A few days ago our daughter celebrated her 24th birthday. She’s been living by herself in her college dorm suite for a month, an experience that has had its ups and downs. Thankfully a friend and former roommate from Dragonfly is moving in this weekend. But that day she was alone.
None of us are big fans of video-conferencing but we stayed lightly linked all day, with a phone call and texts and photographs like the one above of the cake she baked for herself, lemon with lemon-basil icing. We forbore to ask if she was going to spend any time with anyone non-virtually. Anyway, what did it really matter? We were here, she was there.
Last year, having just arrived in Oregon a few days earlier, our daughter was on her own for her birthday in a different way. Not alone alone as she was this year, but surrounded by people she didn’t know. The year before that she was angry with the world (and me) and moved out of our house and into her own digs that day.
After the year of the intensity and intimacy of Dragonfly dorm life, I expect our daughter will look back on her month alone as having been both wonderful and awful. Boringly the same and utterly unpredictable from hour to hour. A time of intense focus and a time of quiet misery. Sometimes depressing, sometimes joyful. A time of industry and a time of sloth. You get the idea. This is how things have been for everyone who doesn’t have an essential job and who has whether by age or circumstance, no reason to leave their home except for food and exercise.
The other day I read a piece both funny and touching in the New York Times Opinion page by Lori Gottlieb and was reminded of the “both/and” concept. She was writing about how, as a therapist, video-conferencing is awful and video conferencing is wonderful. (See link at end).
Enter the “both/and” conundrum. Yeah. The art of holding two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. Supposedly no other animal can manage this feat. I’m not all that sure too many humans can do this either. The point is most of the time it is about what you make of what happens, not so much what has happened. Once something has happened, you can’t take it back. Stuff happens. Bad stuff and good stuff. But a lot of the time this stuff that happens is out of our control. What is under our control is how we act once the thing has happened. We can make it even worse, (by being in denial, or angry, or hysterical and so on) or we can make things better through effort and cooperation. The "both/and" embedded in there is that the thing has happened, but in the end might not be all bad. That depends on us.
There are many people out there right now who are struggling with the “both/and” and want to wish this virus away and for everything to be ok and like it was before. You know, normal. Well, I think I can handle the fact that this is a pipe dream because of what we went through as a family over the last few years, during which time I’ve had to accept that any number of things I had taken for granted or assumed or dreamed of about myself and for my family went flying out the window.
Once something has happened whether it is a break or a virus, we don’t know how we will look back on the event. Right now things feel pretty awful. They felt awful when our daughter lost her way. During the time of this virus we have all lost someone or something or some dream of our future. But I think, because of our experience our family, the three of us have the tools to weather a storm like this together and apart. We've learned to be patient with ourselves and with each other. Because stuff happens.
Would our family have been better off if everything had gone “according to plan” (not that there actually was a plan, ok)? Knowing what I know now that seems . . . so unrealistic as to be absurd. I don’t even think we are worse off. Just something different. Would the human world be better off without the onset of this virus. Maybe? We don’t know because we'll never know now what would have happened in that universe. We don’t know what will happen on this new track we’re on either.
“Both/and.”
Here’s the thing. Too soon to tell.
The only thing that is crystal clear is that we’re going to have to work hard to get through this. Alone and together.
Both/and.
So hang on and hang in there, everybody.
Link to New York Times piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/psychotherapy-remote-covid.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Lori Gottlieb has also written a terrific memoir, funny and wise, about being a therapist called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
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