I was considering this, I realized something frustrating. There are people that do not let you change. Or at the least people who view your changing as a direct attack on them. And while they can’t necessarily stop your changing, they often make it so uncomfortable it becomes a struggle to change with any sort of grace or excitement or curiosity at what’s to come.

I guess maybe it’s time to stop talking so abstractly, and get to the point.

I have been playing with change for a few years now. Seeing it as inevitable, allowing it, guiding it when I can. I try to approach this guiding like a good scientist, or a curious explorer: try new things with the option of changing them as needed. Collect data on what does and doesn’t work and proceed accordingly. What I didn’t count on, is how difficult it can be to change things once they don’t seem to be working. Especially when other people are involved.

Last week, after talking to my parents at our once-monthly meeting that we’ve been scheduling for a couple of years now, I got the sense that this wasn’t working any more. Our conversations sometimes flow and sometimes don’t. It all feels very forced. And I realized, oh, maybe it’s time to change the way we’ve been doing things. I don’t really know what to change it to. And since I’ve been the one changing things, it seems like the onus to figure that out falls on me.

I casually brought it up to my brother this weekend. This feeling that the way my parents and I have been doing things for the last couple years isn’t working any more.

“What do you mean? Do you miss them?”

I didn’t think I did and I said so.

He insisted. There were two options for why this wasn’t working. Either it was COVID or that I missed them.

I knew neither was true. And the pressure to have it one or the other left me feeling that this task (that is very much doable I know) is in fact, impossible.

While I know (theoretically) that there are infinite ways in which my parents and I could spend time with each other, the fact that this isn’t working anymore, the fact that it is now failing, brings this dread upon me. Because it feels like if this isn’t working, then I have to go back to how things were before. My experiment failed. I was wrong.

Another option is that how things were didn’t work and how things are now don’t work, and there is a third and fourth and fifth and sixth way of doing things, many of which might not work. Or more likely will work for a few months or years, and then need to be adjusted again in the future.

We have a tendency to think things are final that are not. We think that if someone needs space from another person, it is permanent, unchangeable, and that we will regret it. But that can not be the case, if we let it. We can allow people the space they need and welcome them back when they’re ready, if we are also ready. We can not see people for a few months, not know when we’re gonna see them again, and sit with the discomfort of not knowing, and still allow it to happen.

I think the thing that is not working for me with my parents right now is the planning. When I first took a step away from my parents, they struggled. I probably struggled too. There was no definition. I would see them when I saw them but less often than I had been seeing them when I has been seeing them before. But then they would reach out and we’d talk and they’d say “when are we gonna see you again?” and I’d get annoyed. I knew they were asking out of anxiety. Out of their way of loving, maybe. But mostly out of anxiety. And I figured, a kind way to avoid their anxiety and my annoyance at the question, was to just plan it out. So every month I see them. And at the end of every call we schedule our call for the next month. But I don’t think that’s working any more.

As many of you probably know and experience, there’s not much to report this year. Things are mostly the same one month to the next. We are in a pandemic. In quarantine. Life is limited and it feels that not much is happening. And it makes these conversations feel pointless. On top of this, I have little trust with my parents. Something they are likely amply aware of at this point. I don’t open up to them about much, because they generally aren’t great at responding to the daily hurts and aches and pains. They are quick to try to fix or tell me the things I should have done differently or they ways I have misunderstood.

I know the other thing delaying this change is that change is hard. There is loss and grief and sometimes pain, even if the change is a good one that we chose for ourselves.

Change is hard because it reminds us how little is actually in our control. When we’re walking down our path that’s been planned out to us, we imagine that we know where we’re going, and that we’ll get there so long as we stay on the path. But shit happens. Snow falls and winds blow, the path gets hidden or we get pushed off of it. And sometimes, we see the path for what it is and make the choice to step into the unknown ourselves.

That has been my life for the last five years since I stepped off of one path and onto a patch of grass. I have been exploring this new world trying different directions and off-shoots. Sometimes I stay on a path for a while because it is easier and I can rest just following someone else’s path. There is peace in that. Freedom. Ease. There is time then to explore paths in other realms or other things all together. When we are following a set path we can pay more attention to what is around us, less nervous about where we are going, we spot a cool mushroom under the brush or a cool bird in a tree. Sometimes I stay on a path for a while because it gives me this sense of safety, this idea that I know where I’m going because there’s a path ahead. And then I realize I’m getting somewhere that’s not working. I think, “Oh. This isn’t what I want,” and step off again.

There are people that are happy to weather these changing paths with us. They may not walk with us all the time, but are happy to join us when the going gets tougher to keep us company and help us feel safe. There are people that stay on their own path, or explore on their own, and are excited to see you when your adventures happen to cross. And there are people who stay on that path defined by someone else, scared and screaming at you to come back to it because what if you get lost or hurt or end up somewhere else altogether.

