Cancer, COVID, white privilege, uprisings, menopause, teenagers…I know a thing or two about how to cope with intense emotional overwhelm.

Symptoms: trouble focusing, difficulty finishing tasks, may feel unsettled, unclear, unsteady.

Treatment: Avoidance coping is what we do to distract, numb, or escape our way out of discomfort. We watch TV, pour another glass of wine, run errands, work without breaks, power wash our windows. Active coping is what we do when we want to make real forward progress. 

3 active coping strategies: 

1. Write down your emotions after breakfast. Don’t judge your feelings, explore them. No need for complete sentences
2. Call a friend and say, “I need to vent to someone who won’t judge me. Are you available?” 
3. Do the smallest brave over perfect thing. Take one vulnerable step forward. It might be asking for help. Engage imperfectly.

Refuse to be defined by Fear. Let me help you find healthy, active coping strategies that work for you. 

Love,

Susie

Boulder, CO Elected Officials June 11, 2020

Act local and make real change. It took me too long to find out who my elected officials were last year, my first year to vote in the USA as a brand new citizen. I made this quick reference guide for those of you living in Boulder, CO in 2020. For those of you outside Boulder, the best resource I found for searching for elected officials AT EVERY LEVEL, no matter where you live in the USA, is on the website for The League of Women Voters under the tab “Elections.”

Our Federal Representatives:

US Senator Michael Bennet (D)

Webpage: Michael Bennet 

Phone: (202) 224-5852

Russell Senate Office Building Room 261

2 Constitution Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20510-0609

 

US Senator Cory Gardner (R)

Webpage: Cory Gardner

Phone: (202) 224-5941

Russell Senate Office Building Room 354

2 Constitution Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20510-0610

 

US Congress Representative: 

Rep. Joseph D. Neguse (D)

Webpage: Joe Neguse

Phone: (202) 225-2161

Longworth House Office Building Room 1419

15 Independence Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20515-0602

 

Colorado Governor:

Gov. Jared Schultz Polis

Webpage: Jared Polis

Phone: (303) 866-2471

 

Our State Representatives: https://leg.colorado.gov/findmylegislator

House District 10

Edie Hooton

Email: [email protected]

Webpage: Edie Hooton

Phone: (303) 866-2915

Colorado State Capitol Room 307

200 East Colfax AvenueDenver, CO 80203-1784

 

Senate District 18

Stephen Fenberg

Email: [email protected]

Webpage: Stephen Fenberg

Phone: (303) 866-4872

Colorado State Capitol Room 346

200 East Colfax AvenueDenver, CO 80203-1784

 

Mayor of Boulder

Sam Weaver

email: [email protected]

City Council Office, City of Boulder, 1777 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80302

 

Police Chief

Ms. Maris Herold 

Sheriff / Police Chief

Phone: (303) 441-3310

Dear Susie,

What if I don’t want to go back to my old reality? I used to run around so fast I had bugs in my teeth. It feels good to slow down. To have breakfast with my kids. To spend more time on relationships and deep work. To spend less time in airports and reacting to coworkers. I feel guilty saying this when so many don’t even have jobs. But I like the quiet. I don’t miss the noise, the commute, or all the travel. I have time now to exercise because I am not sitting in traffic. As tough as it has been working from home, homeschooling, AND trying to stay healthy, I am scared of going back to the pace of life before we had to shelter-in-place. Plus, I haven’t cleaned out my closets yet. I’m not ready!

What can I do?

Signed,

Woman formerly known as “Bugs-in-my-Teeth” 

***

Dear Woman formerly known as “Bugs-in-my-Teeth,”

Whenever the shelter-in-place is relaxed, you don’t have to rush back to your old reality. There is no guard at your door saying you must act exactly as you did before.

That would be a real loss. If we all did that, none of us would integrate the lessons we’ve learned about what’s important. About what matters. About the value of reflection. Or about how creative we are. Or about how strong we can be when we emphasize solidarity, health, and wellness.

