That Thing We Do Not Discuss

thoughts on the conclusion of the pandemic

I used to be (and sometimes still am) a very talented emotional “stuffer.” I could stuff with the best of them, put on a stoic face, and keep going like nothing was happening.

Years ago when my mother passed away, I was so resistant to appearing grief-stricken that I unconsciously arranged my face into a neutral expression. (Or, at least I thought it was a neutral expression. In hindsight, I’m sure it wasn’t.) One day when I came home from work, I finally realized that my face was incredibly tense to the point of pain from the effort at holding the mask. I had to stand in front of the mirror and massage my jaw and forehead for 30 minutes to get them to relax. Even that wasn’t enough — I was holding too much inside.

Weeks later, I attended a yoga workshop at a hotel out of town that was focused on opening the heart center. In that kind of practice, there are a lot of poses and breath work practices that help open the rib cage. This often includes backbends, which invite the muscles around the lungs to open and relax.

In yogic practice, and in many other spiritual philosophies, emotional experiences are attributed to different parts of the body. While this used to be considered new-age quackery, more and more scientific research confirms the role of unexpressed, or “stuffed” emotions, and their effects on the body.

The teacher explained that, according to yogic tradition, the lungs and the rib cage are where we hold our grief and our sadness. In Chinese medicine, the strength of the body’s immune system response depends on the health of lungs and the colon, and their ability to work together.

As I listened, I thought about how much strength it takes to hold in the random bouts of crying that strike you in the midst of intense grief. You know when you try not to cry? And you kind of do this thing where you hold your breath and try not to move, as if you can keep it inside by staying very still? That creates muscle tension in your diaphragm (the muscle underneath your lungs that helps them expand and contract) and the muscles around your rib cage.

I was new to my practice at the time, so back bends were new to me. We did three in a row. They released so much emotion, and so quickly, that I barely made it to my hotel room before collapsing into racking sobs that I had been holding in for weeks. It was painful and unpleasant, like a surprise thunderstorm — sudden, violent. But the feeling afterward was as if I had been cleansed of things that were not in my interest to hold.

I believe that everything is connected. I believe that nothing happens in our physical world that doesn’t also happen in our emotional world, our mental world, and our spiritual world. One of my greatest teachers told me years ago that every illness we experience starts in the subtler bodies first, those emotional, mental, and spiritual fields around us that make up our energy body. I’m not asking you to agree with anything in this paragraph, and I realize that some of you just rolled your eyes so hard you sprained them, but I want you to understand the beliefs that inform this piece.

When the pandemic hit, I noticed all kinds of posts in my newsfeeds from my more spiritually-inclined friends and connections. Lots of folks concluded that the pandemic was a great awakening, even though we had no idea what the fallout would be. Unfortunately, I think it’s somewhat clear that this was no great awakening in the sense that we are not noticeably better off, collectively, than we were before the pandemic. Something broke. We are now seeing the fallout from that breaking, and it will probably happen in slow time.

Even with my reservations about assigning meaning to that event, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of collective grief we were experiencing in the midst of it, given that COVID so deeply affected the lungs. Maybe it was sadness at our collective human misery. Maybe it’s rage at the disparity between people, and the collective unwillingness to do anything about it. Maybe it’s despair at the state of our planet and the lack of care that our leadership shows for it.

It wasn’t only old grief that we experienced. As noted grief expert David Kessler says in a piece in Harvard Business Review, the pandemic forced us to grieve a collective loss of a way of life. While it ended, things will never be the same again. He writes that we’re experiencing,

[T]he loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection… We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air. [W]e’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain…. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this…. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

So, my question is this: if a singular body can feel stopped up, lacking in flow, “not good,” and emotionally constipated by stuffing and ignoring emotions and grief, what happens to the body of the collective under those circumstances?

I was talking with a friend the other day about how no one really marked the end of the pandemic. Because it became so polarizing, no one wanted to talk about it. This is a painful realization when you consider that every single one of us experienced loss of some kind. People lost homes, jobs, family, and friends—either to the disease or to the social discord that came with it. As soon as it was “over,” or we could all collectively agree that we were moving on and going as “back to normal” as possible, we just… moved on. It became “that thing we do not discuss.”

While the pandemic ended… we never actually processed, digested, or even came to grips with how it changed us as a culture, as a country, or how it affected and changed our communities. And likely, none of us have given much thought to how the pandemic changed us as people. We haven’t had our collective backbend, after which we purge what is stuck.

We’ve all noticed the incredible amount of rancor, anger, and total lack of ability to work together. It comes out in our politics but you can see signs everywhere. Most of us chalk this up to increasing polarization and social media, extremism, one-issue voting, lack of education or opportunity, and on and on. But what if this collective fraying of the nerves has more to do with unprocessed trauma and grief than with anything else?

We’ve had no place to come together to mark or discuss what has happened.

We have no systems in place to help us reflect and discover the lessons we learned during that time.

There is no compassionate care for the collective mental health, not to mention the mental health of individuals.

Maybe it’s time to take matters into our own hands and mark that time for ourselves. I invite you to take time to think about everything you experienced during the pandemic—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and how it changed you.

How is life different now?

What do you miss about the Before Times? What don’t you miss?

What were your greatest sorrows? What would you have done differently?

Is there anything about that time you regret? What would you change about that circumstance?

What stories came from this time? What new family memories were made? Include the sad, hard, ugly, funny, surprising, and bemusing stories.

What did you learn?

I’ll be curious to know what you come up with—share in the comments.

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