Topics: grief, loss, mental health, pop culture, COVID, friendship, resilience

A few days ago I was commiserating with a friend about some hard stuff. Not “help me solve this problem” hard, but “it’s shitty that life is like this” hard. Some problems don’t have solutions. Some hardships can only be endured, not overcome. Sometimes making it to bedtime without hugging a watermelon is an accomplishment. 

That isn’t a euphemism, it’s a joke from my younger sister. She is a junior in college and said exam week was so stressful, she saw a giant watermelon on the kitchen counter and decided to squeeze it as tightly as she could. 

Does it make sense? Not really. 

Is it relatable? Absolutely.

Everyone has a breaking point and everyone has a place/thing/habit that is nonsensically comforting when we get there. Lily hugs a watermelon. I sit on the floor of my closet. Brett eats a spoonful of peanut butter. A friend of ours watches hockey fights on YouTube. If someone identified any of these things as their favorite hobby, you might be a little concerned, but as a coping skill, it makes perfect sense. 

That’s not OK. Quirky coping skills should not be so ubiquitous that we hold onto them like merit badges. Why are we so frequently reaching our breaking points that we hug fruit and hide behind clothing racks? 

I don’t have the actual answer, but observationally speaking, I have a guess: we’re all trying to self-soothe and it isn’t going well. We know we aren’t OK, but we don’t want to make that anyone else’s problem. Not because we’re all such considerate and conscientious people, but because we’re angry, mean, little jerks. I won’t talk to anyone, call a friend, or be a burden because if I complain to them, they’ll complain to me and I don’t want to hear about their petty problems, I have real shit going on.

We’ve replaced genuine venting with quirky coping. We’ve become self-imposingly withdrawn, relying on objects instead of people because we see other people as just another “problem” waiting to be added to our plate. Except it isn’t working. All we’ve done is add a metric ton of social resentment to our already-questionable stability. We don’t have the bandwidth to give our friends/family/peers a shoulder to cry on, but now we’re kinda ticked nobody showed up to be ours (those selfish jerks).

See the problem there? We’re not making ourselves available to support each other then resent how nobody is around supporting us. That cycle is so diabolical it has us reaching for inanimate objects as safety blankets.

As messed up as it is, it is understandable. We all just lived through a global pandemic. Like it or not, it was an every-man-for-themselves battle the past four years as we tried to keep our heads above water. All of us experienced a different version of the pandemic, and each one of us feels like we maybe, probably, quite certainly, had it worse off than everybody else. 

Here is how our 2019-2023 went: Brett works in healthcare and I work in an industry that was essential. Neither of us had so much as an hour off during the shut down. Instead our work loads both got heavier. We were freshly grieving Hunter’s death. We were dealing with the court cases from the accident. I had a hysterectomy. Our seven-year-old dog, Scout, died unexpectedly from aggressive liver cancer. My bladder stopped working. Both of our cats died. We dealt with a dozen surgeries and a bout of sepsis. Three of our grandparents passed away. We missed our much-anticipated ten year anniversary trip. And just when we thought we were out of the woods, we both got COVID over Christmas.

It’s easy for me to confidently say, “I had it the worst, my life sucked the most. The rest of you have no clue how much it hurt.”

But some of you do know. Some of you did have it worse.

At GVSU, I met Jenn. Jenn and I hit it off over our love for nonprofit work and the dark humor we both use to offset our highly sensitive personalities. In the past four years, Jenn lost her brother, Phil. Then her mother died. Then her father died. She has three kids under the age of six. Her husband is a full-time student with a full-time job. Her one living family member, her sister, lives hours away. Drowning? No, she was fully submerged and clawing for a life raft. 

She knows what my years looked like, I know what her years looked like, and we both feel so damn exhausted from all of it that we traded in our social bubbliness and dark humor for social resentment and dark thoughts. 

And dare I say, so did you.

Everyone has things that happened the past four years that feel so wildly unrelatable, we voluntarily disconnected ourselves from our life rafts in an attempt to self-preserve. We traded friends for fruits, pleasantries for peanut butter, and hugs for hockey fights.

The answer to this problem feels so obvious. We feel disconnected, so let's all make an effort to reconnect. Let’s throw away the coping skills and return to how things used to be!

The thing is, we can’t go back. Despite Jay Gatsby’s assertion that we can repeat the past, we can’t, Old Sport. We can’t even muster up enough courage to live like it’s 2018 let alone repeat 2019-2023. Our social egos are hurt. Our fuses are short. Our patience is nonexistent. The situation is delicate (Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?).

Stepping out of a comfort zone—even a really dark one—is, by nature, uncomfortable. Our anxiety is going to set off alarms telling us to retreat. Social interactions are going to feel draining. Our people skills are going to be rusty. Worst of all, we’re going to feel vulnerable.

So how do we, in the words of Matchbox Twenty, get back to good? How do we retire our quirks and exchange them for connections? How do we come back from all of it? How do we grab a life raft instead of a watermelon?

The answer isn’t easy peasy, but it is simple. How do we get back to good? We treat it like any other problem: start by making slow, incremental progress. Coffee dates. Check in texts. Meme exchanges. Windows of communication. Random acts of kindness. Intentional efforts of empathy. And for the love, let’s allow vulnerability back into our lives without its angry cousin, resentment stealing the show.

We have to start somewhere. Take it slow. Reach out. Respond. Smile. Laugh. Remember what it feels like to be human. Soon enough, our tip-toeing back into life will feel less dauting, and we will all be better off for it.

Now, grab a glass of water, text a friend or family member just to say hi, and let it feel a little weird and uncomfortable. Heaven knows it can’t be worse than cuddling with a watermelon. 

T’s Top Three Songs for when I’m in a foul mood:

• “Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night” - Bon Jovi

• “Dancing with Myself” - The Donnas

• “Under Pressure” - Queen & David Bowie