#itwas just. a Document.

[whitefangz]

does anyone else remember the age of the "lesbian master doc" when people would post this random ass google docs link at you like it was some kind of holy book that contained the answer to every one of your questions about your own sexuality. That was funny

[cellarspider]

Qunlat 3/12: Phonaesthetics and Phonotactics

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“Shok ebasit hissra. Meraad astaarit, meraad itwasit, aban aqun. Maraas shokra. Anaan esaam Qun.”

Why does this feel different than English, or any other language you might know? phonaesthetics and orthography! The sound of a language and the way it’s written are your first introduction to it, so they’re logical places to start. Let’s dive in.

The above text is the first bit of Qunlat you ever hear, recited by Sten during his imprisonment in Lothering. It has a particular character to it: To an English-speaker, it feels like it can fit equally well with someone speaking forcefully, or gently. It also feels pretty pronounceable, coming from an English perspective. You might not know what to do with a word like “anaan”, but you can make a guess. The orthography, the way it’s written, seems relatively straightforward. And it gives you a sense of its phonaesthetics, the aesthetic qualities of how the language is spoken, including the phonology and phonotactics: what sounds are in the language, and what order you can put them in. These give a language its own identity, even when you don’t understand it.

For an English-speaker, Qunlat is an approachable constructed language. Maybe not as “pretty” as Elvhen, but it’s not giving you any tongue-twisters. I certainly liked it, when I first played DAO way back in the day. I liked it so much that I’m doing this, after all.

Outside of the fiction of the game, Qunlat essentially began as a written language, read aloud by pretty much just one dude: Mark Hildreth, the voice of Sten. These two sources set the template for the rest of the series, with caveats we’ll get to later. I’ll be starting with Qunlat as it’s presented to us in DAO and the main DA2 campaign (minus item names), because these two sources have the most agreement with each other. 

This took an ungodly amount of time to put together. I made the mistaken assumption that the wiki was comprehensive in its documentation of the two games, and that turned out to be wrong. I ended up having to dive into the Dragon Age Toolset to find more vocabulary, and I may still have missed some–I’m not particularly agile with that thing. And the more I found, the more inconsistencies I discovered, and the harder it became to structure this post. So this will only contain a relatively brief description of each source, which is backed up by a pile of data I’ve compiled here:

In DAO and DA2, spoken Qunlat never includes the letters C, F, J, X, Y or Z. The letter W only appears in the word itwa (“to fall”), and nowhere else. In DAO and DAI, Ps only appear at the start of a couple of set phrases: Panahedan (“goodbye”, “take refuge in safety”), and parshaara (“enough”, Sten’s favorite grumpy noise). Similarly in DAO and DAI, the letter U only appears in the name Koslun, and in the context of “QU”, except for one word that’s never been mentioned since DAO: Uukluk, which describes a Qunari architectural style the rest of the games seem to have turned away from. Unlike in English, Q doesn’t need to be accompanied by a U: Qabala and Qamek work just fine without it. 

Consonants follow certain phonotactic rules: This is the difference between “wing” and “ngiw”: one of them is permissible in English phonotactics, the other is not. Why? Because the start and end of a syllable are different roles that aren’t interchangeable. “Ngiw” is perfectly pronounceable, yet it would never arise within English as a result of the language’s internal rules. Vietnamese, though? Different phonotactics, and therefore that string of sounds is entirely possible. In fact, you might potentially use a word that sounds like that while describing the Qunari. Each language has its own phonotactics, and it’s a vital part of the language’s distinct feel.

When talking about individual syllables, we break them down into the onset, nucleus, and coda: the onset is the start of the syllable, the nucleus is its core, and the coda is anything that follows the nucleus. Because languages are hilarious, we have no good definition of what a syllable is, but generally you need a nucleus, and the onset and coda are optional. 

Qunlat in general is far more restrictive in its phonotactics than English is, and tends toward very simple syllables. most have one onset consonant, and one vowel: a “CV” syllable. “VC” is also allowed, but it’s rarer than “CV” or “CVC”. A very, very few are “CCVC” or “CVCC”, where two consonants sit together in the onset or coda. This theoretically means the maximum size of a Qunlat syllable is “CCVCC”, but there are currently no canon words that allow this.⁽¹⁾

Qunlat also has a number of dipthongs or vowel digraphs–Either two vowels placed next to each other, or two letters used to represent a single sound. It’s hard to tell what some of these are intended to be. These are AA, AH, AY, EE, EH, and OH. The dubious word Uukluuk contains UU, but it seems to be non-standard and never used again. The AA and EH vowels can appear anywhere in a word, while EE has only been used between two consonants, and the rest are only used if they’re at the end of a word: vah, toh, and say are valid and canonical words, while ahv, oht, and ays are not possible.

