We Want to Travel and Party. Let's Pause Instead.
Let's grieve the COVID pandemic before jumping into summer's delights.
Hi everyone!
I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to share my latest article with you, which was published yesterday in the New York Times. The piece is about why we should pause to process the losses of the past 16 months before jumping straight into the delights of summer.
Today, many people, including me, are eager to put the COVID pandemic behind them and rush into the joys of normal life that are now available — vacations, bars, parties and so on. But, I argue in the piece, if we want to emerge from this crisis whole instead of broken, we need to process what we’ve lost. Rather than bulldoze past our grief straight into the delights of summer, we should take the time to work through it.
What’s the best way to process these losses? We can, of course, seek help from a therapist or a spiritual counselor. But there is another powerful resource we can tap into: storytelling.
Most people, whether they realize it or not, carry a continuing narrative in their minds about themselves — who they are, where they came from and where they are going. We consciously and unconsciously create this story by taking the disparate fragments of our lives and assembling them into a coherent whole. If you’re interested in how this storytelling impulse can help us work through hard times, check out the rest of my piece at the Times’ website!
Thank you — and until next time!
Yours,
Emily