April 9 Sign in
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Thank you @epangili and @readyornot1234. That means a lot. I hate to feel as if I am whingeing, well, maybe I was, when many people like @juliemouse83 are putting their lives on the line for us. Feel better now, resigned to lockdown again and counting my blessings. (Re-)discovering low calorie pick-me-up snacks: anchovies, tapenade, mussels, wasa crisp bread, cottage cheese, 0% Greek yoghurt... watch for salt content though5
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April 8
Yes X 3
Did a lot of yardwork. It was a beautiful day
April 9
Pass day # 1
I needed to relax a bit so I had a nightcap which took me over and that was okay.
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10th April
Shaky start emotionally but managed 3×Yes.
Exercise: Yes, usual 60 minute permitted walk
Calories: Yes, stayed under. Swapped planned omelette and salad supper for a couple of glasses of wine and nibbles.
Tracking: Yes, logged everything.
Feeling the pain of not being with my kids. Haven't seen them since Christmas and was supposed to have been with now. Still, we're all healthy. I entertain myself doing all kinds of things. I have friends. The weather is glorious. I have sunshine on my balcony for a couple of hours every day. The BBC does wonderful podcasts. Just finished listening to Hilary Mantel's latest.
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Yes x3 and did my no alcohol day
@Chinkiri I definitely empathize. On one hand I feel lucky to have good health and a job still. However I still feel the loss of all I had planned: I was supposed to be on a plane to Prague today, my brother and his wife had to cancel their trip to see us in DC last weekend, my parents have to cancel their trip to us in early May, and my students' end-of-school trip to Puerto Rico is canceled. I'm very nervous about summer plans. It's a lot.3 -
readyornot1234 wrote: »Did I exercise for at least 20 minutes? Yes - an hour in my "happy place" Wii Rhythm Island - where it is alway Spring / Early summer with blossoming Cherry Trees, fields of tulips, people hanging out chatting and fishing, and playing frizbee in park - and where I make a rainbow most every day.
Did I stay within my calorie budget for the day? Now that the fitbit has FINALLY synced, I have confirmed that I am 49 calories to the good.
Did I keep track of everything I ate and drank? Yes-sir-eee
Days goals met: 9
Pass days used: 0
Okay. I definitely have to get one. Is this the virtual thing? I so want to make a rainbow!
old-school original Wii game called "Walk It Out" (goes by "Step To The Beat" in the UK)
This youtube review will show you all around the island. Only 6 minutes long, but maybe skip the first minute to where the actual game-play starts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbvP2I1nh8s
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AbvP2I1nh8s
It also shows how rich the graphical world is (for it's day ~2008 ) with the level of lighting slowing changing and shadows shifting though the hour as well as through the day
Wii-original games are supposed to also run on WiiU systems (depending oh what is easier to find) I have a wiiU I got as a back-up machine. I will try running Wii Fit Plus on it to confirm that bit.
We got the kids one years and years ago. I think it’s at my parents now. I’ll have to find out.1 -
@Chinkiri It's okay to grieve when we lose the things, people and the freedom that we love!
Your friend, Rick4 -
April 9
Yes
Yes
Yes
💚4 -
RangerRickL wrote: »@Chinkiri It's okay to grieve when we lose the things, people and the freedom that we love!
Your friend, Rick
I totally agree.
@Chinkiri - I do agree with @RangerRickL but didn’t know until recently. I’ve been in lockdown completely because of my health issues. I thought I had no right to self indulge in pity. It wasn’t until a friend sent me this that it finally clicked (and sorry so long, I can’t figure out how to hide things):
Trouble Focusing? Not Sleeping? You May Be Grieving
“It’s normal and natural to not be able to just go on as usual.”
By R.O. KwonApril 9, 2020
I couldn’t understand, at first, why I was having such trouble writing. In early March, following the advice of public-health experts, my husband and I had isolated ourselves with his septuagenarian parents, thinking that we could help them. At the end of each quiet day, I sat buzzing with terror but strangely listless, having accomplished very little. Until recently, I traveled a lot for work: Since publishing my first novel, I’ve often been on the road for speaking, teaching and other book-related gigs.
But now the speaking gigs were all canceled or postponed; my teaching had moved online; I was home. I had nowhere else to go. I had a novel deadline coming up. For so long, in planes, trains and cars, I’d wished to have an uninterrupted stretch in one place where I could really focus on my writing, and now, well, look, I had it.
