daffodils + post traumatic growth
“It is important, especially in these moments of high adversity, to find meaning and purpose in these experiences.”
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I saw daffodils three separate times over the weekend. You know what that means. These harbingers of spring look the way this change of season makes me feel: enthusiastic and reaching, eager and bright, face following the arc of the sun.
This is also the time of year where staring out my workspace window is like watching a joyful sitcom: the plum tree in full bloom offers good cheer; different cohorts of birds come and go, singing, all throughout the day in rounds; the dark gray days of rain lead inevitably to bright winter mornings that are so terribly gorgeous I almost forget we’re living through a plague. Still.
I moved into this apartment in late summer 2018, one year sober, and four weeks after ending an eight-year relationship with a Very Good Man who was ultimately a Very Wrong Match. I left everything behind, bringing only my clothes, a lamp, and the one houseplant that had survived four years in a near windowless in-law apartment, into a house with friends. I had no money saved, but you can finance nearly everything these days, and my first purchase was a bed-in-a-box, a mattress that uncoiled, miraculous, just like they said it would, and for the first couple of months the mattress sat on the cool wood floor, and I spread myself out like a starfish, staring out the window at the tree and letting the belated summer sun bake my bones as I wondered about what type of person upends her life like this.
I’ve never loved a house as much as I love this house. I’ve never spent so much time in one room. I’ve never tracked so closely the predictable, yet somehow always surprising, rhythms of the natural world that surrounds me. With the world so small, the arrival of spring is total entertainment: walking through Glen Canyon, I stumble upon a blazing acacia, the yellow such a joy against the various shades of green. I close my eyes and listen to the breeze in the eucalyptus, the birds, and the water in the creek that sounds like mercy. I watch the hawks get harassed by crows. I breathe in the smell of mud.
I spent the better part of Saturday morning scrubbing the bathroom and clearing out my closet and vacuuming the rugs and tending to my houseplants and staring out the window and mulling over the passing of time. It’s already strange enough, the way that the turning of seasons is a surprise every time, even though we know exactly what’s coming, sometimes down to the week (for example: the plum tree’s first furtive blossoms always unfurl the first week of February). But this is not a normal year, is it. We’ve stayed home inside the same walls. Our immediate surroundings have been elevated, amplified. Despite the grief and loss and fear and anger and, yep, there’s that word again, uncertainty, we’ve adapted. We’ve created routines and habits. We’re rounding the corner on a full year of this. Of learning how not only to stay alive, but how to keep living, through a year where time bends and scurries around like a squirrel and where everything, every last thing we were collectively standing on got yanked away and maybe we woke up to how stupid so many of our obsessions were but also, wouldn’t it be so nice to, like, get a fancy manicure (I contain multitudes!).
In the fast-pace of The Before Time, it would often take the shock of a three-story-tall acacia in highlighter-yellow efflorescence to slow me down, snap me back to the moment. In horizon-less Pandemia, the present moment stretches on, beyond what I’m used to, beyond what I would like. Of course I’d much prefer dinners out with friends and being among sweaty bodies crowding a stage and seeing the entireties of your faces and sharing licks from an ice cream cone (yes, I’m that type of person) and the frenzy of rush-hour commute on the subway and street fairs and farmer’s markets. It’s also true that just as I’ve tracked my outer world to the point that I can nearly set my clock to the uncurling of leaves and the shooting up of perennials, so too has my inner landscape offered up its own richness that I never would have had the chance to be surprised by if life had continued on apace.
Also this weekend, while avoiding my to-do list and reading the dozens of open tabs in my browser, I read this study out of Bath, England (I’ll link to it below):
Study identifies 'post-traumatic growth' emerging from COVID-19 lockdowns
The research, recently published in the British Journal of Psychiatry from a team at the University of Bath with international colleagues, analysed survey results from 385 caregivers of children aged 6-16 both in the UK and Portugal. Individuals completed an online questionnaire between 1 May 2020 and 27 June 2020.
This cohort had experienced considerable adversity because of COVID-19. 70% were working exclusively from home, almost half reported a reduction in income and nearly all children (93%) were being home schooled at the time. In addition, one in five identified at least one family member who was suspected or had been infected with COVID-19.
Yet despite all this, when asked the question -- "Do you think there are any positive to come out of this pandemic and of the social distancing restrictions?" -- 88% of respondents said 'yes'.
Spring is here, it’s coming, despite everything.
I think about us these early days of a new spring—working, grinding, staying, carrying on—and the way we can’t help but turn our faces toward the light. I think about what we’ve been through in a year. I think about the early days of this, of not knowing what the virus even was, of being afraid of touching anything, anyone; of all the weird shit we did to connect and understand (remember all the constant onslaught of Instagram Live’s? How much we were on Zoom before we realized how much we’d be on Zoom?); I think about the every-night-at-7pm-on-the-dot banging of pots and pans, the noise terrible but also so welcome and needed, that outward display a manifestation of the inner cacophony.
I think about how utterly unrecognizable we are now to who we were this time last year.
Spring is for fresh starts, new beginnings. The ubiquitous refrain ringing around is the reminder that hey, wait - we don’t want to go back to normal. Normal was bad for most of us. So I cling to reports like the one above, I cling to these stories, because I need to be reminded of our humanity. I need to be reminded that there is something waiting for us on the other side of this, something beyond, or at least in addition to, all the death and loss, and the ripple of grief that we will carry with us for generations. I need to hear stories that counterbalance the ugly narratives forced upon us by major media. I need to hear stories that focus not only on what’s terrible, but what might actually be working, because I need a place to start imagining something wildly new and different and, sorry, I’m going to say it: unprecedented.
I know I can’t shape a new world—one where everyone has access to everything they need, including joy and pleasure, without having to prove anything—on my own. I know that what I am carrying forward into this next season is community. I know that “…by embracing aspects of a quieter life and those small, positives that have emerged from this period," I am now able to be in the world from a space of unprecedented inner calm and ease.
You know what else was unprecedented? There was a time when I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol, until one day the lantern in my gut called me forward into the space of not-knowing. It was there, in the dark, guided by what was then only the dimmest glow, that I got to imagine, and then live into, a future where I got to have a say in my life. This is the same lantern that calls me forward into this next year, Year Two, so here I am, tracing my fingers over a new topography, a map we chart together in real time.
This spring, I step forward into a quiet, tender celebration. I am in awe of us, and our goodness, and the life-affirming vitality of our desires. I step forward into the possibility of great, grand, structural change, and also, cuddles on the couch and vacations on the beaches and grand dinners around scuffed-up kitchen tables.
I did a quickie Wiki search of “daffodils,” and according to some folklore, “…some people consider narcissi unlucky, because they hang their heads implying misfortune.” That sounds about right, doesn’t it? And yet. We’ll be back next year, won’t we? Despite our best efforts. Headstrong, hopeful, humble. Maybe this time, instead of crowding the space underneath the mailbox or vying for attention on the side of the highway, we’ll find some quiet, neglected corner of the backyard and make it so beautiful.
🌼 Study identifies 'post-traumatic growth' emerging from COVID-19 lockdowns
Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, facilitator and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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