I want to change how I interact with my parents these days. I want to step off this path I created and try new things. But I get worried that instead of coming off the path and exploring with me, my parents will stay stuck and start screaming. Or worse that they’ll say, “See we were right all along. Our path was the right path all along.” And what proof will I have otherwise? Aside from the infinite paths and non-paths around us that they fail to see?

I have been struggling to feel connected to people recently.

It is a frustrating feeling. To want more than anything to feel connected to my friends, and not knowing what’s stopping me from doing so.

It’s easiest, at first, to blame others. To make a running list of all the things that people are doing wrong, of all the way their actions lead to my growing resentment.

I don’t know why this is so easy for me. I don’t claim that to be the case for everyone. I am guessing that it is a result of things I was shown and taught growing up. Which means I can work to unlearn them.

What I recognized today is my part.

You see, in simple terms at least, connection seems to me about being seen and accepted by others. But as I spent most of the day (so cold, brr) hanging out (safely and at a distance) with some of my closest friends, I realized I was filtering myself more than usual. I felt more nervous about saying the wrong thing, about hurting feelings, about being misunderstood, or worse, hurting people despite my good intentions.

That all translates to this feeling, this realization that I’m not really showing myself. And if I’m not showing myself, people can’t see me, I’m not feeling seen.

It’s an unfortunate patterns, because the less I feel seen the less I want to show of myself regardless of why it started. This is something we spoke about at work once, these behaviors that push people away when what the person is really seeking is connection. I know that I need to put a conscious effort into showing myself. I need to share especially those things that worry me to share. I need to get out of this rut of feeling so disconnected and alone even when I am around people I love and who love me.

I feel sorely not enough this week. I feel too judgmental, too angry, too needy, too resentful. So I guess I also feels like all too much this week. All to say, I don’t feel like the me that I want to be. Perhaps it’s time I accept the me I am now and start showing her around. I have a feeling most of my friends won’t be too bothered by her. By not the best version of me.

And maybe when she, when I show myself and feel seen, I will get a step closer to feeling like a different version of me.

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.

I have often struggled with flexibility. For me that meant that if something didn’t happen the way I wanted it to, the way I imagined it to, then I would…give up and move on. Sometimes I would get angry and resentful. I would feel hurt and unsupported.

I’m trying to work on that. Work with it.

I’m on my second month of 30 days of yoga!!!!! The first month, this flexibility looked like taking days off without giving up on the month. It meant that if a yoga practice felt out of my league or outside my interest, I could skip it, but come back to the challenge the next day.

This month, I’m trying something a little different. About ten days ago, I showed up on the mat to a practice that was very active, when all I wanted to do was move slowly, breathe deeply, and stretch. So I let the practice play to keep track of time, and I moved slowly, breathed deeply, and stretched.

Today, I woke up tired but determined to do my practice before work–I prefer to move my body with any intensity before breakfast, it just feels better. But this morning as I entered my first downward facing dog, I realized that was not what my body needed in that moment. I decided to pause yoga and get my workday going early. I decided to come back to this specific practice later. And if it still didn’t sit right, maybe I’d skip a day or do a more restorative practice again. Whatever felt right.

The point of this isn’t the yoga…it isn’t what I ended up doing after I finished work today. It’s that playing with flexibility has opened new options up for me. It’s helped me challenge my black and white thinking, something I am constantly trying to improve on. It’s helped me manage my perfectionism and move my body with somewhat more consistency. It’s pushed me to listen to myself more often throughout the day. And to try things out without committing to them unnecessarily. It’s helped me hold more grace for my friends and for the people around me.

So yeah…stay flexible people.

P.S. No this whole post was not a pun around flexibility and yoga, I promise!

Today I went on a walk with a friend.

We hadn’t seen in each other in a couple of months cause of holidays and quarantines and moves. We hiked all around Mt. Tabor in East Portland and talked. About work (we’re both starting new jobs) and family and politics (a teensy weensy bit) and how we are struggling with ourselves now. We…I just have so much time to be alone with my thoughts.

And there are a lot of them.

Towards the end, we talked some about relationships, and where we are in our in betweeness of things. It was nice because he described things that I remember going through a year or two ago. And in that way, I felt less alone with that, and hopefully so did he.

There was a point where I was telling him about how I did all this work to separate my self-worth from a romantic relationship and how now I felt stuck in this weird way. Like I don’t know how to be in a romantic relationship if that’s not a part of it.

And I’ve thought about that (duh) over the last few hours and it’s irking me. It feels like I did all this work to learn to love myself, and I do, but now I don’t trust myself to hold onto that in a relationship.

And beyond that…now that I love myself, the thought of having to convince someone to love me just sounds exhausting.

And I know that that’s where the rub is. In the idea of having to convince someone to love me. I know that’s not how it works. Or how it should work, I guess. And that’s where I’m stuck now.

That’s the work now, it seems.