But I couldn’t focus. What’s more, news aside, I could barely read. Instead, I ate an unusually large quantity of salt-and-vinegar chips. I was exhausted, but I slept badly, intermittently. I cried. Long-held desires and goals felt hazy, at times irrelevant. The days blurred together; deadlines pressed close. I couldn’t fully recall why I’d ever cared so much about books, words.
Other people who couldn’t stay home were going to work every day — many without the option, the privilege, of doing otherwise — while here I was, home, and I couldn’t, of all things, write. Yes, there’s a pandemic, and yes, I felt by turns anxious, furious, and terrified, but it’s 2020 in America, and I’ve felt quite anxious, furious and terrified for a while. The inability to work, though, was new.
But then it occurred to me, as I ate another astringent chip, that this lassitude, the trouble focusing, the sleep difficulties, my exhaustion: Oh yes, I thought, I remember this. I was grieving. I was grieving in early March, I’m still grieving now, and chances are, you are, too.
Consider how much has already been lost, and how much more we’re likely to lose: the lives already taken by the coronavirus, along with the lives currently in jeopardy, and exponentially more people falling ill every day. The lost livelihoods, the blasted plans. Entire families destitute today who were getting by three weeks ago. Upended routines. Postponed weddings and funerals. Depleted savings. Isolation.
The quickly rising anti-Asian racism, stoked by a cowardly president trying to distract this country from his own negligence. Politicians arguing that our elders should die for the sake of the economy. The exhausted grief of those who already knew full well how hard it can be to be American and marginalized. Jobs vanishing, the jeopardized local businesses — restaurants, bookstores — that make a place home. Whole cities are changing, fast. Well, the whole world is, it seems, and there’s that to grieve, too. I could go on; the list is long. “There’s Grief of Want — and grief of Cold — / A sort they call ‘Despair’ —,” wrote Emily Dickinson, who knew a thing or two about loss.
Does any of this sound familiar to you, and if so, do you know what to do? I didn’t, not really, so I asked an expert, Megan Devine, psychotherapist and author of “It’s OK That You’re Not OK.” Devine points out how relatively unfamiliar we are, in the U.S., to talking about this kind of life-changing pain.
“As a culture, we don’t talk about grief, we don’t make space for sadness,” Ms. Devine says. Now everyone is carrying grief, she believes, but because many Americans weren’t talking about grief before the pandemic, we don’t know how to name it, let alone voice it.
That silence can result in what Ms. Devine calls “epidemics of unspoken grief”: “Everybody’s got pain they’re carrying around, but they never get to say it. It doesn’t go away if you don’t get to say it. It comes out in epidemics of suicidality and depression, social isolation, loneliness.”
More loneliness, even, than what we’re already experiencing, Ms. Devine says. This is, of course, part of the especial cruelty of this pandemic: how it isolates us at a time when, grieving, afraid, we might crave fellowship. This is when we most need to connect with other people, she says, but how to find true, deep connection when we can’t so much as touch anyone we’re not already living with?
“Right now, what we have are words,” Ms. Devine says. “One of the reasons we avoid conversations about grief is because it tends to make us feel helpless, and nobody likes feeling helpless. When we feel helpless, we tend to do things to make the other person’s pain go away so that we can stop feeling helpless.”
This is why, she says, in the face of pain, people so often give unsolicited advice, or try to dismiss pain by saying it could be worse, or that everything happens for a reason: it lets us skirt feeling helpless. Even in the way I first brought up my own pandemic-related grief, I’d gestured at dismissing it: I was sad, but at least I had a schedule that could, in theory, let me write. What if I didn’t need the “but,” the “at least,” what if I didn’t need to try to brush away what I felt by also explaining why I shouldn’t feel as I did?
It’s also possible to use words to listen, Ms. Devine says. “Grief can’t be fixed, but it can be acknowledged,” and acknowledgment is the best medicine. “It seems like it’s too simple to be helpful, but it’s actually often the only thing that works.” For others, but for ourselves, too. With our own grief, Ms. Devine advises that we take time to check in with ourselves, to slow down to name our pain. Not to fix it, since it likely can’t be fixed, but to notice it.
It’s true that, in the midst of a pandemic, finding this kind of time might be challenging. Annika Sridharan is a clinical psychologist and social worker, and the director of Partnership for Trauma Recovery, a Berkeley clinic that works with asylum seekers, asylees and refugees from 45 countries. She notes that in a situation of insecurity, such as what the world is facing now, it can be difficult to attend to mourning and grief while we’re also afraid and anxious. Things are not as usual now, Dr. Sridharan says, and, “It’s normal and natural to not be able to just go on as usual.”
