Tea, Books, and Chocolate
A sensitive’s approach to surviving the pandemic.
Sometimes timing is everything.
The COVID-19 pandemic started a few years after I retired. My wife and I had moved to a city where we hoped to settle. Two years in we realized that living in a city was too busy, crowded, and stressful for our temperaments. We needed to be closer to nature. After searching around for a year, we bought a house in the county and moved in in January 2020. Two months later the pandemic lockdowns began!
Here we were in our new county home, isolated on an island of about 2,250 people only accessible by ferry. It was a perfect place to ride out the pandemic. We had space to grow vegetables which suited us as we mostly eat a plant based diet. We had a comfortable distance from our neighbours who seemed to be homebodies much like us. And most important, we had peace and quiet the likes of which one never gets in the city.
During this pandemic we have worn masks, isolated from other people, and stayed home eating wonderful home cooked food, much of which I grew in our garden. The longer the pandemic went on the more I realized how fortunate I was. Each morning I would wake up and sit in bed with a cup of tea, some dark chocolate, and a book, with no timetable to get up or go anywhere. At times I would think to myself “It just doesn’t get any better than this!”
With the isolation of the pandemic, my wife and I made significant progress working through things in our relationship that we had avoided during our working years. Now that we were together constantly we learned to identify relationship stressors early and developed ways to recognized our individual roles in those stressors.
As an HSP, I have identified a number of techniques to improve communication with my spouse. It turns out that some of these same techniques were useful in processing the stress of dealing with the pandemic. Here is a bullet list of some of the strategies:
- Sharing my feelings in a non-confrontational way.
- Getting better at recognizing what is my business (stuff that is mine to deal with), what is my wife’s business (stuff that is none of my business), and what is the universe’s business (stuff over which I have no control).
- Make it safe for my partner to share her feelings, whatever they may be, by not judging or trying to fix them but simply by listening open-heartedly.
- Practicing self care in whatever way works for us individually.
- Not judging or trying to manage my partner’s methods of self care.
- Approaching each day from a place of equanimity and sharing with my partner when I start to feel out of balance.
The end result of two years of forced intimacy brought about by the pandemic is a dramatic improvement in my ability to connect with and communicate with my wife. All relationships have areas of discord. I had feared that a side effect of the pandemic might be added stresses in the relationship. However, it seems our relationship has actually improved. We now communicate better. I understand my partners needs better. And it seems we spend more time in a state of peaceful flow than ever before. As good as life was before the pandemic started, it is much better now. Who would have thought?
