“Just checking in.”
Sending a “How are you?” text out of the blue; telling someone we’re thinking of them; asking how they are doing with their sick parent, move, job search, the whole “empty nest’ thing, whatever.
Those are forms of checking in, and valuable ones for sure.
But today’s COVID climate calls for a different kind of checking in. And it’s complicated. It takes more time than just “How are you?” and requires absorbing and acting on what the other person’s response is, not just smiling and nodding sympathetically. (Not that we do that.)
What I’m talking about is that at this point, almost six months in, we have to accept that everyone–including ourselves–is on an emotional rollercoaster, and how we feel about something (especially social distancing and how to handle it) can change on a daily basis. Sometimes hourly.
I feel like sort of an expert on this for two reasons.
Being a good friend is my vocation. Showing up for people is my raison d’etre. Or one of them. Ha! Now that I put that in writing, I can only hope I’m decent at it!
Two, because I’ve been living in New York City this whole time.
The first three months of lockdown, anyone from New York City was basically Typhoid Mary. I gave up my pied-a-terre in Pennsylvania at the end of February. When I cried over no longer having a home in my hometown, multiple people assured me “You can always stay here!” I know they meant it at the time, but boy did things change quickly. At first I took it personally. I was already sad about losing my job and being stuck inside a one-bedroom apartment, and now friends and family saw me not as myself, but as a viral threat.
It hurt–for two or three days–but it didn’t take long to realize that this was not about how they felt about me, Erica. It was how they felt about the unknown of the virus. The potential threat to their health. New York had so many cases; my PA hometown none.
For me, having a personal pandemic protocol has helped me feel more secure. Getting through almost six months of Coronavirus without catching it has also helped. Staying COVID-free hasn’t made me less diligent, but it has made me more comfortable with how I’ve conducted myself so far.
As a New Yorker, if I go outside, I wear a mask. I’ve shown up at people’s houses in the suburbs and at the shore and been asked why I’m wearing a mask. And I’ve been in yards where I wouldn’t even ask to go inside to use the bathroom, because I know they wouldn’t want me to.
Navigating our relationships as refracted through the dark and scary prism of COVID-19 can make it hard to feel close to people. It’s easy to feel like people aren’t respecting our boundaries, or conversely that people don’t want to see us, when really they are just limiting their exposure out of serious health concerns.
It reminds me of “The Tower of Babel.” The story goes that because the people all spoke the same language, they became so confident in their abilities they decided to build a tower to Heaven, thus making a name for themselves and ensuring cohesion for their nation. We all know the people of Babel got punished for trying to make their own way to Heaven, and the punishment was that from then on they all spoke different languages. Since no one could understand each other, it was much harder to work together, and the tower plan was scraped.
So why did God punish them by making it harder to understand each other?
Ever notice how some of the most hurtful misunderstandings can happen between us and the people we think we know the best? Family. Long time friends. People we usually agree with, expect to be on our side, or at least whose reaction or opinions we think we can predict without asking.
And that is the problem. When we think we “speak the same language” as someone else, we often stop listening to them. We don’t ask questions to find out “where they’re at” today, because we think we already know them. But people change, circumstances change, and certainly thanks to Coronavirus, conditions and concerns change, as well.
What happens when our friends, family, even our children all of a sudden don’t seem to have the same values as we do? It snags when we find out we aren’t on the same page. It takes work to find out why someone is feeling or acting differently than we are. And it can be scary, too, because being in general agreement on important topics is the basis of all relationships, right? Ha! Not necessarily.
Right now we are being called to a higher, more attentive level of relationship. We have to ask questions, check in, and wait for the answers. We have to think of new phrases that capture what we are trying to convey or discover. I think the more empathetic check-ins avoid emotion words, and are more practical. Instead of saying “How are you feeling about seeing people these days?” try something more like, “So, how are you handling COVID these days?”
Recently a close friend expressed her concern that she was going to lose her friends because she wasn’t partaking in their planned get-togethers. My first reaction was, you’re not going to lose your friends by not seeing them or going to their parties for six months. But actually, we can do some serious damage to our relationships if we put ourselves into situations where we feel our boundaries aren’t respected by people we love and trust. Bottom line, there are maskers and non-maskers. There are worse things than not seeing your friends and family. Like seeing them and sending each other the message that you think their boundaries are stupid, or that they are reckless and don’t care about your health or safety.
Our social lives may have taken a big hit for the time being, but let’s not do permanent damage to our relationships. Instead, we actually have the chance (and let’s face it, the time) to deepen our bonds with the ones we love by checking in on their boundaries and performing empathetic behavior that shows we respect them. Especially if their boundaries don’t align with our own. That’s taking loving to a whole new level. Telling someone they don’t have to agree with you to be loved by you. And that you’re willing to do the work to find out how they really feel, and respect it.
#friendship #covidrelationships #covid #boundaries #respectingboundaries #howareyoudoing