Letting Everything Happen: A Covid Journey by Clare Naden

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final” - Rainer Maria Rilke

Never have so few words meant so much. I first saw them last December. It was at the end of Jojo Rabbit, a film that was creating quite a stir at the time as it was a satirical take on Hitler seen through the eyes of a young boy. Some thought it was completely disrespectful; others, like myself, thought quite the opposite. It showed how utterly absurd the war really was. Like everything, it all depends how you look at it.

A few months later another type of ‘war’ was declared, and soon after, I began my own battle with Covid-19. Little did I know that these few words from a film would be a savior in the dark days ahead. 

At first I wasn't concerned. I wasn't 'at risk', so I paid more attention to the symptoms of friends who were sick at the same time. Each day we would check in to see how everyone was faring. 'Je respire' became our catchphrase of the moment. 

Until day four when I found myself gasping for breath and calling an ambulance.

What followed was many months of terror and very little beauty. I had every imaginable symptom, including breathlessness, extreme fatigue, violent diarrhoea, a brutal loss of smell and intense muscle pain. I lost 10% of my bodyweight, went to hospital twice, took three full months off work, with a further 6 weeks half time, and spent many, many days oscillating between the couch and the bed. I poured money at things that didn't help at all, such as energy healers and naturopaths, and others that did such as osteopaths and respiratory physios. 

I made use of the crisis counselling service offered by my employer in the times when I couldn't handle it anymore, and my friends felt helpless in my plight. It allowed me to cry shamelessly, and the counsellor even made a useful remark: Sometimes we place judgements on certain symptoms that aren't necessarily correct. Being breathless or having that crushing feeling on my chest, for example, didn't necessarily mean it would intensify and I would die.

It was the worst of times and the best of times, living alone and terrified of dying with no-one to feed the cat, mixed with lots of loving messages and calls and friends running errands and everyone asking after me. 

But it went on for months, and when, despite all the tests and scans and doctors perplexed I was still battling away, I realised that the only one who could save me was me. 

I discovered there was a 'rehab Covid-19' centre near Paris for those with persistent symptoms, with lots of helpful advice. I took all I could: a psychologist for post-traumatic stress, a respiratory physio to get me breathing normally, and eating eating eating to get the weight back on.

I also asked myself so many questions. Why did I get it so badly? Why am I even alive? What is the point of life if it is riddled with so much suffering?

One thing was clear was that I couldn't return to my life pre Covid. There were things that had to go. Toast for dinner every night was one. Being so harsh on myself (a work in progress) was another. So too was a university course I had applied for related to the wine industry, which I longed to work in, which felt like an impossible task and had caused many many sleepless nights. Out that went. Going out five nights a week was finished. I asked existential questions, explored spirituality, religion, the afterlife.

September came and I went on holiday with a friend and felt happy to be alive. I felt that Covid had been a gift. It made me put things in perspective, appreciate what I did have. Take things slower, be kinder to myself. 

Yet when I returned from holiday I fell into a black hole. Everything had changed yet nothing had changed. I continued to get relapses, albeit much milder and less frequent. I felt worn down by it all, and by the million tiny hurts, such as the incomprehension of friends, the cancelling of plans and the inability to make future ones, the fragility I felt. I guess I had hoped that there would be some great reward at the end of all this. Yet my life was the same, and my health even worse.

I continued with the search, signing up for a retreat along the lines of healing body and mind in a remote part of France. It all seemed rather unpleasant, but the teacher convinced me he could 'fix' me and all would be so much better in the end.

Yet halfway into it, the teacher fell ill.

I felt a huge surge of relief. Hallelujah! The following day I found myself crying with joy in the middle of a vineyard in the Côtes du Rhône region.

Why on earth didn't I do this before? I didn't need to have a reason, or a university degree to wander in the vineyards! I felt so happy, so alive.

It finally hit me that I didn't need to improve anything. I had everything I needed right there. I had friends, good ones, and a job, also good. I had health that was 'good enough'. I was done with fixing. It was time to start living. 

While on one hand Covid has weakened me, and I still suffer from 'bad' days and bouts of anxiety, it has also given me a confidence and insight like never before. It stopped me still in my tracks to make me be here now instead of constantly striving for better or more. I would never have known that simply staying on a winery would give me so much joy. I would never have allowed myself to just be.

As for all the existential questions, well, the only conclusion I came to was that I didn't have one. I just had to live.

And when the pains return and the stress of this period weighs heavy, I try and remind myself to let everything happen. The beauty and the terror. To just keep going, because no feeling is final.

---

Clare Naden is a New Zealand writer living in France and working in Geneva.