This is a time to create a new reality. You are right. We are privileged if we still have jobs. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be grateful and innovative at the same time. This is an opportunity to transform the way we live and work together.

Some questions I have:

• What is the pace just under “bugs-in-your-teeth” fast? Can you aim for that? 
• Can you lead your family and colleagues in conversations about integrating what you have learned from this time? 
• Can you claim space for deep work and rest?  

Here are three ways that may help you to imagine creating a new reality instead of having to go back to the status quo.

3 ways to create a new reality: (Start now. Don’t wait for your governor to give new orders!)

• Protect space and time

Get in your calendar and block off time for exercise, deep work and also for what restores you. Take control of your time and don’t let others schedule meetings for you in those times.

• Advocate for integrating lessons learned

Use existing forums or create one where people can anonymously share learnings from sheltering in place. Let people freely express new ideas about how to work smarter, not harder. Do people want to telecommute more, have shorter meetings, limit travel, and make space for research and innovation? 

• Say NO respectfully. Be the voice for deep work and focus

If you had to drop some obligations lately, don’t rush to revive them. We want to say yes to everything, but it has a cost. Be the voice that respectfully says “No” to projects that impact your wellbeing or hurt your relationships. Be brave and challenge the old reality’s tendency to add, add, add to everyone’s plates in favor of a new reality that encourages deep work, reflection, efficiency, and effectiveness.

I also imagine that you feel more connected to some of your coworkers now than before because you are checking in on each other’s safety and health more often. We are seeing one another as human beings now in our messy living spaces, with our toddlers and pets interrupting video calls. It’s a reminder of how little we knew about one another before this crisis, and how much we tried to hide. But no need anymore! Work can bring out our best selves, if we felt free to show up real.

One of the simplest and most important things you can do as a leader is to show up whole and human, and encourage others to do the same. It may feel small, but it’s a radical act. You can do the following 1-minute activity on video calls, beginning now. Ask, “On a scale of 1-10, 1 being terrible, 10 being amazing, how are you doing right now?” Have everyone throw fingers at the same time so you can get a sense of who is a 3 and who is an 8. Encourage everyone to check in later with those who may need a listening ear or a helping hand.

Every day, devote space to what matters to you most. Next, be genuinely interested in your colleagues as people. If we all resist returning to an unsustainable pace, we can create a new reality that feels whole and balanced. And you won’t need to clean out your closets because you’ll need less stuff to feel happy!

Love,

Susie

***

photo credit: Tracy Kahn/Corbis

Today I discovered how freeing it can be to write down all the ways in which I do not have to be good. These are stressful times and yet we don’t give ourselves permission to do less without feeling guilty.

We imagine that everyone else is productive and creative and bringing healthcare workers meals and saving deportees at the border. We think we are the only ones who are struggling to get dressed or have a shower.

But tense times make it difficult to motivate. And If you are a well-meaning person who wants to make an impact in the world, you are probably beating yourself up right now because there are people with much more difficult problems than yours.

Stop it. Give yourself a little self-compassion. Then join me in a little game that writing geeks like to play.

It’s called “extend a line.”

Here’s how you play: Use the first line of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese” which is “You do not have to be good…” and extend it with your own words.

Imagine you are writing a gigantic permission form to yourself and you want to list all the ways you do not have to be good. Lower the bar. You do not always have to be a self-improvement project. 

Here’s my attempt at extending the first line of “Wild Geese.” *Thanks to Adrie Kusserow for the idea!

Wild Geese in the Time of Corona

(by Susie Rinehart, with deep apologies to Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk 

on your knees through your Clorox-wiped floors, repenting.

You do not have to be good at sheltering in place.

You do not have to be good at sewing masks.

You do not have to be productive.

You do not have to wear pants.

You do not have to feel shame for losing your cool.

You do not have to pick up the laundry you threw out the window, 

or the iPad.

You do not have to keep your voice down. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours. And I will tell you mine…

–Read the whole, real poem here.

