How One Writer is Learning to Navigate Her New Normal

2020: a new year but NOT a normal year. The world really took a turn when it was late winter. The news and social media were giving a lot of updates on the virus that took over the world. At the time, I didn’t know if I should take a break from social media and avoid the news.

Everywhere was closing and shutting down; it felt like 2020 was canceled.

I’m grateful I have a job that allows me to work from home. I had to create a new routine like everyone else when we couldn’t go anywhere, do things we would normally want to do, or visit anyone. Gyms, parks, restaurants, and bars closed for months. I couldn’t even take transportation to see my family.

I learned my new routines could be slower paced because I was home most of the time. I still made myself wake up early instead of sleeping in later. I got my workouts in by using Youtube to do high intensity.

Two takeaways from these workouts:

I was capable of doing them even when it was challenging.
I wanted them to last longer so that I would feel it was a good workout for working harder for that long.

These videos became my regular workouts, including Zoom workouts the other days of the week. It didn’t take me long to adjust to it.

I decided to work right after the workouts because I wanted to enjoy the rest of the day by spending half of the afternoon outside so that I could start walking more. The weather got nicer and summer arrived with the temperatures rising. When I go outside I wear a mask to be safe and as an act of kindness to the people around me. I learned it’s safer to be outdoors than staying inside.

Being inside the first few months made me feel stir crazy. I had cabin fever because I couldn’t make any plans. I had to rely on myself even though I was able to talk to friends and family. There were times I didn’t want to reach out to anyone because there wasn’t anything exciting or new things going on.

It’s now August and the world is slowly coming back to normal—or closer to normal. Gyms are reopening. On July 13th, fitness studios and gyms in my area reopened. I decided to go back to my gym recently. I knew what to expect when I got there; I put my stuff in the locker and washed my hands. I went to the lifting area and didn’t see a lot of people so everyone had their own space and were wearing masks. When I picked up the weights, I was able to ease back into it. I didn’t feel uncomfortable or anxious about the weight area getting crowded because that’s where most people want to be like me. Even though things were different I was happy to be back, because I’m able to return to my normal routine before I start my work day. It made me feel like I can move more and take a break from being in my apartment a little. Leaving helped me to feel like I was able to clear my head.

I don’t think I’ll be going back to the office for a while, but I’m grateful I have another normal routine during this strange time.

[Photo by Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash]

Featured

Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

The Battle to Overcome Your Rejection

Rejection is an issue I’ve had to wrestle hard with over the last three years. Every time Rejection and I had to face off in the boxing arena, I would always end up slammed and pinned down. In boxing, you have ten seconds to get yourself up before the game is over. For me, it took months before I could even peel my head off the floor.

How to Respond to Someone Else's Grief

But this post isn't about my own grief. It's not about the tears I've cried, or the questions I've asked. It’s not about my own days where getting out of bed felt too hard.

It's about a different side of the fight. It's about your mom's grief when she loses her college roommate. And your best friend after she has a miscarriage. It’s about all the people you encounter, telling you about their grief.

Health, LifeCasey RevmanAugust 4, 2020Comment

How One Writer is Learning to Navigate Her New Normal

magazine Blog

Contact SUBMIT