Gabs Writes

Tag: pandemic life

  • You are enough

    You are enough

    Listen. You are enough. You don’t have to be more. Being you is enough.

    You are valuable and your worth can’t solely be measured by what you produce. Or by what you achieve or fail to achieve. Or by what invisible standards you are trying to live up to.

    Maybe you’ve been tired lately. Ditched your hobbies. Abandoned your side hustle. Given up on running. Stopped meal prepping.

    Guess what? You’re still valuable. You are enough. You deserve care and support and empathy and love.

    Maybe you’ve been intending to write a blog post for three weeks but a combination of childcare and full time work and generally bad news in the world has sapped your desire to actually sit down and write it. (Or you write it in your head a lot but writing it on the keyboard is somehow an impassable barrier. Anxiety is weird.)

    Maybe you don’t have the job you want. And it doesn’t pay you enough. (Most likely it doesn’t pay you enough!) Or you spend days procrastinating instead of working toward your deadlines. Or you aren’t working in the evenings when you feel like you should to help you get ahead. All the email newsletters full of helpful tips and webinars you intend to attend are sitting neglected in your inbox.

    Or maybe you work a service job where people are jerks and yell at you for no reason and criticize you for not smiling enough and your manager won’t give you a consistent schedule. Maybe everyone wants you to forget that a pandemic happened (and is still happening wtf) but you have to go work anyway to eke out a living only to have weirdos claim you don’t deserve a livable wage.

    You still have value. You’re still enough. You’re still worth basic human compassion.

    Maybe you used to have hobbies and you don’t have them anymore. Maybe all the motivation seems have to leached out of your body drop by drop and you can’t seem to do anything but scroll social media and promise yourself that you’ll wake up early tomorrow and do better. (A lesson I should have learned better by now but still haven’t.)

    Believe in yourself as much as this puppy believes in you. This puppy knows you deserve all the kisses regardless of whether you got your taxes done on time. (Photo by PartTime Portraits on Unsplash)

    Maybe you buy a lot of a groceries with the intent making lots of great meals but then you order takeout instead. Maybe you keep meaning to learn the guitar or start weightlifting or take an online class or watch that documentary.

    Maybe you simply don’t care anymore and can’t force yourself to care and any plans for the future simply get swallowed up by dread.

    You’re still doing enough. Even if it feels like falling behind.

    Having goals is good. Intending to improve yourself is good. But you don’t actually have to achieve goals and become a perfect efficient glowing version of yourself to have value. The depressed version of you who spent the morning crying, who hasn’t showered in four days and is eating potato chips for breakfast while watching YouTube on your phone instead of doing the dishes has value too.

    Plenty of people who are smarter than me and have analytical brains that haven’t become smooth as eggs have written about the BS surrounding hustle culture and how we are trying to life hack our way to perfect efficiency inside of a whole mess of broken systems. How this mindset is making us all feel like failures if we’re not becoming the picture of #lifegoals.

    I can’t fix the broken systems. But I can tell you that even if you fail to live up to weird impossible standards or even realistic ones, you are still enough!

    Try to extend this grace to yourself. And others. It’s hard out there. A bunch of bad stuff is happening and for some reason people in power are trying to punch down on people who need the most care, empathy and understanding.

    It’s a good time to remember that other people are enough too. When we expect ourselves and others to fit the perfect portrait of what we expect to deserve empathy, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Maybe someone is in a circumstance because they made a bad choice. Maybe things happened outside of their control. Probably it’s a complicated mix of both! Do we really need to demand of someone that they only make good choices to be worthy of help?

    Do we really need to demand that of ourselves?

    We all make bad choices. And some good ones. And some that are bad but were the best ones you had at the time. That’s okay! People are so endlessly complicated but being complicated is super exhausting so we look to simplify. And by simplifying sometimes we reach the conclusion that we (or others) are bad or unworthy.

    But you’re not! The world is wild. You are a valuable piece of it. You don’t have to prove it.

    Seriously. You have value. You are enough. You’re doing a lot.

    Are you doing it all perfectly? No, but are you doing it good enough? Probably! Cut yourself some slack.

  • Writing is hard. So is the pandemic.

    Writing is hard. So is the pandemic.

    Setting goals for yourself can be a double edged sword.

    If you’re an Achiever type, who needs to get a set number of things done in a day or you feel like a Failure™, goals motivate you. They are invigorating. When you reach them, you feel so great.

