March marks the two-year anniversary of this global pandemic. March 23, specifically, marks the anniversary of when life in my county came screeching to a halt with a shelter-in-place order that starkly divides my before-Covid and after-Covid worlds. If March 2020 was the beginning, I’m hoping that March 2022 is the beginning of the end of Covid dominating so much of our life, thought and attention. I think it’s too early to tell for sure, but I’m hoping that by March 2023 Covid will be clearly visible in our collective rear-view mirror.

Covid has not been the only stressor we have been dealing with over the past two years. We have also been reckoning with what many rightly call the pandemic of racism. The past two years have been incredibly emotionally intense. For many it has been an intensity layered on top of years, decades, or even centuries of generational knowledge of racism. For others it has been a jarring realization that racism is not neatly confined in the history books as we were led to believe. Rather it is alive and well, entrenched in structures that still need reforming, and continually evolving in new forms to evade justice. Still others of us are distressed by the very distress of others, unable to understand why people continue to be upset about a reality that remains invisible to us. And this is not an exhaustive list of all the postures and perceptions out there. I am writing a blog, not a book.

So I’ve been thinking about moving forward. We’re much closer to Covid being over than racism, so what I’m about to say does not apply to the reality of racism. Even with the pandemic, some of us will feel like it is “over” at very different times than others. All of my children are fully vaccinated. I exhaled a sigh of relief as my youngest became fully vaccinated that I would still be holding in if he were two and not five. What does it mean for Covid to be “over” if you are immunocompromised? What does it mean if that seat at the dinner table is still empty because Covid took one of your family members–or two, or three. You can see how this gets complicated, right?

For many of us the past two years have been traumatic ones. And here’s something I need to tell you about trauma: your brain has a limited ability to process trauma while it is going on. This is adaptive. While it is happening, your brain is working to help you just survive and get through it. You do feel things while it is going on, but you feel them only to a degree. Your brain will not let you feel the full impact of what is happening while you are in an unsafe situation. There are things you can only feel and process once the threat is over. And sometimes the feelings can hit you like a ton of bricks.

So as I anticipate the “end” of the pandemic, I’m emotionally budgeting for that. I’m making sure that I have space to rest. I’m thinking about how to create margin for the feelings that may very well come up for me. And I’m prepared for the possibility that I may not feel OK even as things become “OK,” and I recognize this as normal. And I want you to know that it’s normal too.

One of the things that is going to change for me as a result is this blog. Writing has been a wonderful outlet for me this past year, and I think it will continue to be. Six months ago, the challenge to create weekly content felt like a good fit, but I’m sensing a need for change. I’m not going away, but in the interests of listening to my body and practicing good emotional budgeting, I am going to change the pace. I will post less frequently–when the fancy strikes–but I’m going to need more time for other things as well.

I don’t know what you will need as we move forward as a society. Maybe you need some things to change, maybe you don’t. But if what you are doing right now is starting to feel like it doesn’t fit anymore, I hope you will give yourself permission to make the kind of changes you need too.