Petty Patty and the Pandemics

aka...dani starts a band

I keep trying to compare this to something. Something I’ve seen or felt before. Something known, something I can point to and say, see? Look! Here’s a playbook, a roadmap, a trusted constellation that might guide me through these uncharted seas. I want someone, something, to tell me: this is how you get through. I find no answers, so the closest comparison I find is in the world of fiction. The news is so awful all the time, I wouldn’t be surprised if a zombie apocalypse was reported on next. Or to look out my window at a lurking Demagorgon, evidence that we have indeed entered into the Upside Down. And I can’t tell you how eerie it is for the plotline of one of my most favorite novels to feel like it’s playing out in real time.

But this isn’t fiction, this is real, it’s happening, and there is no comparison. None of us know what this is, or how to do it. So we’re adapting. What else can we do (also: when all of this is over, can we retire the word “unprecedented” from the cultural lexicon for at least a decade or two?)?

I don’t know anything about surviving a pandemic. But if being a person in recovery has taught me anything, it’s how to deal with really hard shit, and how to stay in the shit for as long as it takes to transform, even when everything inside me is urging me to run or numb. If sobriety were a classroom, I’d be the student in the front row waving my hand excitedly at every question the teacher asked. All this to say, I feel oddly prepared for this moment.

Thanks to my own inner crisis management team, I have a whole arsenal of new coping strategies, which I’ve been blasting away at this crisis: I’m ZOOMing with friends on the daily and practicing yoga and working out with the limited equipment and awkward space at home and yeah, I’m probably eating too many snacks but I’m meditating and drinking tons of water and staying home because unlike the president, I don’t think anyone is expendable, I’m walking my dog at off hours and awkwardly navigating the six-foot distance required between me and my fellow humans at all times, I’m reading and writing and masturbating and doing anything I can to stay in the present moment because that’s the only place that makes sense, that feels safe, I’ve washed my hands more in the past three weeks than I have probably in the past year and OH LOOK, MORE BAKED GOODS, I’m staring at the plum tree shiny with rain outside my window, and the dumb mourning doves that keep crash landing into their belatedly built nest, and I’m wondering whether spring is always this stunning or if maybe I am just desperate for even the smallest glimmer of beauty, for even the most furtive indication that hope is still welcome here, that I’m not a complete moron for desiring something bigger and grander for us, for our society, our country, the world, the universe, for praying that the feral edges of my imagination might take root in something real, that this could be the thing that becomes a roadmap, a constellation, a playbook for some future me, some future all of us, goddess (and Earth!) willing.

Speaking of roots. I went blonde back in December on a whim after a guy I went on one date with offered to turn me platinum (he’s a professional—I’m not that impulsive) and I said yes, because I’m 36 and single, and also because it felt exciting and a bit wild, and let’s just say that since I quit drinking—and woke up to how TAME I’d become—I’ve been hungry for ever more wildness. Anyway. I hadn’t dyed my hair in upwards of twelve years, and had mostly convinced myself that I was digging the salt that had begun to pepper my darkish brown hair, when the real truth is that I was broke all the time and could not justify spending money on something so frivolous. I don’t think it’s frivolous anymore. I’d forgotten how fun it is to make my outsides match my insides, that is, to experiment with my appearance, to be thoughtful and inspired about how I might adorn myself, and how those choices are yet another way I get to express myself out in the world, another practice of untaming.

What I love less is the upkeep. Every 6-8 weeks I sit in a chair for four-ish hours and get myself fixed up. And now that there is no end in sight to this whole, uh, not seeing anyone thing—or at least no end that aligns with MY timeline (or is it hairline?)—that line of dark around my scalp is increasing a teeny tiny bit each day and soon I shall be in trouble.

Perhaps you are rolling your eyes at my conundrum. Perhaps you are saying, Dani! We’re in the middle of a global pandemic! Nobody cares about your hair!

I am with you! My own eyes are rolling so far back into my head, I can see my own brain stem.

