Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (269)
July 28, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 91: For the first time in 10+ years, someone I care about made a judgemental comment about my parenting and hurt my feelings. This isn’t the first time I’ve been criticized, it’s just the first time since I learned to stop running myself down as a parent annnnd it turns out that defense mechanism, though unhealthy, was really effective at protecting me from hurt feelings. It might be the first time I’ve thought, though I didn’t say it, “you don’t understand, you’re not a parent.” 99% of the time I don’t believe that you have to be a parent to understand that family dynamics can be complicated. I’m not sure this is that 1% of the time either, maybe my feelings were just hurt and they had a point, albeit an incredibly harsh and rather mean point. Not my favorite milestone! But a clear sign that therapy has removed some of my walls. Don’t exactly love the side effect but I accept it.
Year 6, Day 92: As a joke, I started listing my “good deeds” for the day in hopes of building up goodwill in the universe and had a weird amount of them today. I noticed some workers had locked themselves out and got the attention of their oblivious coworker. I gave strangers directions (the right ones, even, which is not usually my strong suit). I ran an errand for a friend. Donated a huge batch of points to help someone fleeing abuse. Someone else asked for a favor which is taking all week to figure out. I snapped a picture of a menu that strangers were struggling to read and let them zoom in on my phone.
Year 6, Day 95: I’ve been so full-on this week, I just read a headline that Cambodia is calling for a ceasefire. What?? I had no idea they’d been skirmishing with Thailand. We’re such a disaster here in the US, it’s almost hard to focus attention on anywhere else. Except Gaza. That’s always in the back of my consciousness.
I’ve been working with a therapist to deal with trauma from past abuse. Among other things, she suggested I take a class in mindful self compassion, specifically one using the work of Kristin Neff. I took one on-line. It was really helpful, but all the students had a running joke about how miserable we were. That’s because step 1 is feel the feelings. We had all spent years inventing ways to avoid feeling the feelings! Thankfully, subsequent steps really helped.
Anyway, what I mean is that your first comment resonated with me.
Apologies I started to reply and failed to actually post it!
That sounds very familiar, that may have been my whole first year of therapy 😆
Just out of curiosity, is that class still available? I imagine it could be helpful for some folks.