The last time I suddenly found myself in a state of deep grief, utterly unable to go on as usual, I was 17. One day, I lost the all-consuming faith I’d grown up in, with a Christian God I’d loved so much I’d intended to become a pastor, a woman of God. Just like that, the world I’d known shifted, cracked open, and fell apart. I lost a faith, a vocation, a community and salvation all at once, and, for some time, I felt as if I might be the loneliest person alive.
I wasn’t, though, nor am I now. Coronavirus grief is already a vast, monstrous grief, its reach and breadth expanding daily. It’s also a collective grief, a worldwide loss that — physically isolated though many of us have to be — a lot of other people are, in one way or another, also mourning. I hope, in this extraordinarily difficult time, to be better than I’ve been at letting myself mourn. I’ll start at the beginning: This is hard. I hurt. If you’re hurting, too, you’re not alone.
R.O. Kwon is the author of “The Incendiaries.” Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, Vogue, Buzzfeed and NPR.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.3 -
readyornot1234 wrote: »RangerRickL wrote: »@Chinkiri It's okay to grieve when we lose the things, people and the freedom that we love!
Your friend, Rick
I totally agree.
@Chinkiri - I do agree with @RangerRickL but didn’t know until recently. I’ve been in lockdown completely because of my health issues. I thought I had no right to self indulge in pity. It wasn’t until a friend sent me this that it finally clicked (and sorry so long, I can’t figure out how to hide things):
Trouble Focusing? Not Sleeping? You May Be Grieving
“It’s normal and natural to not be able to just go on as usual.”By R.O. KwonApril 9, 2020
I couldn’t understand, at first, why I was having such trouble writing. In early March, following the advice of public-health experts, my husband and I had isolated ourselves with his septuagenarian parents, thinking that we could help them. At the end of each quiet day, I sat buzzing with terror but strangely listless, having accomplished very little. Until recently, I traveled a lot for work: Since publishing my first novel, I’ve often been on the road for speaking, teaching and other book-related gigs.
But now the speaking gigs were all canceled or postponed; my teaching had moved online; I was home. I had nowhere else to go. I had a novel deadline coming up. For so long, in planes, trains and cars, I’d wished to have an uninterrupted stretch in one place where I could really focus on my writing, and now, well, look, I had it.
But I couldn’t focus. What’s more, news aside, I could barely read. Instead, I ate an unusually large quantity of salt-and-vinegar chips. I was exhausted, but I slept badly, intermittently. I cried. Long-held desires and goals felt hazy, at times irrelevant. The days blurred together; deadlines pressed close. I couldn’t fully recall why I’d ever cared so much about books, words.
Other people who couldn’t stay home were going to work every day — many without the option, the privilege, of doing otherwise — while here I was, home, and I couldn’t, of all things, write. Yes, there’s a pandemic, and yes, I felt by turns anxious, furious, and terrified, but it’s 2020 in America, and I’ve felt quite anxious, furious and terrified for a while. The inability to work, though, was new.
But then it occurred to me, as I ate another astringent chip, that this lassitude, the trouble focusing, the sleep difficulties, my exhaustion: Oh yes, I thought, I remember this. I was grieving. I was grieving in early March, I’m still grieving now, and chances are, you are, too.
Consider how much has already been lost, and how much more we’re likely to lose: the lives already taken by the coronavirus, along with the lives currently in jeopardy, and exponentially more people falling ill every day. The lost livelihoods, the blasted plans. Entire families destitute today who were getting by three weeks ago. Upended routines. Postponed weddings and funerals. Depleted savings. Isolation.
The quickly rising anti-Asian racism, stoked by a cowardly president trying to distract this country from his own negligence. Politicians arguing that our elders should die for the sake of the economy. The exhausted grief of those who already knew full well how hard it can be to be American and marginalized. Jobs vanishing, the jeopardized local businesses — restaurants, bookstores — that make a place home. Whole cities are changing, fast. Well, the whole world is, it seems, and there’s that to grieve, too. I could go on; the list is long. “There’s Grief of Want — and grief of Cold — / A sort they call ‘Despair’ —,” wrote Emily Dickinson, who knew a thing or two about loss.
Does any of this sound familiar to you, and if so, do you know what to do? I didn’t, not really, so I asked an expert, Megan Devine, psychotherapist and author of “It’s OK That You’re Not OK.” Devine points out how relatively unfamiliar we are, in the U.S., to talking about this kind of life-changing pain.
