Rediscovering You: It's a New World ...

It's a new world after the Pandemic. Go and explore...

I think it's fair to say that no one saw it coming. An event in history that overnight had our schools shut down, our faces covered and our daily interaction with the outside world dependant on the limitations of digital screens. With every governing power worldwide turning to these emergency procedures in an attempt to save thousands of lives, little attention was paid to the psychological effects of a year of lockdowns. So in the panic, what did we miss?

I think another fair point is that it’s a new world that’s been created. Out of all this mess, something new can blossom. I know it’s tough to accept that things are different from what we are all use to but difference doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you don’t want it to be.

In this blog entry, I’ll be discussing a few ways to help adjust your perspective on the current situations and remind you of who you were, acknowledge that and then move forward to who you are as well as looking to who you want to be in this ‘new world’.

Appreciating the simple

The earth is made up of so many living organisms that all connect to each other in some way. There are many different theories about how the first forms of life began but there is one thing that is universally agreed upon and that is that the life forms did adapt from one another to evolve which means that we are all connected in some way. It’s incredible if you think about it, ants being connected to elephants and fish being connected to humans. Human kind has often deemed itself superior but we are much more similar to other forms of life than we are different, remembering those similarities can be humbling. You may think what any of this has to do with overcoming the negative feelings that have risen in you since the pandemic, but what it offers you is perspective. You may lose yourself in a particular moment in time but with hindsight it becomes an acknowledged moment in time rather than a hinderance like it once may have been. In time, the pandemic will become just another moment in time, one where humans struggled and let other life forms thrive - whether it be by choice or not.

In a moment where one may not always be able to control their environment, they can choose to appreciate it. I love tea. Mango and passion fruit green tea in particular. When I drink it, it calms me and when I have the chance to drink it I focus on the warmth going through my body and the steam fogging up my glasses. It’s not a luxury trip to the Caribbean or day trip to the theatre but what it is to me is peace. I know it sounds strange to begin talking about a cup of tea in the middle of a blog but I wanted to demonstrate to you just how powerful appreciating the simple can be. I have a lavender oil on my bedside table and at night I put it on my pulse points to help me sleep. I’m an insomniac so any peace is welcomed. Living in the countryside, around nature, is a wonderful cure for insomnia but I make sure I stay appreciative of my surroundings.

During a time when so much is changing and you may be losing yourself, choosing to appreciate the tiny things you do in your day to day life help keep you happy or, at the very least, content. I’m not trying to force you to be happy but I am attempting to make you aware. If you’re still alive, then you have something to be grateful for and therefore, everyone reading this blog has something to show appreciation for. Life may not always seem like it, but it is wholeheartedly the greatest gift someone could ever give you. Someone much smarter than me once told me that if you can still feel something, whether that be love, sadness, happiness or even anger, then you’re the lucky one, because some people live their whole lives feeling nothing and so, to feel even something is one other thing to be appreciative. Accept your emotions but don’t let them hold you back, appreciate them for what they are and they won’t haunt you forever.

Tell Someone You Love Them

This one links with appreciation. It’s often easy to forget just how much others do for you, especially you’re loved ones. During a time where everyone is experiencing ups and downs, don’t forget to let someone know just how much you love them and show them just how much you care.

Sometimes this can be hard for some, but I suggest maybe doing something nice for them and then saying it after you have surprised them with the kind act. Another way of doing this is writing a note. I’ve done this before with someone who I struggle to show my affections towards. I care about them very much but I do find it easy to take them for granted a lot and that’s a failure on my behalf. During the pandemic I wrote them a note encouraging them to pursue what made them happy and at the end I told them I love them. It’s not something that I’m very good at saying but for some reason, writing works best for me. I think it’s because it gives time to get everything I want to say and to say it in just the right way. Sometimes I’m not good at expressing and coming across in the way I want. I think I’m so caught up in trying to be what everyone wants me to be that I forget how I want me to be and so I end up saying or doing the thing I didn’t want to do or upsetting the one person I didn’t want to upset. My point is that it can be hard telling someone you love them but the embarrassment or the shyness is worth the struggle when it means so much to the person receiving the words. To know that their acknowledged in a time where they may feel forgotten or under-appreciated, it’s wonderful to know that one person has their back.

