Prioritizing Self-Care Beyond the Pandemic
An Essay by Dana Bogan
We’ve all been living through a collective trauma throughout the past year.
The sobering number of daily deaths has become a number so incomprehensible that our brain numbs its meaning to shelter us from unrelenting anxiety. We’ve grown accustomed to spending more time indoors, our kitchens and bedrooms becoming dual-purpose offices, our partners, roommates, families, and pets becoming coworkers. We’ve become experts at eyeballing 6 feet and have masks in various shapes and patterns, always kept close at hand.
The world we knew a year ago has become unrecognizable.
We each exist at a unique intersection of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, profession, family dynamics, household composition, and social relations.
The amalgamation of our identities implicates our experiences of living through the pandemic and how we will narrate this time of our lives. Although we may share characteristics with others who self-identify in a specific categorical group like ourselves, the compounded effect of existing in more than one identity means that our vantage point of life is a perspective that very few may share.
I’ve spent several months considering my intersectionality and have reflected deeply on its impact on my experience of living through this pandemic. As I watched the murder of George Floyd last year through my Black identity, I realized that the harm imposed on that aspect of my identity was vastly different than that of my White friends. For weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to put words to the visceral sense of despair and hopelessness that permeated my entire body. It felt impossible to focus on work without a sense of rage toward my White colleagues. They seemed readily able to turn back to the workday without seeing the grave disparities playing out in real-time.
As a woman who has lived with a mental illness for over half of my life, mental health was part of my daily reality long before the pandemic. The worsening of depression and anxiety resulting from social isolation felt untenable as stay-at-home orders suddenly left me without the physical support of my treatment team. As I stumbled through the world with fewer supports and increased stress, the emotional overwhelm was compounded as my work shifted from outpatient hospital practice to an end-of-life COVID inpatient unit. As COVID impacted my friends’ work, my work was COVID. As deaths mounted and we heard tragic stories of loss on the news, it was personal in my family as I lost two beloved Uncles to this disease.
“No one was going to swoop down from above and hold space for the pain I was feeling, nor anyone who could truly comprehend the complex interplay between the twin pandemics of racism and COVID-19 on my identity.”
There was a moment during the summer when I realized that no one could possibly know what I needed for myself except for me. No one was going to swoop down from above and hold space for the pain I was feeling, nor anyone who could truly comprehend the complex interplay between the twin pandemics of racism and COVID-19 on my identity. The most poignant theme of the past year for me has been learning to grant myself radical self-permission to engage in self-care in the way that I need to nurture and tend to the various parts of myself that are particularly targeted and hurting. There are elements within each of us that our friends, families, partners, colleagues, bosses, and communities cannot see or understand, and therefore do not make space for the tending of those burdens. But just because others don’t make space for our healing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reserve space for healing ourselves.
We are often socially pressured to overlook our inherent wisdom and curiosity that supports self-work in exchange for productivity, indestructibility, and external outputs. We must learn to understand what we need and feel empowered to address our needs without apologizing or explaining to others. We must work on drawing the boundaries between work and home, even if work has become home and we are pressured to squeeze more out of even less. We should continue to take days off for vacation, even if we’re simply spending the day at home relaxing. We should encourage one another to seek professional support when needed and continue to destigmatize mental health, not only in service of the chronic stress from the pandemic but also to recognize those plagued by mental illness long before this time. We should understand that the weight of the world is very different depending on how you identify and be graceful with ourselves when processing this trauma from the position of a marginalized identity.
“We devalue our own suffering when we compare it to another’s.”
We’ve all been dealt a different hand throughout the past year, some filled with more safeguards and others with more losses. But looking at our hand through a lens of comparative judgment does little to offer our hearts and minds the love and support they need as we continue to live in an active state of chronic stress and uncertainty. We devalue our own suffering when we compare it to another’s. Suffering is complicated and nuanced and subjective and does not deserve invalidation. You don’t have to suffer more than or less than someone else to feel as though your sadness, fear, anger, etc., is just and warranted.
May you begin to grant yourself permission to acknowledge your struggles as valid. Champion your successes, and seek what you need to tend to your wellness, as your beautiful identities deserve.
Dana Bogan (she/her) is a Clinical Social Worker and Fitness Professional in the Boston area. She is passionate about connecting with diverse communities and deepening relationships with others. Her work in both clinical practice and fitness classes centers around respecting and honoring the mind and body where it is today, while cultivating self-care practices into daily life. Dana is a competitive athlete who enjoys physical challenges as a way to bolster a resilient spirit.