It’s also true that I’m done making myself wrong for my feelings. Erasing my feelings and emotions and sensitivity is what made me sick. And right now, the last thing the world needs is for any of us to stay sick (or invisible, for that matter).

For many of us in recovery, our descent began when we were told either explicitly by our family, or more indirectly (but equally insidiously) by the culture-at-large, that something about us was not quite right. We were too much: too emotional, too sensitive, too much drama, too sad, too hyper. We were trained to tame ourselves, to mold ourselves into a different shape, a shape that the people around us felt comfortable being around. And in this shapeshifting, our true selves had to be unleashed somehow, but since who we were wasn’t safe, that inner wildness emerged in strange ways. Like, addiction. Like, eating disorders. Like, self harm. Like: perfectionism. Like…(fill in your own blank).

My sobriety is not a recovery from a substance or behavior. Rather, it’s a recovering of who I was before I began to run and numb. It’s a reclamation of my truest self: my intuition, my inner wisdom, and yeah, my gut feelings—even when those feelings are dumb, or superficial, or frivolous in the grand scheme. I used to run from the hard shit, as if that would make it go away. But it never goes away. Life is always going to be hard, and I can’t control that. What I can control is how I respond, and I am no longer willing to pierce myself with the second arrow of my own self-hatred and judgment for all the many ways I am not perfect.

Just like I couldn’t hate myself sober, I refuse to hate myself through a global pandemic.

What I’m saying is: More than one thing can be true at a time. I can be bummed about my hair growing out AND be gobsmacked by the pain of the world at the same time. I can acknowledge my privilege and take responsibility for what is in my power to change, while at the same time not minimize my feelings. I can atone. I can forgive. I can honor my contradictions and rough edges and vulnerabilities and I can love myself for my imperfections rather than in spite of them.

This isn’t an essay about how getting sober will help you get through this pandemic (for some of us, this might actually be a terrible time to make that decision—though, if you’re curious, I’m happy to chat). I don’t have any answers. I’m not going to tell you to start an art project or take up an instrument or read all those books gathering all that proverbial dust on your bookshelf. And I’m not even going to begin to pretend that I know what it’s like to be an essential worker or a parent or to have lost my job or my home or one of my beloveds. I too am doing my best to make it through the fog the same as all of you.

What I do know: I know what it’s like to get to the other side of a mess. I know how to let the mess undo me completely, and then re-wire me from the ground up. I know what it’s like to sit, for many many months, mostly alone, figuring out who I am and what I’m really made of and what I really want for myself and the world when everything I had been standing on had suddenly washed away.

If I could holler across time to that future version of me, if I could put in her hands a copy of the 2020 Pandemic Playbook™, it wouldn’t be much of a plan at all. There’d be no snappy three-step list, or a strict schedule, or a color-coded calendar; no, there would be only the gentlest, softest of reminders, to slow down, and to let herself be in the mess.

We are going to get through this. There will be another side. But before we can get through, we have to be in it. We have to stay, and sit in the shit. For a while. For longer than we’re comfortable. For as long as it takes.

And the sooner we acknowledge that we can’t control the mess, the sooner we can begin to build a home inside ourselves. A home that is grand enough to hold the fullness of who we are. A home where all parts of ourselves are welcome, even the parts that are secretly annoyed as hell at our kids or in full rage toward the rampant injustice of an actively vindictive government or that selfishly wishes our hair stylist would make a social distancing exception because we’re somehow special and worth the risk.

I keep wondering what it will be like to look back on this. What story will we want to tell, about who and how we were, about how we persevered, how we adapted? I know none of us want to return to where we were, and how things were, before. But if we want to transform, we can’t manage or control or figure out like we always have. Otherwise, we’ll miss the metamorphosis.

I’m holding out hope that on the other side of this is more freedom and wildness than we could ever imagine. I’m holding out hope that all our own inner transformations during this time of imposed solitude will result in an outer transformation that will be so beautiful, our minds and bodies and the whole planet will be utterly unrecognizable.

We can change. We can choose a different way.

What will we let this make of us?