Unlike English, Qunlat isn’t fond of big consonant clusters. While English can give us words like “strengths”, which is a nine letter word spelled with eight consonants and pronounced with six, The most intense Qunlat gets in the first two games is “Ashkaari”: eight letters, four consonants, three consonant sounds.⁽²⁾ As a result, it may come across as less harsh and choppy than English does to many. The only valid consonant clusters that can stand on their own are ST (Sten, ast, etc.) and the rare BR (brak). No other consonant clusters can be placed at word boundaries.

There are four consonantal digraphs in DAO and DA2: DD, SH, SS, and TH. The double S appears to be a long S, while DD could be a geminate consonant, i.e. a doubled-up consonant sound (ex. English “midday”), though it isn’t often pronounced that way in the games. SH and TH sound the same as they do in English. DD is only found in the middle of words, TH and SS never found at the start of words, while SH can appear anywhere:

DD - Viddathari SH - Shok, ashkaari, ataash SS - Hissra, iss (see note) TH - Athlok, kith, dathrasi

note: there’s no words that end in -ss in DAO or DA2, only later material.

Then there are intervocalic consonant clusters, consonants that can sit together if they’re sandwiched between two vowels (ex. Ashkaari, hissra). There’s only a few of these attested in DAO and DA2, and a few more in later material.

The written language also features a favorite of many fantasy languages: hyphens. Hyphens are used to either stitch together words that are acting as a single unit, or to separate syllables that could produce ambiguous pronunciation. Tal-Vashoth has a hyphen because Tal (“true”) and Vashoth (“grey”) are forming a single conceptual unit, meaning one who’s left the Qun. The hyphen in “Asit tal-eb” helps make it clear to the reader that it’s tal and eb, not ta and leb.

To be honest, there’s no hard and fast rules on where to use these. DAO uses them sparingly, while DA2 uses them more often. It depends on whether you feel a word or phrase requires it, to match your intended reading or aesthetic.

Speaking of “no hard and fast rules”: speaking Qunlat.

As I intimated before, the voice actors appear to have been given very loose direction at best on how to pronounce Qunlat. Not everybody’s going to be getting the full Lord of the Rings or Avatar or Dune⁽³⁾ coaching. If they’re lucky, they get a written pronunciation guide, which may be entirely idiosyncratic to the writer. 

Mark Hildreth gave it a damn good try, but other voice actors like Rick Wasserman (the Arishok), Keith Ferguson (Arvaarad and various other qunari voices), and Felicia Day (Tallis) all give it their own damn good try. All of them have been native English-speakers, and so when confronted with an unfamiliar language, they… try to pronounce it like English.

This is a problem, because the English.

[A reading of The Chaos, a poem by the 19th century Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité. Best listened to while reading a copy of the text, so you can really appreciate the level of understandable salt this man was working through over English.]

That’s why nobody can agree on how “Qunari” is pronounced. Is it with a hard K? A “kyu” sound? That’s supported by DAO as an intended pronunciation,⁽��⁾ but it’s not always followed. Sometimes it sounds like a “Kwu”, even. All of these are valid pronunciations in English, but English has a famously infuriating writing system that is composed of more exceptions than actual rules. 

Most languages actually aren’t like that. English-speaking kids have to spend years learning how to write, but Finnish kids just need to learn the alphabet. Once they’ve done that, they can pretty much write any word they want, because the alphabet is so consistent with how it’s actually spoken. Hangul not only has a similar one-to-one correlation, its letters even look like how you shape your mouth when you make the sound!

But hey, at least English isn’t Tibetan. My sincere condolences to those learning the language, you’ve got your work cut out for you.⁽⁵⁾

I have my own system worked out for pronouncing the language, which I’ll make explicit later. But with regards to canon: I’ll do my best to catalog things at a later date, but all pronunciations are going to be highly variable based on the source. My best advice on this is to listen to whichever performance you like best, and use that as your template. Canon is all over the place, and you can make of it what you want. 

