Pitching a tent instead of building a house.

Dear Friend,

I hope you are doing well. I received some news that upset me recently, which provided me with the opportunity to review my current response versus how past me would have reacted.

In the past, when I found myself sad or deeply upset, I would often fall subject to “ugh, why does this always happen to me?” or “I’m so unlucky” types of thoughts. I’ve worked very hard over the past few years to at least identify when I’m having those thoughts – to observe them and counter them. Not easy, right? Necessary though, I think.

With the news that bummed me out a bit recently, I decided to allow myself a few days to grieve what could have been before facing what is. I think a lot of us have been faced with these moments of “I wanted things to be different but here we are” throughout the course of this pandemic. It’s hard, isn’t it? And that’s putting it excessively mildly, right?

I keep going back to this post I saw on Instagram months ago, where @yasminecheyenne was talking about healing/shadow work and how it’s important to remember you can’t live in that energy of processing trauma and inner healing 100% of the time – it’s important to come up for air, to take breaks, to pause and recenter and notice what’s happen here and now. To focus on what’s still good. To practice the self nurturing care that we need, especially while working through hard emotions.

Lately, my sister and I have had many discussions about how heavy things have been – on a personal and on a world news level – and we’ve both noted that it is so easy to become overwhelmed and to find ourselves spiraling and focusing solely on everything going wrong. We’ve actually been having weekly “What worked, what didn’t, what can we change moving forward” meetings every weekend for the majority of the pandemic, just as a way to force ourselves to pause, acknowledge what’s happening, how we are handling it, if there are any ways we can make things easier for ourselves, and also making sure to try to balance our “what didn’t work” list with an equal or higher amount of “what worked” – it has been very helpful for us to create those gratitude lists alongside the acknowledgement of everything else. It’s helped us pitch a tent in the bad moments instead of building a house and living solely in the negative.

It’s like this song, which comes to mind for me when things are especially hard:

I really like the tent vs. house analogy. Sure, it is easy to get stuck in the blue zone, even so deep in the blue zone that it looks black and inescapable. But if we look at our presence in those feelings as sitting in a tent, well then, sure, we still have a lot to carry with us – sometimes so heavy that we can only move forward by a fraction of a millimeter, moving so slowly forward that it can feel like we aren’t moving forward at all. But each increment of a millimeter forward is still forward. Looking at it as a tent instead of a house helps me remember that progress is progress is progress – and progress makes it easier to maintain hope.

I hope allowing yourself to camp in the blue zone when necessary gives you the space and safety to process the hard emotions while knowing you won’t be there forever. Regardless of where you are on the road out of the blue zone, I’m rooting for you.

With love,

Katie