A year ago everything changed.
Nashville had a horrible set of tornadoes that caused an unbelievable amount of damage. I had heard about a horrible virus that required another country to build a hospital in a day and prepared for the worst- both personally and professionally. Things started closing down and most people, as far as they were told, expected it to last a few weeks. But I’ve had enough microbiology training in my life to understand that viruses rarely, if ever, cause problems for two weeks, and I expected the worst.
But honestly, in spite of all my medical knowledge and training, it was still worse than I expected. It was worse than most of us could have imagined in terms of the damage done to jobs, to lives lost, to the economy, to churches, to families, to friendships… Now many of us are sitting around looking at a lot of broken foundations and rubble and wondering how to rebuild.
But now that things are calming down, I think the first place to start before we jump in and try to “fix everything”, is to reflect.
When we lose a lot, our first step is to Surrender. Our first job in a dangerous situation is to get to safety, and once we’ve done that, we need to stop fighting everything and everyone and admit we’re safe. Safety doesn’t mean life is now perfect, it just means we aren’t in immediate danger and it’s time to change the way we’re reacting to stressors. The way that life goes in the middle of a storm or a stressor or a tragedy is very different than the way life goes when everything is happy. And a lot of getting healing means letting go of that “fight or flight” response and accepting a new way of life.
The second step is to choose to Remember. This step is the hardest for me. I like accomplishing big and amazing things, not reflecting on hard and painful things. But this is the step it’s time for us to all embrace. Even those we did well financially and still have all of their family and friends alive and well and had no big set-backs in 2020 still lost a lot. We lost plans, we lost intentions, we lost expectations, we lost faith in those around us… We all lost a lot. And now that we’re getting to a safer place where life is not quite as dangerous for everyone, it’s time to admit to ourselves how we really feel about everything. We can’t effectively move on from something that we don’t want to admit hurt. We can’t live our entire lives saying “I am fine” and pretending like that really is good enough. We need to admit when things are hard, mourn the losses and imperfections, and let out the anger and disappointments, and let those emotions go.
I actually worked recently on a video to try to help with this step. Admitting something was bad is honestly a lot harder than simply “moving on”, but I find when I try to skip that step I never end up actually getting to move on. Those emotions become a festering wound that never heal, popping up in relationships and situations where they has no business and trying to cause problems where they never should have existed. It’s okay if you’re still upset from something that happened awhile back. It’s okay if something from the far past still hurts. It’s okay to cry or yell or be frustrated by something you wish was completely over by now.
I actually worked to create a video about the frustrations of the last year. I asked friends to share stories that made them sob, yell, or afraid, and put them together with music. Some people told me they didn’t want to share at all. Others really had to be encouraged a lot to be honest about some of what bothered them- something it’s really hard to put into words what you actually feel. But the resulting video we made from the stories people did share was really powerful. It is meant to be a safe place to encourage others to share- to share your own pain, your own frustrations, your own losses- not so that we can all feel unhappy for forever, but so that we can all finally lay down that pain and hopefully begin to move on. If you haven’t seen the video already, you can check it out here:
And then the last step in moving toward healing is to Choose to Trust. This step seems like it would be the most quick and obvious, but it takes the longest to achieve, and honestly, its the least momentous one. One day you look up, and realize you have faith that the bad things are over and won’t win in your life anymore. But it’s an important step to be able to move on, to choose to trust that life won’t always be hard, people won’t always let you down, things won’t always be overwhelming. Things will get better, though it may take time and go slower than you like, but you can choose to believe that as hard as it’s been, it won’t always be this hard. We will not only survive, but come back stronger in the end.