When Love is Not Enough Growing Up

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.” - Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

Growing up, we may have had parents who were present. They were caring. They provided material comfort. They were consistent.

Yet we grew up with a sense that something was off. Something never quite felt right beyond the appearance of everything being fine. 

We then become adults who feel disconnected from ourselves. We don’t know who we are or what we want. 

There is an emptiness inside of us that we keep trying to fill - with the next achievement or with food or alcohol or validation from other people. Yet nothing fills that hole, that emptiness or numbness inside of us. 

Spending time with our family can feel confusing, or be done out of guilt. Even though everything looks fine on the surface, there is a sense of distance, or fakeness or the feeling that we can’t be fully ourselves with them.

Yet everything was fine growing up. Nothing bad happened. Others had it so much worse. So it must be my fault, we conclude. There must be something wrong with me. Why can’t I just be happy? Why do I feel so empty all the time?

It’s not always about what happened. It can also be about what DIDN’T happen. 

What didn’t happen is that your internal village of emotions, needs and thoughts wasn’t taken into account enough.

Being loved and cared for growing up is essential. And we also need to feel seen, to have our inner world or village reflected back to us. 

One of the roles of a parent is to help their child get to know their own village, to help them understand and mirror back to them their emotions and needs - their internal world. 

Yet it is very difficult for a parent to provide this, if they didn’t experience it themselves growing up, or if they were overwhelmed with parenting, grieving, depressed, or struggling with another child who needed more attention. 

This isn’t about blaming parents - it is about understanding and bringing compassion to ourselves that it is difficult to really see and understand ourselves if this didn’t happen to us growing up.

How were emotions dealt with in your family? Were they talked about in a healthy way? Were all emotions welcomed, even more difficult ones, like anger or sadness? Or were they ignored, or played down or invalidated? Perhaps only certain emotions might have been allowed, like happiness - but there was no room for more vulnerable emotions like sadness. Or maybe emotions weren’t really shown, or talked about. You were never asked about how you felt or what you wanted or needed. Perhaps there was a need to keep up appearances that meant avoiding conflict or showing anything ‘real’ or vulnerable.

You might have heard things like:

There’s nothing to be upset about.

Boys don’t cry. 

Suck it up.

You think that’s bad, other kids have it worse. 

Don’t be sad. Count your blessings. 

There’s no room for anger in this home. 

I don’t like seeing you like this. Cheer up. 

And because emotions are such an important part of us as humans, we might have concluded that WE don’t really exist, that WE don’t really matter, that WE are not interesting. Because we were not really understood on a deeper level, WE don’t really understand ourselves as adults. Because we weren’t really held and told it’s OK to feel what we are feeling, that all emotions pass, and that it’s OK to be feeling this way - we now don’t know how to hold ourselves as adults.

We may feel numb and disconnected from ourselves and like we are too much and not enough all at once. 

This is the result of emotional neglect.

As Dr Jonice Webb writes: 

“Emotionally neglectful parents may be loving and well-intentioned but they still, perhaps through no fault of their own, fail to notice your feelings and respond to them enough. And by failing you in this way, emotionally neglectful parents fail to teach you the emotion skills you will need for your lifetime. 

Now, as an adult looking back, you may readily recall all that your parents gave you, but it is far more difficult to see the vital ingredients they failed to give you: emotional validation, attention and attunement, emotion skills, and emotional intelligence.”

Jonice Webb compares emotional neglect to baking a beautiful cake but forgetting the sugar. It looks good, yet lacks sweetness. Emotions provide sweetness. Emotions are what give us a sense of aliveness. They are like signposts in our internal village that provide information about what we like, what we don’t like, when something feels right or not. 

As adults, it is not about blaming our parents for what they did or didn’t do. But it isn’t about blaming ourselves either and thinking there is something wrong with us. Having a term like emotional neglect can help us accept the reality of what didn’t happen growing up. We can stop blaming ourselves or thinking there is something wrong with us and instead start taking responsibility for giving ourselves what we need as adults. 

If you are a parent yourself, it’s never too late to start doing this with your own children. Emotion skills can be learned - all they require is a willingness and curiosity to explore your inner world. 

Perhaps a really simple step is to pause and simply take a moment every day to ask yourself:

What am I feeling right now? 

What do I want / need? 

Physical sensations like being hungry tired, thirsty, energised count too, and can be a good place to start. 

If this resonates with you and you want to find out more, you can download my PDF on emotions here and find out more about emotional neglect on Dr Jonice Webb’s website here. 

Dealing Honestly with Negative Feedback

Negative feedback or criticism from others is never an easy thing.