Don’t Expect Anything

A harsh teacher of mine once said, ‘Don’t expect anything, you’ll always leave disappointed’. It does seem like a pessimistic thing to say but it’s true. Many people expect things to happen in their life. They expect to get that promotion, they expect a friend to stick around, they expect everyone to treat them with respect. It’s a lovely ideal, but it’s simply not realistic. The only person you should expect things from is yourself. If you hold yourself to certain standards and expect them only of yourself, you’ll find you are able to maintain a level head in many more situations than before. For example, if you were expecting a promotion and then you don’t get it, you may feel angry at the person who did get the promotion or angry at the person who didn’t give you the promotion. The thing you have to remember is no one owes you anything. You chose to do the work to earn money, you chose to try and go for that promotion, any feelings good or bad that are connected to that promotion are on you. You didn’t get the promotion and someone else did, they may have deserved it, they may have not but at the end of the day that doesn’t concern you. Now it’s your chance to make another decision like you did with the promotion, it’s your decision whether you leave that job and move on or you stay and work harder. Either way the only person you need to hold to an expectation is yourself. No one else can control the quality of your life except you. How you perceive things, the decisions you make are the ones that will effect you the most. So many people feel down because of decisions that they believe other people made but the truth is, the only reason they are down is because of the decision they made and it was that decision that made them feel like this.

The next example I mentioned was expecting a friend to stick around. This may seem like a weird example but let me explain. If you think about it, there is nothing tying a friend to you. They are there because they feel they want to be or they need to be and if they want to leave that relationship they are free to. Expecting a friend to stick around says very little about them and much more about you. If you knew that person wasn’t going to stick around, would you have invested so much in that friendship? The answer if it was a true friendship would be yes. If the answer is no, you were only friends with the expectation that they offer something in return. That is not the terms of a real friendship. A person with a true friendship would have invested the same amount in that person even if they knew they were going to leave, and they would have done so because they appreciate the time they did get to spend with that person. They learnt from that person and the lesson in itself was worth the investment. There’s a saying that says, “Don’t regret something that once made you happy” and this is exactly what I’m trying to say with this example. A friendship is an experience of another human you’ve decided you want to be around. Just because you have decided that, doesn’t mean they are bound to you. As I said before, keep expectations only to yourself. You may decide that this person is your friend and for a friend you will commit yourself to a certain set of values that you uphold. This could mean that you check in on them once a week to see how they’re doing and make sure things are going well for them. It could also mean committing yourself to arguing with them, challenging them when they are heading down a path that could be harmful to them. Friends challenge each other to be better and you might decide that these are your commitments that you expect of yourself. A good friend will hold similar expectations of themselves and if you both expect nothing of each other but everything from yourselves then that is the basis of a strong friendship and one that few people get to experience.

My final example was expecting people to respect you. A hard truth in life is that you will always find someone who disrespects you even if you have been lucky enough to go through life without having this happen often. My thoughts for this is that, why let someone else’s disrespect effect the way that you act? If you become disrespectful to everyone that disrespects you, then you become a reflection of them rather than yourself. If you expect everyone to respect you, this anger at being disrespected will eventually consume you and you lose yourself. On the other hand, letting go of the expectation that everyone should respect you releases the anger at being disrespected since you no longer hold an ideal of how someone should treat you. You can have thoughts about how you would like to be greeted but understand that each person can, and is, allowed to react differently to you and as long as you maintain the expectation that you will treat everyone you meet with respect then you hold on to your own identity and don’t waste time worrying about someone else’s different set of values.

