Self-Awareness Overload by Gillian Barnes (@geezfresh)

I can’t believe the close of another round of #GBWritesWithOthers is upon us and now it's my turn to share why I've learned. It's hard to pick just one subject as I feel like this period of time has been one of constant pivoting, but I would say (and yes, it is an umbrella term) I have learned the most about self-awareness.

Being alone with yourself is hard. I mean, in my case I live with a partner, so I haven't been fully alone like some people (side note: you are warriors!), but for many more hours than is typical I have been "alone with my brain."

I can't plan everything. Damn.

I write about this a lot, so I apologize for the re-hash, but it is sort of necessary to explain my next point. I'm a strategist. I plan everything. Guess what can't happen during a pandemic? Planning. During this time my first response was to plan, backup plan, and triple backup plan. Planning calms me, but the fact is, most of that planning was for naught.

However, despite my initial disappointment in finding this out (and all-out depression some days), I have learned that I can think about different situations without committing. I can run numbers and dream without execution. This has been valuable to me as I now know how to roll with it (as much as my personality will allow) much better than I have in the past.

Self-care is hard.

The first few months of quarantine left me confused. I lacked a routine. I wanted to sleep in like a slug, and I let myself do that. Now let me tell you, that was the first mistake. Pre-pandemic, as I have never been a morning person, I would wake myself up 1-2 hours early to get ready. No, I'm not a prima donna with my makeup etc., what I mean is that I need time to mentally awaken. It takes me several cups of coffee, a shower, and really, just time to be my best. In the beginning, I let that slip. Don't get me wrong, I still got things done, but I didn't feel good about them.

I also bit my nails to an absurd degree, indulged in extra calories, and really just lived a very sumptuous life. As punishment, I put on some extra weight, lost a significant amount of energy, and withdrew from many things that made me happy. It was a bad scene.

Recently, I started changing that. I started nightly tea drinking to calm my body and mind. I began painting my nails so that I couldn't bite them as easily (truly gross habit...but that's me!). I got into playing story and planning-based games to calm myself (Stardew Valley). And finally, I started this project back up to force myself to reengage with the writing community on Twitter and beyond.

I still have more work to do. For example, at some point I have to get into a consistent workout schedule, but I am now in a much healthier place where I am prioritizing what makes me happy and calm.

I have two selves, and they need to blend better. No more 50/50 split.

We all have different character traits, but during these past few months I've realized I have two distinct personalities. The first is the CEO and that woman runs things. She gets sh*t done. She knows what's best and won't hear anything else. She's kind of awful sometimes and she has not been thriving during quarantine.

The second is a sort of homebody. She enjoys freshly washed laundry. She likes reading books and having multiple hour philosophical conversations. She dreams about traveling and appreciates beauty. Someday, she might buy a house in Maine or Kyoto and never come back. She writes when inspiration strikes and when she is obligated to. She cares about her family and friends above all else. This latter person is who I am becoming, with a dash of the former.

My goals and intensity have netted me promotions and other accolades, but they have also made me unhappy. I have realized that I can still maintain a bit of the CEO while relaxing. It's okay. I like that. I am going to strive to be an 80/20 person from here on out with the calmer Gillian running things and the CEO in check. She's still valuable, but sometimes ambition needs to take a backseat to mental health.

I ask too much of people.

I don't think it's a secret that sometimes I hold people up to the standards I set for myself (which are quite high, and sometimes ridiculous). I've stopped doing that as much. In one particular instance, and for anonymity I will keep this as blanket as possible, I learned about someone's home life and it changed how I look at how they achieve things. People are genuinely trying their best and they all have different levels of achievement etc. I am really trying to see people more fully now (I can't promise I will uphold this 24/7, but I am TRYING).

I want what my parents have.

Oh, dear. This isn't the first time I've written about my stepmother being correct, and trust me, it won't be the last. In the past, she and father mentioned leaving me my childhood home. It made sense as I am an only child, but I remember distinctly firing back with "well, I'm just going to sell it. There's no way I will live in New Hampshire." I believe I even made an ICK noise.

