In COVID Times, Grief—and Growth—Aren’t Linear
AN ESSAY BY JENN KEARNEY
2020 taught us what it was like to lose anything and everything. What can we gain from this pandemic?
Pop onto any social platform today, and it seems like everyone doesn’t know how they’re still getting out of bed and doing this thing called life a whole year or more since COVID took off.
Whatever you’re feeling, however, you’re feeling about the last year+ of time, one thing is for certain: we are all carrying an incredible amount of grief around with us.
It’s impossible to not feel an immense amount of loss since 2020 both crawled by and blew right past us. Thanks to COVID-19, we have lost millions of lives worldwide—and hundreds of thousands in our backyard. We have watched friends, loved ones, even ourselves lose jobs, forfeit vacations, postpone weddings, and even attend funerals by Zoom. We can’t not mourn what we once had and what we’ve lost in our own ways over the last year and longer.
I would be remiss not to write an article about the impact of COVID-19 and not share my own experience with it, including what I lost.
In March 2020, I was near my peak of physical fitness. I’m a distance runner, avid spin-goer, and lover of lifting weights, and I have a hell of a lot of fun doing all of it. I was working hard at home, at work, and in the gym.
At the end of April 2020, my essential-worker partner brought COVID home without symptoms until he mentioned that all his joints hurt. The next day he couldn’t get out of bed. Four days later, I spiked a fever. It was hard to get a test, but I’m immunocompromised and have asthma, so I was able to get one—positive, of course.
I don’t remember most of May
I couldn’t breathe normally—it felt as if an elephant was sitting on my chest all the time. My ribs hurt from trying to take deep breaths. My muscles spasmed all the time. I lost my sense of taste and smell and also lost my voice.
I spent most of my days and nights asleep with a recurring nightmare when my fevers broke that I was bleeding from all my pores. I would wake up, sheets and clothes soaked through, convinced that I was covered in blood and too exhausted even to consider getting up and changing my clothes.
I finally tested negative in June and thought the worst of it was behind me.
I have never been more wrong about something in my life—and that it would change my life in ways, I didn’t think possible.
I spent the summer in a fog. I had memory loss. I had to leave sticky notes all over my desk to make sure I got my job done. My heart rate would spike for no reason. I was losing hair by the fistful multiple times a day. I couldn’t run, let alone walk, without thinking I would pass out from my lung capacity being so minimal. Taking a flight of stairs felt like I was sprinting with a snorkel on.
I took a sufficient amount of time being confused about my lingering symptoms and feeling sorry for myself. My anxiety stayed through the roof, and I fell into a fear cycle of checking the news, checking social media, and crying because I was confused and angry and scared. I felt so alone all the time.
To be clear: I’m not alone in this, and I never have been. I have an unconditionally caring partner. I have several close friends. I have a family who, by some miracle, has remained healthy throughout all of this. And in my day job, I work in mental health communications. I create resources for others. I have resources. So why was it so easy for me to surrender to feeling awful all the time?
After talking to psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinical consultants at my job and asking them this same question, I realized they were all telling me the same thing.
We’re all burned out and fighting to get through every day.
People rely on habits, patterns, and schedules because we thrive in normalcy. Normalcy keeps our anxiety levels down. And yes—we have anxiety all the time. Our fight-or-flight response is our body’s natural anxiety reaction answering the question, “Should I stay, or should I go now?”
What happens when we become out of sync? Our stress levels go through the roof. Our heart rates spike, we get irritable, our cortisol (stress hormone) levels rise, adrenaline gets overproduced, and more. We’re constantly on edge and looking for ways to “take the edge off.” It’s part of why alcohol use has increased at an alarming rate during the pandemic. We’re so desperately trying to cope and brace ourselves, yet we don’t know exactly what tomorrow holds.
There are a lot of parallels between my own journey with COVID and others’ experiences. I lost time. I missed out on travel. I constantly worried about my family, my friends, and my own health. I got out of shape. I tried to get back in shape. I failed at a lot of things.
You’ll hear from a lot of people that growth isn’t linear. Yet, in our love of predictive behavior, we subconsciously will our progression and growth to be that every day is better than the one before. And when it isn’t? Oh boy, are many us upset about it—and this became all too common during lockdowns, restrictions, and progress that was quickly lost during backsliding.
I lost a lot of myself in the months after when I was trying to grapple with “life post-COVID” until I realized: dividing my life into pre-and post-illness was up to me. Choosing to focus on my backslides instead of my growth held me back from fully recovering and emerging from this pandemic—whenever it ends—with a better head on my shoulders than when it all started.
A wise friend shared motivational and inspiring words with me years ago, and I hope that they resonate the same way with you as they did me.
“When you find yourself struggling physically - remember that it’s all in the mind. The mind is the fortress that controls the body, and the body can achieve anything you set yourself to do. The only thing stopping yourself, is in fact yourself. With every step you take, you are closer to proving your mind wrong - you can in fact do this. You can push yourself harder, faster, stronger and even further than you thought you were ever able to achieve.”
It’s perfectly okay to mourn what we’ve lost and feel remorse for the things we’ve turned down.
It doesn’t make you any less of a person—in fact, grief, sadness, shame, remorse, and allowing yourself to feel how you feel makes you a more well-rounded person.
Does your pandemic world have setbacks? Plenty. Does it also have progress? Absolutely. Will you witness both on a regular basis? I can’t tell you that for sure.
But what I do know is that the progress and the propulsion into our ability to grow and grieve simultaneously lies in every step that we take forward. While we may still be upset when things don’t go in our favor, we can relish in the fact that the biggest facilitator of change lies within us. And that, I think, is the best part of our collective pandemic journey.
Jenn is a digital communications manager in the mental health field, creating space for others to learn about the inner workings of their mind and destigmatize conversations around mental health, mental illness, and human behavior. She has a Master of Arts in Health Communication from Emerson College and Tufts University School of Medicine, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Babson College, and over a decade of freelance writing experience.
When she's unplugged you can find her running, cooking, lifting weights, greeting every dog she encounters, cycling, or cracking dad jokes. Hopefully, you don't find her doing all of those at the same time. Say hi on Instagram or Twitter.