Take Time To Catch Up With Important Friends

Friends are best when the quality is measured rather than the quantity. It’s something many people are told but few uphold. Friendships are like plants, if you don’t nourish them, they will die. Taking time out of your busy schedules to catch up with the people that matter to you is important. I would even go as far as to say it is crucial. We understand this now more than ever, now that it’s been taken away from us for so long. Catching up is a lovely thing to do in person however, adapting is an important skill to learn and making plans to video call close friends will help keep you sane during these strange times. When you are on these calls, take time to talk but also take time to listen, make sure you give the person the time they need. If it is someone you really care about, you will take the time or you will make the time. I feel the phrase “I don’t have time” to be a very funny one. I find it funny because it is technically not true. Everyone has time, they just have decided that you are not worth their time. That sounds harsh. I mean that they have allocated certain activities to certain amounts of time and the larger amount of time they spend on something, the more important it is to them. Now some people may say that they spend most of their day at work but that doesn’t mean they care about what they do or enjoy their job. The truth is, deep down they do care, they care that their family has a roof over their head and food on the table and the job gives them money to afford those things and therefore they dedicate more of their week to it than any other activity. Even in this situation, my theory works. Time management is a whole other skill in itself especially in a society that offers so many distractions but, at the end of the day, if you care about maintaining a friendship, you will prioritise those people according to what’s most important to you. Make sure you never lose sight of your priorities, otherwise they’ll lose sight of you.

Acknowledge Fear

Fear is something that holds all of us back at some point in our lives. It’s both a natural and unnatural concept as some are learnt and some are from birth. One of our restrictions in moving forward is our reluctance to acknowledge our fears. I will discuss this in much more detail in the next blog entry but the idea is that we cannot move forward unless we acknowledge that the fear is holding us back and tackle it head on. A fear is already half defeated once it has been acknowledged because most battles with fear come from either denial that we are scared or the idea that we are in unknown territory - we don’t know how we will react and this scares us. Acknowledging the fear demonstrates an awareness of one’s own mind and it’s only when we know what we’re scared of (when we know what we’re facing) that we can begin to actively fight it or challenge it.

Acknowledging fear during the pandemic can actually be a calming experience. When you logically go through all your fears and order them, you can actually battle many of them away with logical answers. Many of your smaller fears can be overcome in this way but of course greater fears will take more patience and more time to explain to yourself.

Stop Running the simulation

Life is like a computer game if you think about it. On many computer games when I was little, the game would allow you to have a test run or a test drive before playing the actual game. The world is complex, but it’s also really simple. As we go through the pandemic and the lockdowns, we become more and more trapped by our own imagination. We imagine all the things we would love to do but after those images in our head fade, we don’t pursue them. Now that we have been experiencing this pandemic for over a year, we now have practice in adapting our lives. Stop running the simulation or test run of the game and actually play it. What dreams you dreamed about during the pandemic, do them or do the adaptation of them. If you had a dream of going on holiday to a country you’ve always wanted to go, actively begin looking and researching the specific area you want to go and get an idea of the average price ranges from flights to accommodation. Even if you don’t book it yet, start separating part of your salary each month so that when everything does open up, you’re fully set to begin exploring with all the knowledge of the culture and an idea of the local area.

If you don't start now, you never will. You’ll always end up making more excuses about why you didn’t do it. Also, in a time when things can take their toll quite easily, especially on our mental health, having something to look forward to or work towards, will help ease the lockdown blues.

Momentum

My final tip is, keep moving forward! It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you don’t go backwards. Take time for self care - even if it’s the little things like my enjoyment of my tea. You can’t move forwards if you don’t have any strength and self care is just another way of ensuring you have that strength when you need it most. Momentum is key. Work hard when you have the strength and when you don’t have the strength, let the momentum you’ve picked up from all that hard work carry you forward. You don’t have to get as much work done as you would if you were at your full strength, but you do have to get something done even if it’s one thing per day.

Something that I find helps is committing yourself to one task in the morning, one task in the afternoon, and one self care activity in the evening. When you’re tired, having a busy schedule where you do a different task on the hour can cause ‘burn out’ or can make you feel demotivated if you don’t get all the things done on your list. If you only commit yourself to a morning task and an afternoon task then you are more likely to stay on track and if you get everything done in that day then you are free to decide what you do with the rest of your time - whether you relax or whether you do some more work. Just be careful not to over work and to find your balance - as long as you’re moving forward, you’re on the right track!

That’s all I have for this entry, thank you so much for reading. I hope you found it useful and if you feel that it could help someone struggling then feel free to share it with them. I’m no expert in any of this so don’t take what I say for gospel but I do hope that some of the discussions push you to think and I hope the new thoughts you develop help you to move forward.

All the best,

Eight