Some Things That Are Helping

On Trying To Be Kind (If Not Necessarily Nice) To Myself

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what was then an impending milestone — traveling with my family to drop Seb off at their university — and now I’m back to continue processing it all here in the hopes of this being useful in some way to you, Dames Nation, and of having a handy cheat sheet for myself when I inevitably feel somewhat bleak at some point this fall.

I’m still a little jet lagged and am keeping half an eye on the Phillies game as they attempt to clinch a spot in the playoffs, but maybe that somewhat distracted and in-between time zones frame of mind is the right one to be in as I try to capture some thoughts on what I did and am doing that’s working.

I’m working really hard at not approaching this as an opportunity to get an A in this phase of my life, but even when I set aside that frame, it’s still true that I’d really like to be more pulled together than I am. I’d really like to feel as confident parenting at a 3000-mile distance as I do from one floor of the house to the other. I’d like to not face each afternoon worrying that I’m going to worry – and listen, I know. I know how that sounds, but hear me out. One unexpected outcome of seeing Seb off to college is the wholesale resurfacing of all the memories of the emotional rollercoaster that marked my own first semester at college, when homesickness would strike so often and reliably in the late afternoon and early evening that I grew to dread those times of day. 

I indulged myself a lot that first semester, wallowing almost daily in the crummy feelings and rarely doing much to try to feel better, because wallowing felt a lot safer and more predictable. Eventually, I went to therapy at the student health center, where I learned that I was experiencing very normal, run of the mill separation anxiety from my friends and family, which made me feel way better almost immediately. Knowledge! 

Now I can distinguish between self-indulgence and fruitful babying of myself much more easily. One feels nice, but lets me drift in a bit of a daze, and the other is an actual kindness to both my current and future selves, which is what marks the difference between self-soothing and self-care. Both have their place, of course; I write to you now as someone who snagged a very soft pre-owned cashmere sweater on eBay for $40 because I’d been such a brave big girl for the last couple of weeks.

None of my strategies is novel, and all are, to varying degrees, corny, but once again I’m here to say that corniness is nothing but a mean-spirited reclassification of unease about being legible to others as emotional. I didn’t play it cool before, and I’m not going to bother trying to do so now. 

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Journaling: I brought a notebook with me, knowing that I’d want to remember as much of the trip as possible, with as many precise, maybe strange, details as possible. Memory is such a slippery beast, especially in big moments, and I knew we were in for a solid two weeks (if not more) of big moments. Memories from across several days tend to swirl and eddy into a nearly-indistinguishable mass of whatever my brain has decided is the dominant emotion of the time, sort of a casserole of images and thoughts. Tasty, but devoid of subtlety and the moments of humor and oddness and sweetness that crop up every day. Jotting down a couple of sentences some days and several pages on others always, always helps. If I could manage nothing else, I’d stick with this.

Worthwhile Self-Distraction / Lateral Productivity: I brought my knitting with me, too, and managed in one cozy afternoon in my in-laws’ living room what I had failed to do for months in my own: finish the (very simple and straightforward) sweater I’d been working on for literal years. Yesterday, I had plenty of energy but no capacity for making decisions, so I channeled that considerable antsiness into finding and disposing of all of the expired medications I could find in the house. These activities aren’t pressing, but it sure feels good to have completed them, and they’re not draining. 

Oklahoma-ing: not the musical, the emotional transparency pact password from Ted Lasso. I only want Seb to tell me they’re ok when they are actually ok, and I’d always rather know than not know when they’re having a tough time. This takes needless fretting out of the equation, and respecting the deal helps us continue to build mutual trust, even at a distance. We haven’t had to test this arrangement much yet, and I hope we don’t have to, but just having it in place has been really helpful. 

Intellectualizing: aka turning one’s emotional experiences into a story to be analyzed and then edited and retold for comedy or pathos. This is definitely self-indulgent and is a very ingrained habit, so I’m working on being more aware of when I’m doing it, and hitting pause to make sure I’m not doing so at the expense of actually feeling whatever it is I’m feeling. 

Being a Mess and Not Yelling At Myself For It: I’ve cried at least a little bit every day for the last two weeks. On a couple of days that made me question what on Earth I was doing, leaving my child in a whole other country, I sobbed off and on for hours. It’s annoying and extremely undignified, and I don’t love it, but it’s not debilitating, and I know by now that no feeling lasts forever, and the only way out of them is through. Again: no shortcuts? No little sneaky back way out? Ugh, unfair! 

And yet. I had a moment earlier today where I was letting myself feel sad, and in the middle of it, pictured myself sort of collapsing. I saw myself falling down & bursting into a flock of birds as I did, and I keep revisiting that image. It seems oddly hopeful: if I fall down, maybe I won’t shatter into useless shards that could cut someone who tried to tidy them up. I might become something else entirely, and that would be painful in a different way; it’d be sudden, maybe sooner than I could easily adjust to, and maybe without warning, but who’s ready to become something other than what they are, anyway? But maybe there’s room in there for it to be beautiful, too. It might even be interesting, and if I were really lucky, it might even be both.