“I just feel overwhelmed.”
This is one of the most common sentences I’m hearing from my clients — and from the people around me in general — right now.
No matter what you are dealing with, our emotional landscape is stuffed at this point in history. Confusing protocols and timelines for reopening workspaces, conflicting advice on social distancing, fear of risk, the overwhelming emotional experience of recognizing that centuries of structure oppression are cracking open, and that we have to work together to find new pathways. There was a sentence this morning in the Ask a Manager blog — one of my favourite workplace resources — that captured just how unprecedented this time is: “how do I participate in civil disobedience without getting fired during a pandemic?”
I’ve noticed how many people in my world are trying to meet deadlines, deal with all of the work stuff in front of us — as though these needs exist outside of our tender, emotional, human selves.
I was talking with a client about what this time feels like, and we came up with an unlikely metaphor: it feels like we’re trying to stuff too many balloons into a car and then drive. It seems doable, and balloons are light, and we feel pressure to just keep getting on with our lives, but stuffing those balloons in the car means they’re going to bob around and get into our faces and block our view. We can handle individual balloons — we know how to do our jobs, and how to parent, and how to be a friend, and how to be with our aging parents, and how to keep ourselves physically and mentally well. But we don’t know how to do all of those things at once, at home, in a seismic landscape. And some of those balloons that are edging in front of our faces? They hold pretty big truths we can’t keep ignoring.
We need room to make sense of those truths. We need to be open to responding to the fear and anxiety of people around us who have been told “stay home” and now are being told “come back to work,” when it feels like not that much has shifted in terms of risk. We need room to #dothework of changing centuries of structural and institutionalized racism, of the complex system of intersectional inequity. We all need room to participate in the rapidly unfolding changes in front of us. Those of us with leadership roles need to make space for the important conversations about diversity, anti-oppression, equity and inclusion, and to make changes in our own spheres. We all need room to be thoughtful about the parts of our jobs that matter the most right now as this phase of the pandemic unfolds, and to support each other through uncertainty and fear of risk. We all need room to let the thoughtful, listening, learning parts of ourselves emerge.
We can’t drive when things are blocking our view. We need to pause for a moment and pay attention to what’s right in front of us — not try to duck our heads around the balloons and keep driving in the direction we were going in.