    But, if you are this type of person who has to check everything off the list every day and you fall short on a goal, then your feelings of being a Failure™ tend to compound, multiply, and grow until you are convinced that you are the worst and laziest person in the world for not being able to achieve this one thing.

    When I started this blog last May, it wasn’t on a whim. I had been thinking about hows and whys of starting a blog for a couple years. For a long time I let my perfectionism stand in the way of getting anything done. I had to come up with the perfect content plan that would include many brilliantly crafted arguments that ended with profound realizations and takeaways.

    Yes, I am fully aware I am ridiculous.

    Once I gave up on the idea of regularly delivering the impossible through writing and decided that I could do literally anything else, the ideas started flowing. As it turned out, I hadn’t completely run out of ideas and had nothing to say. I’d just paralyzed myself via perfectionism. A lot of my writing for fun in the past has been fiction writing, particularly books. I thought that writing a blog would be a nice, easy release from that. These posts are shorter, therefore they’re easier! (Again, why does my brain do this to me and why do I fall for it every time?)

    So I set the goal of a post a week. If you go back through my 2021 archives, I did a decent job. Missed weeks here and there, but overall, considering the having children, being in a pandemic, and the holding down a job then quitting that job and starting a new job thing, I did pretty good.

    Then it all sort of unraveled.

    Blonde, white girl lying facedown on bed, hair in front of her face.
    This has basically been me for the past two months. Not pictured: The children climbing all over me.

    Like many parents, my last couple months have been really hard. Sick children, sick me, daycare closings, the Omicron variant, and a whole mess of other shit has very unfortunately returned me to the type of burnout I was experiencing last summer. (I am not opposed to reviving hot cicada summer for this winter. We can make it work.) But this time instead of trying to power through and do the writing at night, I instead kind of collapsed and started mindlessly watching YouTube instead. Oh, and I also finally saw some Squid Game months after everyone else had already forgotten about it.

    The terrible part, other than the absolute grinding burnout, was that I was thinking about writing pretty much every night. But I didn’t have the energy to do it, couldn’t force myself to pull out the laptop. So instead of delighting in this great outlet, I just thought about the article I wanted to write and how much I sucked for not being able to write it. Pretty much every night of December and January. Good times!

    My goal for 2022 is still to write and update this blog. Weekly, if I can! But, if not, then often enough so that you know I’m still here. I have a couple topics I definitely want to cover. There’s a whole treatise I want to write about the Kate Winslet/Cameron Diaz masterpiece The Holiday. And although it’s not Christmas anymore, I’m going to write about that silly movie two months after it’s relevant. Because I want to.

    I still have a couple thoughts brewing about the Mission:Impossible franchise. I want to write more about how the internet thinks of and approaches content. I want to write more about books. And I have a plea to make to authors and movie makers around the world to please stop giving your mean female characters “mustaches.” What are you doing with that. Stop it.

    But the bigger goal, other than posting semi-regularly, is to be kinder to myself. And to remind myself to be kinder than others. It’s been almost two years since this pandemic thing started and everyone needs a lot of grace right now. I basically need boatloads of it by this point.

    I hope you’ll give it to me. And I’ll try to return the favor.

  • Space is super terrifying…and maybe a little sad?

    Space is super terrifying…and maybe a little sad?

    In the past year, I’ve watched two space movies that showed up on Netflix–The Midnight Sky and Stowaway. At the end of Stowaway I noted that both movies are pretty quiet pensive little movies that leave you on a note of hope but also seem to be permeated with melancholy throughout.

    Is that a common feature of space movies, I wondered, or do these two in particular seem to speak to living through a pandemic? Both were written and filmed before the pandemic hit, so they’re not a commentary on the way things have been for the last year. Then, I thought, maybe space movies always have been a reflection of the pandemic and we just never realized it.

    People trapped in a small space, trying to get along because they have no other options. Being forced to reckon with how deadly to go outside.

    Purple night sky over a horizon dotted with stars.
    It looks innocent now, but it will try to kill you.

    Because the last year has been frustrating and claustrophobic and terrifying and also really sad, I thought it was fitting to pick some space movies I’ve watched recently and rank them. First, in order of how terrifying space is and then in order of how sad it makes you feel. Just like 2020.

