Kintsukuroi

The anxiety is new, since the beginning of the pandemic. But before the world shut down on March 13th, I had just recently put Arvo down, I was taking on additional hours at work to make ends meet (for our family and my husband's family), and I was juggling the responsibilities of motherhood with three young children. 

A month before we came to understand that the Covid-19 was here to stay and was dangerous, I took a new role which took me further away from direct patient care (my absolute favorite thing about my job) and moved me into a more isolated administrative role where a lot of my work can be done from a quiet office. My life felt chaotic and challenging prior to March and those feelings only spiraled when restaurants and gyms closed and spending time with my older parents began to feel dangerous. What was an initially brief dance with mental health issues became a more permanent main-stay in my life. I don't think my experience is in any way unique or novel, but my struggles have, somehow, surprised me (Aren't I stronger than this? Haven't I dealt with more difficult things in the past? Why can't I simply choose to feel better?).

For me, anxiety is a frenetic and manic state. My mind turns on and it sits on one puzzle (in the last year, it's mostly been my job and how I can do things better) and it doesn't stop. The thoughts churn and scenarios present themselves and it doesn't stop until I am absolutely an exhausted puddle of once-recognizable-human-matter. I almost always only fall back asleep when I am simply too exhausted to do anything else and it is, generally, only an hour or two before my alarm would go off, anyway. During the day, I stay busy enough that I can mostly ignore the spinning. It is at night, in the most lonely hours, that my mind prods me awake. Having slept off the worst of the exhaustion, it gets to work solving the issues I hadn't dealt with during the day and also makes up stories and scenarios and fears that would feel preposterous in the light of day. 

I have tried almost every solution imaginable. And the only thing that has worked, thus far, is returning to words. Returning to quiet time with a blank page and a blank check in terms of the things that I need to write. And trust me wholly when I say that I need this space. It is a place to calibrate. A place to release. It is quiet here and there is room to be so very imperfect and so vulnerable and so shattered.

This has been hard and I am tired. Are you? Are you sick of the locked doors of your favorite restaurants and businesses? Are you sick to death of watching those around you lose their livelihoods and others abruptly lose family members to this illness? Are you mourning the loss of someone, still processing their premature absence at your dinner table?

I am weary of the death and the fighting over masks and the actual insanity of not believing science. I am tired of behaving as though the five hundred thousand people who have died are statistically insignificant, as though their (preventable) deaths are a small thing. Death is never small. And absence is always irrevocably full.

I am tired of being afraid of killing those around me if I happen to be an asymptomatic carrier. I am sick of wondering, every time I come home from clinic, if this is the time I infect my loved ones and someone I care about is damaged, irreparably from infection. Or worse, if this is the day I infect someone I love and they don't recover. I cannot venture too far into this possibility without recoiling utterly and wholly into the anxious puddle I described above.

I remember early on there was a lot of texting with loved ones. There were a lot of check-ins, especially with my other mama friends. "Are you okay?" we'd ask. We would share tricks for keeping kids busy inside with the school year effectively canceled. We'd applaud one another over our ingenuity. And then a month, two months, more months passed and those threads simply stopped. Because you can only be brave for so long. Eventually, acceptance comes, but it is acceptance of a foreign and altered world, one in which we all became something just a little bit different than we were prior. More resilient (absolutely), occasionally sadder (certainly), awaking in the middle of the night with heightened anxiety and sleeplessness (raising my hand).

I have been so lonely through this and fear has cozied up close, whispering at first the worst case scenarios (a sneeze in the grocery store? drop the groceries and run!) and now, reminding me that the fundamental fabric of our society and who we think we are has been altered irrevocably. Our children will not be the same. We will not be the same. Many, many things we loved before this time will mutate into something else and others will cease to exist entirely.

And yet, another whisper joins the one that prods me awake in the night. It reminds me (it is so quiet, can you hear it?) that the world is infinitely beautiful and valuable and complex. It speaks of that sparkling snow and those waves headed toward the shore and the stars which still glimmer with alarming intensity overhead. It speaks of resilience and newfound kindness, of empathy and joy, of quiet days spent with family, of forced connection and a return to writing after years of silence.

The nights of anxiety have decreased and I no longer look backward at the past with the gaze of a caged animal. I will be okay. We will all be okay. Everything will be different, but different is not bad. Many things have broken, but broken is also not bad.

There is a Japanese art form named Kintsukuroi in which an artist repairs broken pottery with a mixture of powdered gold. The idea of the art is that a fracture is not something to hide. Instead, the repair highlights that broken things can be made more valuable, more beautiful, and more complex. In the last twelve months, we have all shattered. But we are, I think, in the process of finding each of our parts, of mending and cementing and healing the jagged edges. And for many of us, the version we become has limitless potential to transform us into something more beautiful, valuable and interesting. We have an opportunity to recreate ourselves as something more empathic, kind, and patient. To remember, perhaps, that even in trauma and anxiety and the depths of sorrow, we are something truly miraculous to behold.