In Praise of Mixed Feelings

I’ve been meaning and meaning to write about how I’m doing with the pandemic. The short answer? Fine. Knock wood, my sweet partner, Ben, and I are both healthy. Neither of us knows anyone who has died from CO-VID 19. We’re able to teach online. We have cute cats and plenty of food. We can Zoom with our friends. We even have toilet paper.

But the longer, more authentic answer?  How am I really? How do I want to be in the midst of this pandemic?

That’s a big question, and right now, even small, everyday decisions seem fraught. For instance, take these two. How much time do I want to spend on social media? How much news about the virus do I need to read?

I love seeing what my friends are up to on Facebook, and before the virus hit, FB was a nice way to wind down in the evening. Now, I need online connection more than ever, but last night when I went on Facebook, my feed informed me that sixty health-care workers at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics have tested positive for the virus. This hospital is mere blocks from my home, and it employs many of my friends and neighbors—and many alum from Mount Mercy, where I teach. So when I saw that news, my fear spiked, and my heart aches for those workers and their loved ones.

Did I need to know this sad, scary news? Is knowledge always power?

I’m not sure. And I’m not criticizing my friends who posted that news. In a way, I’m glad I have the info. I can reach out to the people who are directly impacted. I can pray for them. I can take pride in the fact that I haven’t completely buried my head in the sand. I can tell myself that I’m bearing witness to suffering within my community.

But, for my own physical safety, I probably didn’t need that news. And that brings me back to the question: how much virus-related news to consume?

This morning when I opened my browser, there was an NYT story titled, “Is the Virus on My Hair, My Clothes, My Newspaper?” The answers to those questions are clearly related to my physical health, but the headline alone makes my pulse race. So I need to read the article, but I sure don’t want to. I’ll save it for later, for right before I can take a walk and burn off some of the fear it will generate.

Many mental health experts recommend restricting news consumption to twice a day—which seems like a lot to me. The more general rule of thumb: consume enough news to keep yourself physically safe, but not so much that you ruin your mental health.

That delicate balance—that sweet spot, that blessed equilibrium—is what I’m still seeking.

Not just with my news consumption. And not just during the pandemic. That optimal midway point is a guide post for my life, an inspiration for this blog.

But right now, that midway point can seem elusive. Predictions keep shifting. The virus itself may be mutating. And the advice that the pandemic generates grows ever more conflicting. There are wildly different opinions on topics ranging from face masks to time management.

These rampant mixed messages are brilliantly satirized by the author of the blog She is Fierce. (Shout-out to my friend Susan Loyacano, who posted “Relax” on FB.) Here is a brief excerpt:

…Relax. Don't watch the news. Make sure you're informed. Keep off social media. Stay connected. Try and focus on the positive. But be sure you know how serious it is. Don't worry needlessly. Don't take it too lightly. Don't let the kids see your fear. Don't bottle things up.

Relax. Don't hoard. Do you have enough supplies for your family? What if they get sick, do you have medicine? What if you have to isolate, will you be able to feed the kids for two weeks? Don't worry about it, though, just focus on now. But be prepared, otherwise you're just being irresponsible.
…

Relax. Someone else has it worse. You can't complain. Learn meditation. Learn a new language. Learn to relax.
But not too much, because these are scary times.

This Fierce blogger wittily shows why so many of us are feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. It’s not just the virus. It’s a serious overdose of perfectionism and either/or thinking.

The antidote?

The answer is always both.

But, seriously, one practice that is helping me through the pandemic so far is the effort to embrace both/and thinking, paradox, and mixed feelings.

This endeavor is beautifully captured in a graphic created by @holisticallygrace. (Shout-out to Jillisa Claye, the Mount Mercy alum who posted it on FB.

There are so many reasons why I love this chart! First of all, “Yes, and” reminds me of improv. (Shout-out to Karen Renee Krebs, improviser extraordinaire, who taught me to use “Yes, and” group activities in my creative writing courses.) “Yes, and” fosters not just creativity, but also accuracy and health. I especially resonate with this: “Yes, we can be hopeful, and feel like everything is falling apart.”

If it weren’t for my ability to embrace that mixed feeling, that paradox, I wouldn’t feel hopeful at all right now. Just when I most need hope!

An important admission: I was well into my forties before I started to truly understand that mixed feelings were not only possible, but necessary and desirable. The person who taught me this is the person responsible for much of my emotional growth, my beloved partner, Benjamin Thiel. When he was transitioning some fifteen years ago, he shared his mixed feelings with me, and he generously encouraged me to experience my own: “Yes, I could grieve the loss of our seemingly lesbian life together, and I could celebrate the fact that my beloved was at long last able to be his authentic self, the man he always knew himself to be.”

This gift that Ben gave me—the permission to acknowledge my mixed feelings—is one of the most precious gifts that one human can give another. And if I can help even one other person unwrap this gift for themselves sooner rather than later, well, that’s partly why I’m writing.

Mainstream culture tends to favor “purity” and simplicity, and to be honest, so do many subcultures. Perhaps because of the soundbite and the Tweet—or the human instinct to label experiences as safe or dangerous. So the more voices speaking up on behalf of mixed feelings, the better!

Fortunately, there are many such voices. As I wind up this post, I’ll share a couple I’ve recently encountered. The first is from Kelly Dwyer, a writer and teacher that I shared an office with at the University of Iowa back when we were both graduate students. Kelly posted this on FB shortly before our recent cluster of spring holy days:

To my young friends (and anyone else who needs to hear this): … this will be the first holiday you’ve celebrated under Covid-19. There might be a silver lining to celebrating a holiday under sheltering in place, but, more likely, for many of us, there will be a sense of loss. I would like to ask [you] to consider both keeping this loss in perspective and also grieving it. That is: yes, be mindful that not being able to go to a place of worship, not being able to go out to brunch, not being able to visit your grandparents is not nearly as bad as losing someone to the virus. Keep your loss in perspective. And yet—don’t be afraid to recognize it as a loss. … Feel your loss, name it, keep it in perspective, and then—let it go, and enjoy this new way of celebrating as well as you can! …

The second is from an article for The Guardian by Rebecca Solnit. She articulates a lovely paradox: “I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.”

Solnit also quotes Patrisse Cullors, who authored “a sort of mission statement for Black Lives Matter.” The statement ends with these words: “Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.”

The statement is beautiful, according to Solnit, “not only because it is hopeful, not only because then Black Lives Matter set out and did transformative work, but because it acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering. The sadness in the depths and the fury that burns above are not incompatible with hope, because we are complex creatures…”

We are complex creatures. Right now, we desperately need to explore and treasure that complexity, and one way of doing that is to read literature. For human complexity is the subject of nearly all great literature.

So as my time and energy allows over the coming months, I plan to post about literary texts (and a few other types of writing) that help me embrace (emotional) complexity.

I’d love to read about the texts that help you. I’d love to know how you’re doing during this pandemic. Not just the short answer, but the longer more complicated one.