Unfortunately, it becomes extremely all over the place in terms of spelling, as we get to everything outside of DAO and DA2’s dialog.

And my job becomes more complicated. So complicated, that I wrote an entire second post on this, then decided it was overkill. I can post it if desired, but the “Dictionary” and “Phonological Inventory” spreadsheet in the workbook of madness contains the raw facts of everything. It also provides notes on the weird differences between DA2’s spoken dialog and the item names.

Before we end this post–say you want to take what’s been presented here and run with it. You want to make new words for yourself. How would you do that?

It’s finally time to talk about one more aspect of phonaesthetics: certain sounds and sound combinations are rarer or more common than others. For example, “birtend” seems like a plausible English word, partly because it contains common English letters. “Zuquxay” doesn’t seem English, even though it’s easily pronounceable by English-speakers, because it has a bunch of rare letters in it, strung together in rare ways. Changing how frequently sounds are used in a conlang will heavily impact its overall feel.

Because I am not entirely sane, I’ve constructed a frequency chart for Qunlat. Actually, several, depending on whether you want a count of consonant clusters or just distinct sounds, and whether you want content that fits with DAO and DA2, or if you want every word ever called Qunlat.

Turns out, up to a quarter of the entire language is just the letter A. 

Next time, depending on what people desire: an examination of how Qunlat begins to vary more outside of DAO and DA2’s dialog, or we move ahead to phonology. Either way, we will be properly introduced to the works of my nemesis: Philliam, a Bard!.

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Footnotes

(1) Some may wonder “but what about a word like Vashoth, where you could consider shoth as its own five-letter syllable?” Well, it’s five letters, but only three sounds. I get into that a little further down the main text, under the subject of “digraphs”. If you’re wondering about the word ashkost, though, good choice! I’m pretty sure the word is split as ash-kost though, so I’m still right. :P

(2) For anyone wondering why “strengths” and “ashkaari” contains fewer consonant sounds than consonant letters, it’s because “ng”, “th”, and “sh” are two-letter combinations that each produce a single sound: You don’t pronounce “sing” as “sin-g”, or “the” as “t-he”, or “shush” as “s-hus-h”. Or at least I don’t, you do you.

(3) Though I should of course note that while the actors in Dune received packets of information from linguist David J Peterson, he didn’t have any direct interaction with the actors. He also didn’t coach their pronunciation of Arabic stuff like Madhi or Lisan al-Gaib, and hooboy, some of those are wobbly.

(4) When you’re tracking down Sten’s sword, the man who looted it has a surprised response that’s phonetically written out: “We're looking for a qunari sword.” “Kyun-what? I'm sorry, I... ah... I don't know what that--”. That would seem fairly unambiguous, but when listening back through samples from the games, Sten and the Arishok pronounce the word /kunɔri/, and you’d hope both their actors were coached on this one. I’ve also heard /kʷu/ pronunciations, not just /kju/. In fact, the only place /kju/ seems to be the unambiguous pronunciation is for “Qun” as a standalone word. As a conlanger who likes unambiguous romanization schemes, this annoys me greatly. Side note, if any of this is unfamiliar, stick around for when I talk more about phonology! I promise, it’s fun! You get to listen to strange little mouth noises on wikipedia, including the funniest little “üü” sound I’ve ever heard in my life!

(5) While English spelling has been afflicted with the pronunciations that were most common several centuries ago, written Tibetan has been largely unchanged for eight hundred years. The spoken language, however, has continued changing. This has created some wide divergences between the written and spoken languages: while the name of one of the central Tibetan province might be pronounced something like “Ü-Tsang”, it’s written as དབུས་གཙང, which is more literally transcribed as “Dbus-Gtsang”. If you’re writing or reading Tibetan, you just have to know that ahead of time. 

But don’t worry! English might get like that one day too!

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[moodboardinthecloud]

Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful

Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life

Tara Haelle

Aug 16·13 min read

https://elemental.medium.com/your-surge-capacity-is-depleted-it-s-why-you-feel-awful-de285d542f4c

Itwas the end of the world as we knew it, and I felt fine. That’s almost exactly what I told my psychiatrist at my March 16 appointment, a few days after our children’s school district extended spring break because of the coronavirus. I said the same at my April 27 appointment, several weeks after our state’s stay-at-home order.