That girl was CRAZY! These days I've found myself dreaming of inheriting or purchasing that home. It's a place of possibilities. I see my husband and I raising children of our own there, eventually finishing the basement and making an art studio in it, or even planting a full-blown garden...I think I only see it now because I've had time to sit with my priorities and realize what they need to be as opposed to what I thought they should be. I'm officially old, nostalgic, and focused on going gray happily at the age of 33. What is happening?

The new Gillian

When we emerge from this time, I think we will all be different, and that certainly isn’t a bad thing. I will still be career-focused, but I will tamper that with a deep respect for others. Here’s to 2021 because 2020 is almost in the rearview mirror.

What I Learned While Being Furloughed Due to COVID-19 by Bethany B. (@dreamgirlBA)

In March, my employer shut down. My husband was also one of several employees to get furloughed. Thanks to that, we both ended up at home for one and two months while our state was on an “essential business only” ban. In that time, we used stimulus funds for a major project we needed done around the house and I bought a Cricut the day I was furloughed (impulse I had been eyeing for a year). At that time, we figured I could take the time to work on my side business while my husband worked. 

He was furloughed a week later, both of us before the extended unemployment benefits started. I tried to keep the attitude of being on a vacation or taking a break from working as a way to keep my anxiety down and it worked. It felt more like a vacation. 

I started working on my Etsy while filling out job applications while my employer continued to pay me, but never heard back. When the Cares Act passed, we were able to relax. 

I got a book finished I was working on and started pushing it. Since it’s print on demand, every time I get some books in, they sell pretty quick on my Etsy. My Etsy also fell dead while the shutdowns were beginning so I had time to regroup and rethink. I used the Cricut and started making graphic tees and totes as well as started on my astrological line I was originally intending on making and it’s starting to sell now. 

In the time I was furloughed, I learned quite a bit. 

I did learn that finding time to work on my Etsy, Etsy creations and books helped me increase sales. Now that I’m back working, I’m trying to find extra writing time as well as trying to spend extra time working on candles and sewing projects. Even though we were both unemployed, we were able to make all our bills monthly and when he went back to work, we were completely caught up. 

I also saw how much of a dependence we all have on employers. Just missing work for a few months is crashing so many people—one income stream is not nearly good enough. Debt-free is also the way to go. How many people would end up homeless going a few months without a paycheck? How many would lose their car or end up with collections calling? There are some debts we absolutely need—but we don’t have to spend our lives in debt. It’s not going to be fun and at times may be a bit painful but we have worked out a plan to consolidate debts, froze our credit cards and are working on paying one loan payment off without racking up credit card debt. We will still have car/truck and mortgage but with an extra couple hundred a month, it will help and if this happens again, we will have less leaving every month to take the strain off. 

I also saw that running e-commerce is going to be the way to go—instead of working for someone who will lay you off or furlough you without pay or good benefits, e-com was doing better. 

With people staying home, they were shopping online and the big chain retailers with strong online apps and websites made it out better than the ones that still aren’t progressing. Online is the way of the future and brick and mortar chains need to get up to date so they won’t be run out of business. 

I learned where I waste time and what to do about it. After careful consideration, I decided I spent too much time on my Facebook and it did nothing but stress me out so I deleted it. By next week, my account should be no more. I started slowly deactivating and worked my way up to seeing that I would go on the site and compulsively scroll—and get annoyed. It no longer gave me anything productive and it killed the time I have had to be productive. I still have my business page linked to my husband’s account and otherwise, I’m spending all my time on Etsy that I would be spending on Facebook. Between Etsy and my blog, it’s generating more income than Facebook ever could. 

The last thing I have learned is that hanging out all the time with my kids, without us running all over—going to work, school and everywhere else was pretty fun. I’m looking forward to going back to somewhat normal when the school year begins and they want to be around other kids, but if I need to teach them at home, I now know I can. 

Now the worst is over, but I’m sure a second wave is going to come along with the schools opening. Those are a few of the things I learned that stood out while our state was on lockdown. I’m sure there are more ways I have changed. 

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Bethany B. on Twitter @dreamgirlBA.

