Why "we're all in this together" isn't always better.

It’s not a secret that I had several small to medium challenging life events after first moving to Nashville. I’ve blogged about them extensively. When COVID hit right after the tornado, I had a few people express sympathy that this was happening after all of the other things. At the time, my attitude was, “No! This is different! It’s not just me, it’s all of us in it together!”

And at first, it did seem better. Everyone was experiencing stress, fear, confusion and could validate each other’s feelings and troubleshoot and share survival strategies and tips. It became clear very quickly, that although we were ‘all in this together’ certain people and professions were impacted more than others. The longer this went on the more obvious this became. There are also those people who are ignoring the pandemic, leaving an unfair burden of containing the spread to those who trust science. But this isn’t the place to get into that.

Dean walking Cloud during the snowstorm. The kittens actually enjoyed the snow.

We’re approaching the year anniversary of shut down and people are hitting wall after wall. For many, the end of 2020 seemed like a milestone, the vaccines rolling out was another, the election, etc. But for most of us, these things passed and not much has changed. For people in my age group in particular, there’s no telling when we’ll be able to get a vaccine. February seemed to be the month for hitting walls.

The winter storm effected most of the country last week. I know for a fact that I’m not alone in wondering why this was hitting me so hard when we’d been in a pandemic for a year. Personally, I tried to write it off by recognizing that I had gone from working 14+ hour days for a couple of months to suddenly the gyms were cutting hours due to weather and I was suddenly home and trapped inside. And yes, maybe that impacted me. But everyone was feeling it.

I think that it was just that one last thing.

Aang and Dean in a hotel on the way to Dean’s family for Christmas. We agonized over every aspect of the trip. Calling hotels to determine their safety measures, checking with family members to be sure they really wanted us to come, and dealing with the general stressors that come with holiday travel and kittens that hate cars.

We’ve become so used to this low grade stress. We’ve been through a year of reworking, cancelling, reevaluating everything from birthdays to holidays to visiting relatives to seeing friends. We’ve had to cancel or change every joyous social occasion and many joyous creative outlets like theatre and art museums, etc. Then you throw this week of awful weather on it and it was just one thing too much for a lot of us.

Yes, we’re all in this together. But we’re also all flailing at the same time. Our support system has no more support to give. Those that we’re used to leaning on can barely hold themselves up. In normal times, it’s rare to have a social group have more than one member need a lot of emotional support at the same time. Normally our tragedies are staggered.

If you’re lucky you’ll have a friend who’s emotionally available when you hit your wall. Or maybe you’ll be the one who’s emotional available and you’ll be able to step up for someone. I think that’s all we can do right now. Be there if we can be there, and be understanding if no one is there for us.

But things will get better. Winter will end and spring will come. The only thing you can count on is that things will change.