2022: A Primer on How to Cope
Dear Friends,
Here is how my holiday was supposed to go: my in-laws were to arrive on Christmas Eve. We’d eat dinner. We’d take a walk around my neighborhood and look at Christmas decorations. We’d do all the Christmas-Eve hype with my daughter (milk, cookies, speculation), then send her off to bed for my favorite night of the year: playing Santa.
We’d have Christmas morning: gifts, breakfast, mimosas, the enticing smell of boeuf bourguignon cooking low and slow all day. A gleeful toddler surrounded by toys and love. A beautiful holiday meal.
Then, the next few days spent enjoying each other. Taking my mother-in-law to breakfast and for pedicures. Going to see the light display I read about online.
Then, my sister arriving on her birthday. A big birthday dinner. Time spent just the two of us–a trip to Union Market. Checking out the murals in NoMa. Eating at good restaurants, visiting art museums. She and my daughter seeing each other for the first time in six months. Rest. Time off. Merriment and delight with favorite people.
Here is how my holiday went: The Monday before Christmas, my daughter was feverish and had a runny nose. I didn’t think much of it, because #preschoolgerms. She was fine by Tuesday afternoon. Then I got sick too…and it turned out those preschool germs were COVID.
My in-laws stayed away. My sister stayed in New York, visiting my other siblings.
For a brief and delusional twenty-four hours, my family toyed with the idea that my husband might not catch it–that my sister’s visit might not be shortened much, after all. That we could have a normal New Year’s.
My husband tested positive on Christmas morning. While he rallied and prepared a beautiful boeuf bourguignon, I had lost my sense of taste and smell and could not fully experience it. (Though I did experience extreme gratitude that we wouldn’t have to cook for the next few days.)
“What symptoms does Jake have so far?” my sister asked me on FaceTime.
“Mostly rage,” he called from the background, stirring the mushrooms.
As for me? First I was left with lots of philosophical questions like Why, when plans fall apart, do they do so after you’ve spent $400 on groceries for a week of hosting?
More seriously, I found myself feeling resentment that we’re still dealing with this. I mistakenly thought that, at this point in the pandemic, we wouldn’t have to spend holidays alone anymore. This is my family’s first bout with COVID, but it feels like our third Christmas dominated by it. I’m grateful for vaccinations and later variants making our experience much less scary than those early days. But the holiday felt like a near-identical repeat of 2020–everyone staying away for fear of spreading the virus. An intimate, cozy holiday, but not by choice.
The thing that doesn’t feel like a repeat of 2020, though, is me.
If there’s been a theme to my writing this year, it’s been How to Cope. How to cope with uncertainty, with disappointment. With grief, with fear. With the mundane and the earth-shattering alike.
I feel it’s fitting that this last letter of 2022 should in some way serve as a meditation on the year. So here it is: 2022: A Primer on How to Cope Through a COVID Christmas, or Really, Any Hard Time.
Remember that your feelings are valid.
I don’t have to pretend that everything is okay. It makes sense to be disappointed, and it makes sense to still be caught up in a little pandemic trauma, even as we try to recreate normal lives.
Don’t hang all of your hopes on big joys at the expense of small joys.
Though, for all intents and purposes, our Christmas was canceled, it wasn’t canceled for one very excited, very bright three-year-old. She didn’t care that we all had COVID (easy, perhaps, for her, as she seemed to clear the virus after about 36 hours). She had her parents, Santa filled her stocking with Play-Doh, and she was allowed to eat a Kinder Egg before breakfast. And you know what? I was fully present for all of those glimmering, joyful moments.
The low: Christmas with COVID. But the high: a holiday that was actually perfectly suited to my toddler daughter. No extra hubbub or expectations–just an easy day at home with no meltdowns and a peaceful, three-hour nap.
“I have a question,” I called down to my husband on Day 4 of COVID. “If you can’t smell the Vick’s VapoRub, does it still work?”
Even if that something is plate after plate of PlayDoh spaghetti for a toddler who declares she is an artist-chef. (Fun tip: while PlayDoh elevates your nervous system if you think about how hard it is to get out of the carpet, manipulating it is also extremely calming if you surrender to the process.)