I have, unsurprisingly, been all over the place this week. I wish I could wrap everything nicely for you with a bow. The only consistent thought, coming up again and again, is how I have to get comfortable in the gray zone. A good friend put it differently yesterday. Getting comfortable with complexity.

This first started with what to call Wednesday’s events. I have seen arguments to call it domestic terrorism and arguments against that. I have seen arguments saying that demonstration is not a strong enough word. I have seen arguments that calling it a coup is complicated and dismisses coups that have happened elsewhere. I’m not here to explain all the arguments, but rather to talk about complexity.

People do not agree on what to call Wednesday’s event, but they agree that it’s important to be discussing it in terms of white supremacy. White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to people of other races and thus should dominate them. Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that white supremacy also constructed races and therefore gets to decide what races are and who belongs to which race.

This is also complicated because versions of white supremacy can be found in many countries and cultures and groups of people that are not white. We see a preference for light skin in many cultures across the world. Think about skin bleaching in southeast Asia. There is racism within Judaism (a people classified as a race by a Nazi German), with Ashkenazi Jews at the top. There is racism within the Latinx community where Indigenous and Afro-Latinx peoples are often underrepresented. It is confusing and complex to see groups of people who would not be considered white by white supremacists, echo these pyramids of power in their culture.

On Thursday, I started seeing a new complication–what about Jewish people. I saw a lot of Jewish people get angry about antisemitism not being explicitly included in discussions about white supremacy. I saw Black and Indigenous folks get angry that Jewish people were centering themselves in conversations. I am Jewish and to be honest, I cringed at a lot of the ways I saw Jewish people engaging. And I had to sit with that. I have seen some heartening responses from both sides acknowledging that antisemitism has often not been an explicit part of the conversation. Acknowledging that there are Jewish people who are deeply racist. Acknowledging that anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism is still the focus in the United States. Acknowledging the moments of antisemitism by Black leaders. Acknowledging that we all benefit from ant-racism work. This was, is, uncomfortable work. And, as my therapist pointed out, we are unfortunately often in the business of reenacting trauma with each other. Of triggering each other. Of leaving spaces with few people and sides feeling seen and heard.

In therapy, I spoke about my own internal struggle. I am an Ashkenazi Jew. I am white by some standards and not white by others. I have explicitly been told in my life that I am not white. I have also explicitly been told that I am. I felt fear as a Jewish person in the USA on Wednesday as I have following every synagogue shooting that has happened since my family moved to this country. As I did following Charlottesville. I also felt shame and embarrassment that Jewish people were making it about us. These are my feelings and I promise I am working through them, and in the meantime I want to be honest about them. Being Jewish and white in this country is scary for days, maybe weeks at a time. But I move freely. I come with the privilege of class and money and, yes, skin color. I have no accent and most often (and most annoyingly) people that do not know me well, assume I am Christian. It is easy for me to hide, to blend in, as it has been for some Jewish folks for eternity. This is a blessing, yes, and it comes with its own complications.

Being Jewish in this country has been really scary at times, but it has not been the same as being Black or Indigenous in this country. I don’t see my friends and family and community dying of COVID at higher rates because of their Jewishness. I don’t see my friends and family and community dying at the hands of cops in disproportionate numbers because of their Jewishness. I don’t see my friends and family and community being pushed to certain neighborhoods and food deserts because of our Jewishness. I have heard stories of the times that this has happened to us. Of Europe before and during the election and rise to power of the Nazi Party. But it is not happening to us now, not in this way, not in this place, not in this time.

And just like being Jewish in this country does not pose the same threat as being Black or Indigenous. These are all also different from Latinx experiences, from immigrant and migrant experiences, from the experiences of Asian people, from Muslim and Arab experiences, from transgender experiences, from experiences of poverty and houselessness. It is true that none of us experience the same oppression as the other, and yet we all experience oppression. In some form at some time on some level.

The other thing that’s complicated is where do we go from here. How do we move forward as a country knowing what we know of each other now. Knowing that there is a percentage of the population who so desperately believes in white supremacy that they are willing to give up our democracy for it. Knowing that there are people who hate (and fear) Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, and transgender individuals so much that they are willing to watch this country crumble.

How do we call more people in while ensuring safety for those most marginalized? What do we do to reintegrate people who are wanting to take accountability and are wanting to try to do the work? How do we handle the people who don’t?

I heard the other day, I believe from Sonya Renee Taylor, that it is immensely challenging to imagine a future like this because it’s so hard to imagine something we don’t already know. This is a challenge. This is work that we have actively chosen not to do as a country. And so, a country where we do this work feels scary and new and unimaginable to many. Let’s acknowledge that and try anyway.

I think a lot of us assume that what we have been unable to achieve is impossible. I don’t think that’s true. As a country, we haven’t been trying all that hard if at all. But even if it is impossible, is it not still worth trying?

**Please let me know if any language I have used could be improved upon. I am using what I know to be best practice at this time, and language is complicated and fluid and I’d like to know if anything could be worded better.**