When I was done, I laughed out loud. I felt free of the loud inner critic. I felt light. I felt connected to all of you who might be going a wee bit mad. There is power in celebrating who we are rather than who we strive to be.

Love,

Susie

***

Want to join The Resilience Journals? It’s a 30-Day Journaling Challenge you can start anytime, for free. And unsubscribe anytime. Sign up here.

 

Where is there room for brave over perfect and joy over fear in a pandemic? 

To get through this, we need to get serious about two things: containing the disease and containing our fear about the disease. 

If we can learn to be more comfortable in the unknown and master the skill of managing our fears and our expectations, we can make decisions easier, pivot faster, and feel calmer.

Happiness “doesn’t depend on how things are going,” says neuroscientist Robb Rutledge of University College London. “It depends on whether things are going better or worse than you had expected they would.” (source: The Atlantic, 2014.)

I thought I’d share 5 of the tools that have been working for me to continually recover from fear and find peace in uncertainty, in case they are helpful to you, too. There are so many more tools I use, but I chose these because they seem particularly relevant to the pandemic and its impact on us and our kids. 

The only authority I have that these practices work is my experience. Right now that includes being immunosuppressed during a pandemic, living away from my family, having a rare form of cancer in my spine, undergoing chemotherapy, receiving radiation treatments, and not knowing if they are working until inflammation subsides and they scan me in…July.

I’ve been forced to get smarter about how I cope with rapidly changing, frightening times. I want to share with you what I’ve learned, so you don’t have to go through the above to learn these tools on your own. The brave over perfect, joy over fear revolution is about eliminating unnecessary suffering caused by our thoughts. It is also about helping us and our children get beyond disappointment and into creative, problem-solving mode quickly. 

1. Face Fear on your schedule, not his. I wake up 11 minutes early to make time to face Fear. If I don’t, Fear wins all day. When it wakes me at night, I use my SAFE tool. But by rolling up my sleeves and staring Fear down first thing in the morning, I create space for other feelings, like gratitude and joy. Here’s what to do. Purposefully bring up scary thoughts. Then notice the physical sensations that those thoughts make you feel with the same amount of attention you would use if you had to describe them in detail to a doctor. For ex) Ask yourself: Where do I feel in my body, not my head, the thought that someone I love might get sick? What is the sensation’s texture, shape, weight, and intensity? Try not to push Fear away or replace the thought. Keep going. Where else do I feel it? What name might I give these sensations? Then shift gently to: What is one thing I could do today to lessen that fear? Next, with each breath, imagine exhaling light and space into each place of tension.  By using higher-level brain activities (focused attention and visualization), we take energy away from the fear center of the brain. What usually happens next is surprising. I don’t get stuck with the thought for long. My mind shifts on its own to things like, “I wonder what to eat for breakfast.” And the rest of the day, when I get triggered by something terrifying I just heard on the news, I remember to drop right into my body instead of staying in my head and manage the feeling from a place of calm attentiveness.
2. Learn (and teach your kids) to Manage Expectations.This is from the amazing Julia Juster, who was trained in Success Counseling. When vacations are cancelled, big sports events erased, and almost everything kids look forward to (except maybe closing school) is now off the table for a disease that they haven’t even seen yet, it is hard to pivot. Our expectations often block our ability to get present and creative with what we CAN do now. Use these three simple questions to process the disappointment. Saying the answers out loud helps get to problem-solving quicker. Writing them down is even more effective. Ask yourself or your child, 1. What did you want to happen or expect to happen? 2. What happened instead? 3. How does that make you feel? (get granular: what is under the anger? Sadness, frustration, helplessness, confusion? 4.Then, move into problem-solving mode. For ex) Now that you can’t graduate on your college campus with all your classmates, what can you do to stay connected to them? How could you celebrate and honor this big moment differently, when you are all in different places? We get good at processing loss and pivoting if we first acknowledge our feelings, then train ourselves to be creators of our future instead of its victims.
3. Find anchors to ground yourself and others. If your child or loved ones are feeling anxious, teach them the SAFE tool and the stress breath. Listen compassionately to their fears about the pandemic without trying to fix anything. Only after you’ve done that, give them this article (or tell them the main points) on 10 Reasons Why You Ought Not to Panic. My friend sent it to me and I was grateful for the fact-based way it gave me anchors to ground myself. Keep your eye out for things that ground you and then use them.
4. Tame your tigers. Make two columns on paper. On the left side write one of your recurrent fears or “tigers”. Fill the left column first. Then, on the right side, write down at least one thing within your control that you could do to lessen that fear and tame that tiger. For ex) Left side: Fear of flying home on Friday in case I get sick from someone on the plane. Right side: Ask my doctor for a mask and gloves. Ask the airline if the plane isn’t full if I could sit alone due to a medical condition.
5. Pay attention to signs of spring. Get outside more. Keep track of signs of spring on a list on the fridge or somewhere where everyone can contribute. Walk near water if you can, or up a mountain. Notice how much longer it is staying light. Hug a tree. (I am obsessed with trees and decided I’d try identifying the trees in the Boston Common. I cut twigs (almost got arrested) and keyed them out. Now the trees are budding and blooming and I can see if I was right! So fun. And then I discovered that the trees 100 feet away in the Public Garden are all labeled. I didn’t need to do all that work. Ha!) Spring happens fast: listen to how many new birds are singing now. Watch the people salsa dancing on the pier. Or eating their lunch outside. Notice that change is constant. And it can be beautiful.