I wanted to share this short video on how we can respond to this within ourselves, not necessarily in what we say to the other person, but in how we receive it first within ourselves.

Once we have done this, I think we can then choose how we respond to the other person, or whether we respond at all - and it will probably come from a more centred place.

I hope you find this useful!

Video creds

The Psychology of Time During the Pandemic

“Time is one of the most powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, and actions, yet we are usually totally unaware of the effect of time in our lives.” - Philip Zimbardo, Psychologist + Author

I think that for most of us, this is the first time our lives are being impacted to such an extent, and at such a global scale by something largely out of our control.

This is naturally shifting our perspective of TIME in many different ways.

I wanted to share five shifts around the notion of TIME that might be helpful to work with during this particular time we are living through.

This is based on a Facebook Live I did - if you prefer you can also watch the recording at the bottom of this post.

Before the pandemic, many of us had a sort of naive arrogance or what the ancient Greeks might have called hubris that we could plan things and that it was quite certain they would happen. 

We had plans. We had booked things in advance.

It is possible that in the Western world, we lived under the assumption that time is in my control more than in any other time in history. 

Now we are learning in a very potent way that this is not always the case. 

We can work really hard, plan things, do everything in our power to make them happen…and then something completely out of our control strikes and we are left staying at home and obsessively washing our hands.

With this new reality, it is really, really, really important to allow ourselves to GRIEVE what will not happen, the plans we have had to let go of, at least for the foreseeable future. 

It doesn’t matter how big or small the plans were. It doesn’t matter if others are more affected than you. And you won’t get stuck in the sadness or grief. Emotions tend to flow through us when we allow ourselves to feel them completely and without resistance. What we resist, persists.

And perhaps the learning here is that while time was actually never fully in our control, the way we respond to ourselves still is. We can still, and always, choose kindness and allow ourselves to feel what we are feeling without resisting it.

It’s OK to feel what you are feeling.

Check out this great podcast episode with Brené Brown grief expert David Kessler or this article by David Kessler.

Nobody knows when this will end, and that sense of the unknown for our old-school human mind = DANGER. No end in sight is really disconcerting. 

Yet when we look back on history, we have experienced pandemics before, and we have come out of them. Not having a clear end date does not mean this will go on forever.

An emotion that often accompanies the unknown is ANXIETY.

—> Anxiety as an emotion is about helping us prepare for a perceived threat - usually by imagining all the things that could go horribly wrong so we can take action to avoid this from happening.

If you can, take action - do what you can to help yourself prepare as this can help with anxiety.

Yet at other times, there is no action we can take in the moment.

So for example, anxiety might be telling you your parents who live in another country might be affected. What action can you take? Can you do online shopping for them? Check in with them regularly?

For the stuff we can’t control, acceptance of the limits of what we can do, is often helpful. Perhaps even feeling the vulnerability and caring underneath the anxiety.

As anxiety tends to get caught up in imagining future worst case scenarios, when working with anxiety, it can be helpful to keep coming back to the present moment.

Right now things are mostly OK. I am feeling this anxiety because I care.

I am also finding it helpful to take one day at a time right now. We can get through one day - and the reality is that we have no idea what the future holds.

This is probably the first time for many of us that we are being confronted with the utter vulnerability of being human - the first time we are being confronted with illness, with death, with not feeling safe in the world in this way.

Time is our most precious resource and yet the way we go about our lives does not always reflect this. We tend to live our lives as if our time here was unlimited.

What we do with our time right now can still be a choice - even if we have less freedom than before.

We may not have the RESPONSIBILITY for our time that we thought we had before the global rug was pulled out from under our feet, but we still have RESPONSE-ABILITY - the ability to choose how we respond to the current circumstances, who and what we say YES and NO to during this time.

TIME is still our most precious resource, and perhaps some questions worth asking ourselves are:

—> How would I like to show up during this time for myself and others? 

—> Looking back at this time, how would I like it to have changed me? 

It’s also OK if the only thing you can think of is: I survived. I made it through one day at a time. There is no need for lofty ambitions or self-improvement if that doesn’t feel right or possible for you at the moment.

Time feels frozen in a way - not because it has stopped or is waiting for us - nature continues just fine and is even thriving and regenerating without us. The seasonal cycles continue and time keeps going.

Yet on an individual level we can see this time as a sort of musical chairs where the music has stopped and we have had to ‘sit down’ and really be confronted with our lives and the choices we made the last few years.

What if we took a look around at our lives with kindness and curiosity and asked ourselves: 

Is this the life I want to be living?  

—> Do I like the work I am doing? 

—> Do I like the relationships I am in?

