In February 2020, I unknowingly wrote my last blog post during what I now think of as “The Before Times.” In it I wrote, “The old way of living and working is gone. The new way is emerging but has not yet arrived.”

Boy, was that an understatement.

Three weeks after that post, the whole world was in some version of lockdown, and the old way of living and working was indeed gone. The VUCA roadmap I had shared then (https://www.danagallagher.com/intrepid-explorers-in-vuca-territory/) still holds. But in retrospect, I can see that I had a comparatively superficial idea of what VUCA territory was really like until faced with this pandemic.

As an executive coach, I’m in a unique position to hear people’s unvarnished reactions to life during the pandemic: their terrible (or wonderful) realizations about their Working From Home lives, their deep anxieties, the people and conditions they are grateful for, and the things they have tried or done to bolster their resilience. Based on my and many others’ experiences, here is what I’ve gleaned in the intervening months between my last blog post and this one.

Living through this pandemic is a process, not an event. In the early days of the pandemic, we all scrambled to set ourselves up to stay safely home. Some people felt relief to have everyone quarantined, others were anxious. Some people felt shut in, others felt happy to have extended time at home. Essential workers had very different experiences than those unemployed or those working at home. Still, it seemed like this could be temporary and with any luck, things would “go back to normal” shortly.

But as days turned to weeks and then months, it became clear that we would not be going back to normal. It was as if our ship had sailed and we were now mid-ocean, with a broken compass and radio, and no land masses in sight.

It was at this point that people really started to ask me if they were “crazy.” They reported:

-Insomnia and bad dreams. And falling asleep during the day (“Night after night, I’m staring at the ceiling at 3 am. And napping at 3 pm. What IS that?”)

-Emotional overeating and drinking more alcohol than usual. (“I need to shut myself off, but I can’t seem to do it.”)

-Having a hard time concentrating, retrieving data from their memory banks, or simply feeling like they weren’t firing on all cylinders (“I’m 25% dumber than I used to be.”)

-Feeling depressed and/or anxious (“I am freaked out of my mind and freaked out about how freaked out I am. I don’t know how long I can go on like this.”)

-Feeling listless and unmotivated. (“Using this time to learn a language–what was I thinking? I can’t even get off the couch.”)

-Feeling guilty because they had a job and a home and didn’t have COVID–but still feeling resentful and destabilized. (“I am actually in pretty good shape compared to so many other people, but I feel enraged that this is happening! What is WRONG with me?”)

Because these reports were so consistent, I can only deduce that none of it is crazy, but rather, that these are normal reactions to a crazy-making situation.

And perhaps deeper than that, this is traumatic, and we are grieving. Grieving the loss of life as we’ve known it, and sitting uncomfortably with our ambiguous losses**. Unlike when someone dies, where there’s a clear lamentable endpoint, this loss is without clean boundaries or resolution. The impact of this pandemic has many tentacles, reaching into all aspects of life in a way that we cannot even begin to understand or process yet.

The grief of ambiguous loss is by definition more messy; it freezes us in place as the loss stays unresolved. It is the most stressful form of grief.

So, how do we cope?

The first thing is to treat yourself as if you are grieving, not as if you are crazy. Be gentle with yourself. Expect less of yourself. Take time to feel your feelings, by yourself and with trusted others.

Don’t isolate. Tap whatever community you have, in whatever way feels most comforting and nourishing. Bring your real feelings to trusted others–you will be amazed by how much you are not “crazy” and not alone, and how much people want to connect with you. Let yourself care, and be cared for by others. Extend help when you can, and ask for help when you need it.

Get with “what is.” It’s past time to acknowledge that things are not ever going back to the way they were. If you are waiting for things to go back to normal, you will suffer intense frustration and fear—because that is not going to happen. It’s painful, but the sooner you adjust your expectations, the more quickly you can stabilize.

Be in the day that you’re in. Many of us live a good part of our lives in and for the future. We have deadlines and goals and dreams that beckon us forward. In a VUCA setting these are subject to re-routing or outright cancellation. We don’t actually know what will happen next week, much less next month or year.

I am not suggesting that you stop trying to meet deadlines or that you kill your dreams. But I am saying that the only moment that is a given is this one. And this one. And this one.

Acting as if you can reliably anticipate and plan for the future is a waste of your precious energy. So, do what is in front of you today. Be with whomever you are with. Do your best to stay present to this moment since fretting about the future helps nothing–but being here now helps everything.

Practice “perspective-taking.” Although coronavirus may not ever go away, at some point the pandemic will abate. When this acute phase is behind us, what would you like to be able to say about how you conducted yourself? Who do you want to have been? Imagining your future self looking back at yourself today can guide you to attitudes, behaviors and practices that bring your truest, best self forward in the present.

Another “perspective-taking” practice is to look at this situation through the lens of grief versus the lens of judgment. If you are feeling critical of the conduct of yourself and/or others, how might that be different if you thought of them and yourself as grieving, versus being selfish, annoying, or wrong? Where can you bring kindness to your critical judgments of self or others?

As we are now abundantly aware, VUCA conditions are inherently difficult for humans. And as the pandemic wears on, we will need all of our grit, resilience and compassion to get through. We will need each other.

Please feel free to add anything you have learned in the comments below, or to contact me with your thoughts. I consider this topic open and ongoing, and will share new ideas as they come my way.

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*VUCA=Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity

**For more information on Pauline Boss’ pioneering work on ambiguous loss, https://www.ambiguousloss.com/