How to Play the Mandolin. Sort Of. by T.M. Montgomery (@TMMontgomery3)

What did I learn from my time in quarantine? How to play the mandolin. Sort of. I need a lot more practice.

To be fair, I already knew “Winder Wie Ist” fairly well. But learning “Mach auf, mein” and “Ay, Deus, se sab’ora meu amigo” were highlights of those three weeks.  And the process of learning those songs and others, picking up an instrument I hardly knew and strumming until I figured it out, taught me more than a few minutes of music.

Like Gill, I’m an aspiring author. I try to write often, though being in the excruciating editing phase of creating a novel has caused me to spend much less time on it. What do I do with free time when not writing? 

Watch a movie or play a video game. Fun things, but not particularly rewarding. 

I spend time with my lovely wife. While I treasure that time, I’m not sure that we’re enriching each other’s lives on a daily basis. Perhaps once we’ve had children. 

Making children, now that’s a fun endeavor, but the result has a long waiting period. And ends in diapers. I can’t wait for it and probably can’t wait for the first few years to be over.

What does it get you, trying to spend your time more fruitfully? I experienced a prescient example about six months before COVID-19 hit. Before playing the mandolin I had tried the violin, a much more difficult instrument. I went to dinner at a friend’s place, and the man’s teenage daughter was talking about quitting orchestra in school, where she played violin. The father seemed unconcerned, whether she quit or had ever played, and I felt compelled to stop the entire conversation to lecture him on the challenges she’d overcome up to that point. After 18 months of regular practice and thousands of dollars in private lessons, I couldn’t produce a short song entirely in-tune. The girl commiserated with me, saying that it had taken her several years to reach that point, and that she was only going to stop formal practice, but would continue to play on her own.

I’m not much sure that I moved the father, or that it was my words that convinced the daughter not to give up entirely, but I did think that I may have nudged the father’s girlfriend’s opinion of her future step-child in a helpful way. I could not have made this meaningful connection without the shared experience of playing the same instrument. And the girl’s words of encouragement likely influenced me to try again, which might have been with my violin were it not an ocean away in climate-controlled storage. 

People spend time in many ways and kill it in many more. But trapped in our house, casting about for some meaning to the days, I relearned the old lesson that time spent improving yourself is the most fulfilling. Learning something, or teaching something, usually tends to include a lesson about one’s self. Our lives are better, and the world is better, when we search our souls and find some understanding with which to fill our hearts, and perhaps spill over into the hearts of others.

I don’t think wisdom leads to happiness, but I do feel that it’s much harder to be unhappy when you invest your time and energy into something that becomes part of you. Music, for instance. Culture, art or literature of course. Self-reflection, which leads eventually to kindness and empathy.

The world needs a lot more of those right now, but they do not spring from words on the internet, however arranged or by whatever medium disseminated. They flow freely only from a calm, steady heart, so enriched that it has love to share.

I’ve heard a surprising number of stories about families and couples struggling to cope with the close quarters of quarantine. My wife and I came out perhaps even stronger together. After all, she did learn the patience to listen to me strum the same dozen songs over and over. 

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow T.M. Montgomery on Twitter @TMMontgomery3.

Suffering As A Teacher by ASH (@ASHnovelist)

I want to look at the question itself: What did I learn from quarantine life?

There’s a famous Bryant McGill quote that, “suffering is one of life’s great teachers.” But I don’t think it’s a kind teacher, nor a compassionate one. I think it’s the kind of teacher that barks orders, punishes fast, expects too much from its students. I think what makes suffering such a great teacher, is that it’s effective at making you retain information. However, I don’t think that we always learn the right lessons from our suffering, simply that we feel an overwhelming need to prevent this suffering in the future. Our minds come up with reasons for our suffering but those reasons might not have any basis in fact. Our brains may create coping mechanisms, but they might not be healthy for our long-term survival.

For those of you who don’t know who I am, I’m ASH. I’m a coward who hides behind an icon instead of showing their face. I’m scared of a lot of things, I try to please others because I don’t want confrontation, and I don’t know who I am. I think that these flaws, and many others, exist within me because of my childhood abuse. I was made to suffer and so I learned. I learned to associate common household objects with abuse. I learned to do what others want so they won’t focus their aggression towards me. I learned to never be certain with my beliefs because I was constantly told that those beliefs were wrong. These are lessons that might’ve helped me when I was young and under attack, but as an adult, they keep me from being happy and they keep me from being able to make connections. These are lessons that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to unlearn.