    This fits. There’s something here.

    There are so many movies I could have included but didn’t, so if you think a movie needs to be on this list, let me know! I won’t add it, but I’ll let you know how terrifying or sad I think it is.

    In space, no one can hear you scream

    These movies have been scientifically ranked from least scary to most scary. Don’t argue with the formula.

    • The Midnight Sky
      • Something has happened to earth and it’s basically going to implode and kill everyone. That’s messed up, but it makes the earth scary, not space. There is a scene with the astronauts that proves space is deadly, but honestly, I mostly left this movie feeling like that space station was pretty cozy.
    • The Martian
      • This movie is one big fight to keep a guy alive when Mars and space keep trying to kill him. But there are lots of jokes. The scariest part is probably Matt Damon near the end and how bad he must smell.
    • Apollo 13
      • The whole movie centers around trying to get astronauts home and it’s suspenseful because space will definitely kill you! But it’s also a wholesome film about people doing a lot of creative problem solving. So it’s tense, the threat is there, but ultimately you get wrapped in a warm emotional blanket.
    • Interstellar
      • This is another movie where earth is really scarier than space because it’s so messed up. However, Interstellar gets bumped up the list because space can also turn thirty minutes for you into like three decades on earth and then you miss out on everything like your kids growing up. That’s scary.
    • Deep Impact
      • A giant asteroid could come wipe out the planet and there’s very little we could do to stop it. Even with an intrepid crew of brave astronauts. This move is pretty goofy and often corny, but it’s not that unrealistic. We know that earth has been visited by mass extinction events from space in the past.
    • Stowaway
      • The whole premise of this movie centers around space being hostile. Your equipment breaks, your plants die, all of you are going down. Also, the spacewalk in this movie literally made me so sick to my stomach, I had to look away from the television until my husband told me it was safe again.
    • Gravity
      • Space is so scary in this movie, it starts to verge on comic by the end. But literally everything that can go wrong will go wrong and it will remind you why space is a terrible idea! Don’t go to space! Just don’t do it!
    • Event Horizon
      • I don’t remember this movie very well, but it has eternally scarred my psyche.

    Ugly crying brought to you by the stars

    Now we take the same group and rank them from least sad to most sad.

    • Event Horizon
      • I don’t know we can even count this one. It will haunt your dreams but it exists somewhere outside of the sadness scale.
    • The Martian
      • Too many jokes! I am not sad. I am delighted.
    • Apollo 13
      • There is a strain of sadness in this movie (I’m bummed they didn’t get to land on the moon). But ultimately everything ends up okay. People figure it out! There is hope for us yet.
    • Interstellar
      • Everyone cries in this movie. Matthew McConaughey misses his children growing up. Anne Hathaway lost her boyfriend. Matt Damon was trapped on an inhospitable planet alone and sobs when he sees another person again. (Honestly, relatable content.) Even the ending is pretty bittersweet. But then all the weird stuff in the third act distracts from the sadness enough to kick it down the list.
    • Gravity
      • Is there a rule that astronauts have to have tragic backstories? Why must Sandra Bullock’s child be dead in this film? George Clooney floats away into nothingness to save her. Sad people trying to cope in traumatic situations is a whole genre and this one slides right in.
    • Stowaway
      • These scientists were going to get to figure out some cool stuff. Instead all of their experiments were ruined. And this guy who didn’t want to be on the ship might never see his little sister again. And he and his sister are orphans after an apartment fire from when they were kids. Plus the characters have to wrestle with a deep ethical question. As a final piece of sadness, Toni Collette is good in this movie and I wish she got to do more.
    • Deep Impact
      • Hear me out. This movie is mostly goofy and I don’t think it’s probably that good, but when the astronauts are saying good-bye to their families at the end and then the teenage girl gets her baby brother shoved in her arms by her mom? I was bawling real tears, my friends.
    • The Midnight Sky
      • This movie radiates melancholy. My goodness. Earth is not in a good place, George Clooney has a tragic past/present, and while he accomplishes his goal of preventing the astronauts from returning to earth, it’s not like all the people left on earth are going to end up that great. If you think about the implications of this movie for too long, you will get real sad.

    There it is. The official rankings. I’d say that I don’t make the rules, but I totally made the rules here. Pick something to make your evening scarier or sadder. And if you’re watching Stowaway, consider having a barf bag on hand.