Until this year, I had never heard this week referred to as “Dead Week.” Right now it feels like the term is everywhere (except, of course, for my Australian art friends, who refer to it as “twixmas.”) It’s the liminal space between the two holidays, a time when time ceases to hold meaning. A time when we are supposed to, if we believe the memes, become one with the couch.
My first impulse, when it was clear that family wouldn’t be coming, was to just go ahead and work the days I had planned to take off. But then I remembered, uh, you have COVID. Even though I’m feeling fine, I also deserve rest. I also deserve to embrace the lull between the two holidays and do a little, well, nothing.
Remember that no feeling lasts forever.
I realized that the piece of COVID I’d always dreaded the most was being trapped in the house with a restless toddler for ten days. As I’m writing this, my daughter is on day 10 past COVID symptom onset, and I’m on day 8, so it is almost over. We will get outside again. We will see people again.
Lean on (and love) your community.
And those people? They matter. My friend Heather dropped bagels at our door on Christmas Eve morning. Elizabeth sent an Instacart gift card and dropped off a care package with gifts. My in-laws double masked and came by for a few minutes to bring presents and tins of our favorite holiday sweets. Friends texted to check in, to commiserate, to send love. These things are meaningful in normal times, but feel more so when you’re sick and isolated on a holiday.
And with that, 2022 comes to an end. We have coped, we have suffered, we have laughed, we have enjoyed and despaired, we have prevailed, I suppose.
It means a great deal to me to have you as a How the Light Gets In reader. Thank you for spending your time with my words this year, and for commenting and replying to let me know how you’re doing and what you’re thinking and feeling. (For you, too, are my community.)
As always, and especially in the tender days of the new year, take good care,
Dot
News & Updates
Five after-school openings now available for individual or family therapy with Matthew Brooks or Katie Gaynor. If your child needs a place to process grief, loss, a medical diagnosis in the family, anxiety, depression, trauma, or life transitions like a divorce or a move, we are here to help. Reply to this newsletter or email info@alexandriaarttherapy.com to hold a spot for your child.
Holiday Hours
Our practice manager will be out of the office December 29-January 2. If you’re a prospective client and would like to be added to our waitlist or receive more information, click here to complete a brief interest form. Individual therapists are setting their own holiday availability. If you are a current client, chat or email with your therapist directly about scheduling for the rest of the month. We also recommend this blog post about how to support your mental health if you have a longer break between sessions.
Blog Posts
New Prompt! This week, we’re sharing a free download: the Reflection Timelines Workbook. We’re sold the idea that the new year is a time of improvement…but what if, instead, we view it mostly as a time of reflection? This prompt for journaling or art making will help you honor the things that have happened in the last year, and if you like, set some soft intentions for the year to come.
Read the blog, or download the free workbook:
Our “8 Things” series continues, this time with Art Therapist Jenna Kelley. Check out this blog to read more about eight things she loves, including mesmerizing pour painting videos and her grounding morning routine.
Links We Like
Laura Miles on immersive art for Washingtonian Magazine: “The experience of living inside a work of art is, for me, a unique opportunity to experience a piece on a multisensory level,” Miles says. “The images move around you in fluid ways, the music is chosen carefully to enhance the feeling, and you let go of everything that doesn’t matter in that moment. Integrating the senses in such a way can help us feel more connected to our internal world and our external one—like that feeling of looking at the stars and feeling both minuscule and infinite.”
I’d like to try this! Bowls made out of fabric scraps.
German ornament catalog–mail order as art?
The unintended consequences of photography.
Adding to the list of reasons to visit Japan.
Heather Havrilesky on dead week goals: “Relax and enjoy yourself. Sinking into a nice, inert egg-noggy fog is the reason for the season. Don’t forget that! This means you need to narrow down your holiday goals significantly. Limit yourself to one (hopefully relaxing!) goal per day if you can. Examples: Ask your mom some questions about her life. Sit outside and stare at the trees for an hour. Make your kid teach you how to play a video game they love. Make some bread for your friends. Stuff like that. Let everything else fall by the wayside and focus on one thing that seems important, that strengthens a relationship, that feels good.”
Always good to end the year with a poem.
Fading, coping, still here. Drawing by Sara Hagale:
So sorry for all the change in plans and sickness. We’ve had a lot of this too. It’s hard. Finding the moments of joy as always and grateful for the downtime. Hope you enjoy your escape!!