—> Do I like how I show up with family and friends?

—> Do I like where I live? 

—> How can I tread more gently in the world - through the choices I make right now, for example by buying local products and supporting small businesses if I can?

Allow this time to shape you, to strip life to the essentials. What actually really matters? 

We can see this as a time to gather information without needing to do anything more about it at this stage - simply a time to take stock and notice with kindness and curiosity towards ourselves, the aspects of our lives that are working, and the ones that are not.

I don’t think it is healthy to only stay with what is happening in the present - to only talk about the pandemic.

We still have an identity beyond this pandemic. We are still humans with a past and a future.

We can draw on the past: memories, photos, videos that give us energy and help us to reconnect with who we are. We can share this and connect with others on this level, too, instead of only talking about the pandemic.

It also feels important to me that we still have dreams - that we can dream, envision, even take tiny steps towards a future self - even if we can’t yet put a timeline on this.

So maybe during this particular time, allowing ourselves to dance flexibly between our past, present and future selves, without getting stuck anywhere - is something we can explore and be aware of.

Facebook Live Recording:

This Isn’t Working for Me Anymore

Surrender to the way things want to happen next, even though this often involves a vast and terrifying loss of control. Trust the magic that was born into your soul. - Martha Beck

It starts with a whisper. A nagging sense that something is not right. That what seemed OK up until now, even something you chose or wanted, no longer is. 

A relationship. A job. A situation. 

You resist. Try to numb this feeling with food, with alcohol. You even take up running. You add more things. Busy busy busy. Don’t feel this. Don’t think about it. Don’t question things. Don’t shake the boat. 

You convince yourself it’s all OK. That it’s your fault. You chose this. Nobody forced you.

You tell yourself you want too much. That you’re not trying hard enough to make it work. That you’re never happy. WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE HAPPY??

It would be so much simpler if you could just suck it up. Go through the motions. Act like everything is OK - because in so many ways it is! YOU SHOULD JUST BE GRATEFUL!!

It would be so much simpler. It would be…and yet you can’t.

You get to the point where the whisper become more persistent. Where the whisper becomes an incessant thought. Where it it morphs into an obsession. NOT WORKING. NOT WORKING. NOT WORKING. DON’T WANT THIS. DON’T WANT THIS. DON’T WANT THIS. 

You can’t ignore it anymore. 

Resigned, you give up fighting. You give up and you begrudgingly listen. You listen to what is going on underneath the obsessions. Underneath the chaos. 

And when you really listen, you realise:

This isn’t working for me anymore.  

And with this come the desires, the needs you have been trying so hard to ignore. 

I want something different.

I want more. 

The realisation hits you like a ton of bricks.

This isn’t working for me anymore. 

With this honesty, you feel a wave of sadness.

This isn’t working for me anymore. It once did, and now, it no longer is.

Maybe because you’ve outgrown it. Maybe because you want something different now. Maybe because you’re finally being honest with yourself. Maybe because you’ve learned to respect yourself. Maybe just because. 

This isn’t working for me anymore.

You allow yourself to hang out in this space. This space that Nancy Levin calls the “space between no longer and not yet”.

You don’t know what the ‘not yet’ looks like. You only know that the way things are no longer works for you. That you can’t continue like this.

Being honest about this opens up a space where you recognise you need something to change, even if you don’t yet know what that looks like. 

You stop fighting your own truth. You allow yourself to want what you want and to no longer want what you don’t want, even if this feels shaky and uncomfortable and unknown and scary. 

You allow yourself to hang out in the space of

This isn’t working for me anymore.

and

I want something different.

Without necessarily doing anything different in the outside world yet. You don’t make any big decisions or changes. You don’t know where you are going - you have no idea - but you start there.

You start by simply being honest with yourself.

You start there.

“it is being honest 

about 

my pain

that 

makes me invincible.”

- Nayyirah Waheed

Dating IS Awkward

Did you know that the first Sunday of January has the highest number of sign-ups on online dating platforms like Tinder or Bumble? (source)

I think it is part of the new year energy, of wanting something to be different this year - and perhaps wanting to avoid being alone for Valentine’s Day.

And yet, like New Year’s Resolutions, a lot of people give up on this quite quickly. Dating feels too uncomfortable, too confronting, too awkward.

Yet if we want a different outcome in our lives, we also need to do things differently.

So what if instead of fighting the awkwardness, we learned to embrace it instead? I share some thoughts on this very human emotion in this video.

Even if you are not dating, this can also apply to the awkwardness in social situations.

(I love the word awkward. I can definitely identify with it and I love how even the spelling of it feels…awkward).