Embracing the Many Contradictions of a Pandemic

I keep getting asked about how people with OCD and anxiety are handling all of this. And I get it. Many people are feeling heightened stress and anxiety right now and so it seems natural that folks who were already dealing with these things might be struggling. And of course, for some people, that assumption is accurate. But I think it also oversimplifies this situation. We all want to understand what’s going. We see the enormity of the pandemic and want to be able to wrap our heads around it. But humans are complex and the situation has pervaded so many aspects of our lives that it seems impossible to boil this down to something so simple. Instead, I think we need to embrace the ambiguity of it all. There are many conflicting thoughts and feelings that we are all cycling through. We don’t have to pick one. We can allow ourselves to experience these thoughts without having to filter it into a binary choice. I’ve highlighted just a few of these contradicting thoughts below:

It’s okay if we move back and forth between these contradictions. It’s okay if, in any given day or hour, we vacillate between these thoughts. Give yourself some space to allow these thoughts in without having to attribute meaning or significance to the thought’s presence. The thought does not need to be emblematic of you or a summation of your pandemic experience; it can simply be a snapshot of one particular moment in time. Maybe someday we’ll sort this all out and and reach a better understanding, but for now, we have no choice but to accept the uncertainty and navigate our way through this experience.