Process It, Clear It: How to Deal With Seasons That End Abruptly
Or, what crying at the train station taught me about bottling up emotions.
Back when “pandemic” was a word I only used in reference to a board game or history, I commuted to school and work via train. I’d squish into the train car with dozens of other mask-less people and shoot back and forth between my home city and Toronto.
I used to fantasize about having a short commute. I thought the pinnacle of a good life was either working from home or driving less than ten minutes to work. I didn’t want to listen to podcasts on the train anymore. I didn’t want to wait on the cold platform anymore. I didn’t want to waste hours of my life in a tube zooming along the same stretch of earth.
It has been almost a year since my last day commuting on the train. I was on my way to school on a sunny day in March and I suddenly felt the urge to check my email. This wasn’t a mindless scroll kind of urge. I felt a kind of intuitive knowing that my class would be cancelled.
I checked and there it was: the class was cancelled and we were moving online until the end of the semester.
A year in quarantine. A year threading in and out of lockdowns. A year of sitting on my bed with a laptop, graduating from university, and getting my first full-time remote job out of school.
My fantasy came true. I didn’t have to commute anymore. My commute was only as long as it took to sit up in my bed. Everything seemed perfect.
A year will change you.
Now we’re edging onto the year mark. The days in quarantine all felt the same, like a tessellation of each other in endless succession. Looking back, I changed more than I realized.
I didn’t have to perform for anyone in quarantine. I didn’t need to hop on a train to get to my life. My life was around me all the time.
For a while, it felt nice to recalibrate back to the moment. It felt grounding. I met parts of my life that I used to fly past, like my backyard and my books. I ate better. I slowed down.
But something felt weird. The day I got off that train and went home after my class got cancelled, a switch flipped in my mind. I tucked and rolled into this new way of being. I did not panic. I did not rage. I did not cry. I just got off the train and went home to my new, slow life and started adapting.
Then I went back to the station.
Nine months into the pandemic, I went back to the train station just to get a taste of the good old days. The parking lot was empty. The parking garage was empty. It used to be so full that people would abandon their car on the road or park on the tiny patches of grass around the parking lot. Now, nothing but space.
I cried for an hour.
I didn’t necessarily miss commuting. I didn’t miss the long rides or the people sitting too close to me. I didn’t even miss school. I missed parts of that old self. Something about walking back into that familiar place reminded me of everything that got left behind.
I didn’t say good-bye to my old life pre-pandemic. There is a distinct split between the self that got on the train to go to school and the self that got off the train to go into quarantine.
There is usually some sort of marker for seasons that end but, for many of us, our old lives ended without our recognition when the pandemic pushed us into quarantine. We didn’t necessarily grieve what we left behind because we didn’t know how drastically everything would change or how long the pandemic would take.
This happens in other ways, too. It doesn’t take a pandemic for a season of life to be cut off abruptly.
So I cried in that parking lot even though it felt stupid to be crying over missing out on going to school on the train or walking through downtown Toronto with my boyfriend. I missed going to eat tacos or pizza, especially without a mask and a bucket of hand sanitizer. I missed movie theatres. I was sad about the opportunities that got lost because I spent almost a year in my house.
A lot of things can be true at the same time.
As we hit a year since quarantines and social distancing and stay-at-home orders started altering our lives, I wonder if we will hit up against some bruises, some raw spots of grief as we remember life as it was.
I think it is possible that quarantine exposed some important changes that needed to be made. It is possible that quarantine slowed us down and taught us some things about ourselves.
It is also possible that quarantine blocked us from freedom, that it drained us mentally and emotionally, that it cut us off from possibilities.
Both can be, and are, true.
It can also be true that we wouldn’t go back to our old lives, but we still miss them.
That’s what I was dealing with while crying at the train station. I needed to acknowledge what got left behind. When I started crying, it surprised me. I didn’t think I needed to grieve anything. But it did help to process that emotion. It cleared something in me.
What to do about it.
I don’t pine for the old pre-pandemic days. The world is always turning and changing. But I do two things differently now:
- I actively look for joy in the mundane routine of my life. I am assuming that, someday, I’ll look back on this period of life and miss something about these days. We often rail against the confines of the season of life we are in but those tend to be the things we get nostalgic about later.
- I process my emotions when they arise. I journal. I cry. I talk it out. I don’t want to wait almost a year to cry in a parking lot. My new mantra: Process it. Clear it. Simple and effective.
Process it. Clear it.
The reason I place a high priority on processing my emotions when I feel them is because I went to therapy.
My therapist recommended a book written by psychologist Ronald J. Frederick, Ph.D., called Living Like You Mean It.
If I could distill the main message of that book into one sentence, it would be this: feel your emotions and be free.
In one chapter, called “Feeling it Through,” Frederick writes:
“We don’t choose our feelings, and fighting them won’t make them go away. We don’t have to like them, but if we can accept our feelings for what they are and allow them to have some space, we can then begin to feel our way through to a different and better place.
Although the tendency to criticize or judge our feelings may seem formidable, acceptance can be a powerful antidote. It can free us from the chatter of our thoughts and allow us to make contact with our authentic self. Although this may seem like a case of “easier said than done,” allowing ourselves to get curious and befriend and accept our feelings opens up the natural flow of our emotions and enables the process of change to begin.” (pg. 113–114)
A season may end abruptly, but our emotions don’t. They float forward into the next phase. I’ve found that some days I feel “off” without explanation. When I take time to sit and identify what I’m feeling, though, it is usually connected to something I didn’t properly process before.
As Frederick says, don’t judge yourself for your feelings or how long it takes to process them. I imagine it like clearing a clogged drain. It doesn’t matter how long it took for things to build up. It won’t help to criticize yourself for the buildup. You just have to process it and clear it out so everything will run better.
Like crying in the parking lot.