Nice sob story. Boohoo who cares, right? I’m inclined to agree, but I feel like my suffering can help to explore this issue without things getting personal. I think there’s something deeper at the heart of the question: “what did you learn from quarantine?” And that’s the false assumption that suffering MUST be meaningful. Every horrible thing that happens to us has to have a reason, right? But why?

When bad things happen to us, we react, we cope, we recuperate, and then we evaluate; not necessarily in that order. When we evaluate our suffering, our brain is looking to prevent this horrible thing from happening again. If only I had checked my emails before walking out the door, I wouldn’t have gotten in that fender bender. If I had slowed down sooner, the car would’ve seen me. But this isn’t always true. Not all moments of suffering are preventable. It didn’t matter if I stopped playing with dinosaurs, or stopped reading about dinosaurs, or read about Greek Mythology, or studied mathematics. I was always going to be dumb and immature to my abuser. It was never about what I did, it was about them having power over me. There was no way for me to stop my abuse by changing my behavior. Similarly, sometimes you just get hit by another car.

There isn’t always a lesson to be learned from suffering. We want to believe that there’s some great lesson to learn so that it will never happen again. That impulse is strong and very human and I don’t want to shame people for having such a natural reaction, but we are not machines. We are capable of thinking about how we come to conclusions and why. When something bad happens, there isn’t always a way to stop it. I couldn’t stop my abuse because I never even knew to recognize it as abuse. With great introspection and understanding, we can recognize when we are powerless and fight the urge to jump to false conclusions that make us feel better about the future.

Moving into quarantine, I knew that I was troubled and flawed and weighed down by whatever undiagnosed mess the psychologists would call my mind. What I didn’t understand was how badly I had self-isolated before any of this began. My fear of socializing took my friends from me. It did it by degrees, convincing me that a phone call was too little, or that they were probably too busy to make time for me. Then my brain told me that I was a low-value friend and that all of my interactions with them were negative. Then it repackaged every conversation I ever had with them and turned it into a highlight reel of them being disgusted with me and them lying to feel good by taking pity on someone so repugnant. Six months before Quarantine started, I’d told my best friend that talking to them caused me anxiety and we stopped talking.

It took me a while to realize the truth of my situation. Much of my failings, my decreased memory, my mood, my appetite, were starting to be picked up by other people. Now that the world was in isolation, I started to see the true impact of isolation on the human mind. As bad as I was, my fears had only made things worse. The lessons of my suffering were only causing more suffering.

So I’m a mental wreck, who cares? Well, the thing about big events is that there aren’t easy answers. If a tornado hits your house while you were wearing a blue shirt, never wearing a blue shirt won’t protect you from tornadoes. So when buildings are hit by airplanes our minds aren’t okay with that. There has to be a reason! There must be something we can do to make sure a President is never shot again. That’s when conspiracy theories start. That’s when people believe that vaccines cause autism. COVID-19 will cause a flood of new conspiracy theories about how the youth, the left, the conservatives, the elderly, the government, or the corporations engineered a virus to kill hundreds of millions of lives. (I really hope we don’t match Spanish Flu numbers.) What’s important is that we don’t fall into that trap.

Suffering tries to force us to learn a lesson, but there’s never a guarantee that we’ll learn something useful. I think that on an individual level we can all learn a lot about ourselves during quarantine, but I don’t think that this pandemic should be the time to learn big lessons about the nature of the human mind or make sweeping generalizations about a group of people. I learned that I like kombucha, but only if it’s flavored rose or pomegranate. I learned that I have a lot of trouble working in the same room as my partner. I learned that hugging a stuffed parakeet can help me cope as an adult. I learned that I can’t live without friends even if having them is physically painful. I didn’t learn why COVID-19 has killed far more Americans than any other country.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow ASH on Twitter @ASHnovelist.