“As a culture, we don’t talk about grief, we don’t make space for sadness,” Ms. Devine says. Now everyone is carrying grief, she believes, but because many Americans weren’t talking about grief before the pandemic, we don’t know how to name it, let alone voice it.
That silence can result in what Ms. Devine calls “epidemics of unspoken grief”: “Everybody’s got pain they’re carrying around, but they never get to say it. It doesn’t go away if you don’t get to say it. It comes out in epidemics of suicidality and depression, social isolation, loneliness.”
More loneliness, even, than what we’re already experiencing, Ms. Devine says. This is, of course, part of the especial cruelty of this pandemic: how it isolates us at a time when, grieving, afraid, we might crave fellowship. This is when we most need to connect with other people, she says, but how to find true, deep connection when we can’t so much as touch anyone we’re not already living with?
“Right now, what we have are words,” Ms. Devine says. “One of the reasons we avoid conversations about grief is because it tends to make us feel helpless, and nobody likes feeling helpless. When we feel helpless, we tend to do things to make the other person’s pain go away so that we can stop feeling helpless.”
This is why, she says, in the face of pain, people so often give unsolicited advice, or try to dismiss pain by saying it could be worse, or that everything happens for a reason: it lets us skirt feeling helpless. Even in the way I first brought up my own pandemic-related grief, I’d gestured at dismissing it: I was sad, but at least I had a schedule that could, in theory, let me write. What if I didn’t need the “but,” the “at least,” what if I didn’t need to try to brush away what I felt by also explaining why I shouldn’t feel as I did?
It’s also possible to use words to listen, Ms. Devine says. “Grief can’t be fixed, but it can be acknowledged,” and acknowledgment is the best medicine. “It seems like it’s too simple to be helpful, but it’s actually often the only thing that works.” For others, but for ourselves, too. With our own grief, Ms. Devine advises that we take time to check in with ourselves, to slow down to name our pain. Not to fix it, since it likely can’t be fixed, but to notice it.
It’s true that, in the midst of a pandemic, finding this kind of time might be challenging. Annika Sridharan is a clinical psychologist and social worker, and the director of Partnership for Trauma Recovery, a Berkeley clinic that works with asylum seekers, asylees and refugees from 45 countries. She notes that in a situation of insecurity, such as what the world is facing now, it can be difficult to attend to mourning and grief while we’re also afraid and anxious. Things are not as usual now, Dr. Sridharan says, and, “It’s normal and natural to not be able to just go on as usual.”
The last time I suddenly found myself in a state of deep grief, utterly unable to go on as usual, I was 17. One day, I lost the all-consuming faith I’d grown up in, with a Christian God I’d loved so much I’d intended to become a pastor, a woman of God. Just like that, the world I’d known shifted, cracked open, and fell apart. I lost a faith, a vocation, a community and salvation all at once, and, for some time, I felt as if I might be the loneliest person alive.
I wasn’t, though, nor am I now. Coronavirus grief is already a vast, monstrous grief, its reach and breadth expanding daily. It’s also a collective grief, a worldwide loss that — physically isolated though many of us have to be — a lot of other people are, in one way or another, also mourning. I hope, in this extraordinarily difficult time, to be better than I’ve been at letting myself mourn. I’ll start at the beginning: This is hard. I hurt. If you’re hurting, too, you’re not alone.
R.O. Kwon is the author of “The Incendiaries.” Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, Vogue, Buzzfeed and NPR.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
I am going to put a very relevant post to this, particularly the thought I had no right to self indulge in pity part into What's On Your Mind Today. It addresses a tangent-issue that some of us have mentioned (or feel but aren't mentioning) - the feeling of guilt of not being ABLE (for whatever reason) to take a more visibly directly-active role as this continues to drags out. Some thoughts on how you actually ARE taking an active role BY seemingly staying passively on the sidelines. I have wanting post something like this but not sure of how to lead into it until now.3 -
Wow O!
Thank you very much.
@stella7x7, @Chinkiri, @epangili, @davert123, @SuziQ113, @craigo3154, @ craigo3154, @juliemouse83, @Bill70sStrong, @BMcC9, @HASWLRS, @cjane917, @loopydo2017, @Hollis100, @RangerRickL, @Katmary71
You all made my day wonderful. I really enjoyed it. Saving some of the joy to be celebrated on Easter Sunday
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yes x 31