These tools help me to remember that I am not in control. Then I focus on the one thing I can have some control over: how I choose to respond to disappointment and uncertainty.

I choose to respond by being brave enough to continually return to the present moment where I am safe, where I am resilient, where I trust I’ll make good decisions by collecting smart people all around me. And I know you will too.

Love,

Susie

***

An ode to girlfriends after a weekend with these beauties. I met Natasha as a toddler, then in 1983, we both met Teza, Alli, and Jill (not pictured) in middle school. We were twelve-year-old girls who didn’t yet know the words, “You can’t do that.” We have been there for each other ever since, making sure we never believe those words.

We were there when braces came off, when hearts were broken, when friends died, when others moved away. We were there, on the end of the phone line, to get the call that said, “I’m pregnant” and the call that said, “I lost the baby.” Now we are there for the ones that say “I’m scared!” and the ones that say, “I did it!” 

We’ll call to talk about raising children. We wonder if our kids will grow to be kind, to know their worth, to fight for truth and love over all else. We brainstorm ways to manage screens and anxiety. We used to cry about how tough it was to never have alone time, to always be needed by little hands. Now we sigh that we’re no longer needed. We call for advice on how to grow our universe beyond our children and how to leap confidently into the next stage of life. The answer seems to be more girlfriends! Connect deeply right where we live. Having great girlfriends means that we never face a challenge alone.

We celebrate each other’s birthdays and accomplishments with wine, sometimes tequila. And we always make space for delicious food and adventure. Natasha, Teza, Alli, Jill, and I live in five different places, two different countries, and yet we rally for one another, take three flights just to be there in hard times and in good. 

Our adventures together include nature and wildness. For years, as teenagers, when life felt too hemmed in, too sharp, too busy, we strapped a canoe to the top of the car and went calmly wild into the woods and waters. Over the years, we’ve gone kite-flying in Guatemala, sea-kayaking in Mexico, and surfing in the rain in British Columbia. During this recent reunion, we drove through winter weather to the ocean to watch the tides ebb and flow. Then we went on a midnight, ninja-like expedition to find firewood. Each time we set out into the unknown, Natasha drives, I navigate, Teza produces the adventure, and Alli is our safety and wellbeing advisor.

This weekend, during my treatments for a rare form of cancer, this group of warrior women came to cook for me, rub my feet, and say, “You’re stronger than you know.” With them at my side, I feel it. I always have. 

My girlfriends are my secret superpower, my very own justice league. The way I overcome is because we overcome together. 

***