being small and staying home is how to survive

My whole life's meaning has been derived from the denial of self and the focus of others. This is because of who I am and who I have been encouraged to be. From a young age I was praised for being a peacekeeper. Out of a motivation to keep those around me happy and their peace secure, I would accept the role of submission in every situation that might benefit from it. I believed that my ability to do this was my great gift to those around me.

Therefore, my role as a single mother feels ripe with purpose. Denial of self! Care of others! This is my comfort zone. But as Glennon Doyle writes in her new book, Untamed, “Selfless women make for an efficient society, but not a beautiful, true or just one.” My peacekeeping mind developed my life story around the character of a selfless woman. My worth was how much of myself I could give away without asking for anything in return.

But how does one make wise, guided decisions with this lack of self connection? I am self-controlled, but not self-guided. I am other-guided; other-aware. Now, as a mother whose children are growing into preteen years, I want to teach and model a reverence for self as well as others. For if God is in us, rather, since God is in us, we would give honour to nourish ourselves. To know one’s own silence and anguish. My mind knows this benefit and truth now that I have aged a tad, but my body hasn’t been given the freedom to experience this yet.

At the very least, my children should each know their own interests, what sets them apart. What anguish they carry. What makes them holy.

To teach my children this, I must discover mine. Outside of others. Outside of the expectations of church which has drowned out my own unique voice. Church has so many opinions of me as a woman, a mother, a wife, a young person, a career person. My longing has been over-reached trying to contort in order to appease the church. God is close, always. God knows me.

As John O’Donohue writes in Anam Cara, “we reduce the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the external, familiar image”. I have a personality that wants answers; I want to know that I’m doing what’s right or I literally cannot sleep. I have reduced my own wildness and mystery by demanding I stay within "the answers" in order to survive. In order to protect the peace.

Right now, the world is hyper-aware of the spread of sickness due to the global pandemic caused by the COVID virus. Governments are monitoring and limiting the movements of their citizens. We are told to stay at home as much as possible to limit the risk of infection. Schools are closed, businesses are closed, and thousands of people are losing their jobs at once. Health care workers are called “front line workers” in a time like this, as they work overtime to help all of us manage this virus that we can’t figure out how to cure. People are scared and this all feels like a weird movie.

I recently saw a news article shared on Facebook about a man who had left to go backpacking in the wilderness just before this sickness went global, and when he returned to his urban home he said it felt like he was returning “to a different world”. As all articles shared on Facebook can seem hoax-y, I don't if this story was true, but I know the feeling is very real.

Those who are recovering from heartbreak, trauma, loss, divorce – this is how it feels to be awake every day: like a new world suddenly emerged out of nowhere. Your existence is suddenly awkward and new in a place where it feels everyone is reading off the same handbook that you were never given.

When this happened to me at 26, I immediately felt unsure of everything I did in the world. I looked externally around me to get information on how to behave in this new world:

Should I make small talk with the cashier – did the person in front of me do this - does the person behind me expect me to?

How come the kids and I are the only ones at this park, is this not the right time to be at the park? Do people not come to parks anymore?

The simplest of things that I had done many times before my sudden marriage loss became something brand new to me that I felt unable to figure out on my own.

This has had lasting effects on me to this day. Even tonight, I went to go brush my teeth and my children were asleep in the next room (we live in a v. small 2bd, 1 bth suite). The light was off, and I was trying to find my toothbrush in our pot of 7 toothbrushes (who knows why 4 people have 7 toothbrushes). About 10 seconds in I thought to myself, wtf don’t I just turn the light on. An internal struggle ensued that had me going around considering how turning the light on would bother the sleeping kids in the next room, and trying to avoid closing the door to contain the light because we rarely close doors in our house and it would probably squeak. Just fumbling in the dark, fighting with solutions to the problem I was continuing to adapt to.

I ended up turning the light on in order to end the indecision and thought to myself: OMG I won’t even give myself a light to find something in the dark, when the light is RIGHT THERE AND WILL BOTHER NOBODY. Why would I continue to fumble in the dark? It’s irrational, but I have been choosing ‘fumble in the dark’ over ‘turn on the light’ in almost every conceivable situation in my life, in order to not bother the people around me. In order to stay within whatever situation I'm used to, whatever is keeping the peace for those around me. My mind looks for ways I can stay small, rather than look for ways my existence can be adjusted to.

My problem is that during my recovery, I had been looking for direction from a society that is on it's own form of lockdown and has been for hundreds and hundreds of years. I had lost my wild; lost my trust in my intuition and learned from society instead. Society had lost her wild long ago. The things I had been learning from her was leading me away from who I am, and this led to my depression. This led to me being unable to sit in peace with myself, even alone in my own home. I was uncomfortable taking up space, even with just myself to take it from. It made no sense, but I could see it in everything I did. No space for me, please, I'm good was the verdict of my mind. That is, until COVID hit our society and I saw the narrative I’d been living in play out in front of me: being small and staying home is how to survive.

Each member of society takes up space – we can see the lack of it now in public places all over the world as governments limit social gatherings. The impact each person has on society can be seen in the vibrancy of oceans and air quality as we remove traces of ourselves as much as possible. We were told, collectively, to stay home and stay small, but I had been doing this for years already – I felt the directive of society saying those same things to me after my marriage ended - even before I was married, as well as in my marriage. I complied for years.

Waves of fighting off this directive would come and then go. I would quickly return to staying home and staying small; due to some minor, or immense, negative encounter. I would remind myself that mistrust was the smartest thing life had taught me. This is what I knew to be true: the smaller your world gets, the safer you are. I do believe that to make your world small is wise when grief makes her way amongst you, but I had refused to exhale when grief faded. If more space was made, more grief would surely come, I thought. There is a time for safety and a time for wild discovery. Sometimes being small and staying home is a part of wild discovery - and sometimes taking up space and expanding your home is safety.