Yes, it was exhausting having a kindergartener and fourth grader doing impromptu distance learning while I was barely keeping up with work. And it was frustrating to be stuck home nonstop, scrambling to get in grocery delivery orders before slots filled up, and tracking down toilet paper. But I was still doing well because I thrive in high-stress emergency situations. It’s exhilarating for my ADHD brain. As just one example, when my husband and I were stranded in Peru during an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands, we walked around with a first aid kit helping who we could and tracking down water and food. Then I went out with my camera to document the devastation as a photojournalist and interview Peruvians in my broken Spanish for my hometown paper.

Now we were in a pandemic, and I’m a science journalist who has written about infectious disease and medical research for nearly a decade. I was on fire, cranking out stories, explaining epidemiological concepts in my social networks, trying to help everyone around me make sense of the frightening circumstances of a pandemic and the anxiety surrounding the virus.

I knew it wouldn’t last. It never does. But even knowing I would eventually crash, I didn’t appreciate how hard the crash would be, or how long it would last, or how hard it would be to try to get back up over and over again, or what getting up even looked like.

Psychiatrist and habit change specialist Dr. Jud Brewer explains how anxiety masquerades as helpfulelemental.medium.com

How to Live When Your Mind Is Governed by Fear

In those early months, I, along with most of the rest of the country, was using “surge capacity” to operate, as Ann Masten, PhD, a psychologist and professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, calls it. Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

“The pandemic has demonstrated both what we can do with surge capacity and the limits of surge capacity,” says Masten. When it’s depleted, it has to be renewed. But what happens when you struggle to renew it because the emergency phase has now become chronic?

By my May 26 psychiatrist appointment, I wasn’t doing so hot. I couldn’t get any work done. I’d grown sick of Zoom meetups. It was exhausting and impossible to think with the kids around all day. I felt trapped in a home that felt as much a prison as a haven. I tried to conjure the motivation to check email, outline a story, or review interview notes, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t make myself do anything — work, housework, exercise, play with the kids — for that whole week.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Or the next.

I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an “anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,” along with a complete inability to concentrate. I spoke with my therapist, tweaked medication dosages, went outside daily for fresh air and sunlight, tried to force myself to do some physical activity, and even gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks. We were in a pandemic, after all, and I had already accepted in March that life would not be “normal” for at least a year or two. But I still couldn’t work, couldn’t focus, hadn’t adjusted. Shouldn’t I be used to this by now?

“Why do you think you should be used to this by now? We’re all beginners at this,” Masten told me. “This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s expecting a lot to think we’d be managing this really well.”

It wasn’t until my social media post elicited similar responses from dozens of high-achieving, competent, impressive women I professionally admire that I realized I wasn’t in the minority. My experience was a universal and deeply human one.

An unprecedented disaster

While the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” has been repeated endlessly since March, it’s easier said than done. How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?

“This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives,” says Masten. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with. Even those who have worked in disaster recovery or served in the military are facing a different kind of uncertainty right now.

Americans are faced with more risk than ever. Understanding how the brain navigates this new reality can build…elemental.medium.com

Life Is Now a Game of Risk. Here’s How Your Brain Is Processing It.

“I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster,” Masten says. “It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.”

Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, “you have to adopt a different style of coping.”

“How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the ‘new normal’ is indefinite uncertainty?”

Understanding ambiguous loss

It’s not surprising that, as a lifelong overachiever, I’ve felt particularly despondent and adrift as the months have dragged on, says Pauline Boss, PhD, a family therapist and professor emeritus of social sciences at the University of Minnesota who specializes in “ambiguous loss.”

“It’s harder for high achievers,” she says. “The more accustomed you are to solving problems, to getting things done, to having a routine, the harder it will be on you because none of that is possible right now. You get feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and those aren’t good.”

That’s similar to how Michael Maddaus, MD, a professor of thoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, felt when he became addicted to prescription narcotics after undergoing several surgeries. Now recovered and a motivational speaker who promotes the idea of a “resilience bank account,” Maddaus had always been a fast-moving high achiever — until he couldn’t be.

“I realized that my personal operating system, though it had led to tremendous success, had failed me on a more personal level,” he says. “I had to figure out a different way of contending with life.”

That mindset is an especially American one, Boss says.

“Our culture is very solution-oriented, which is a good way of thinking for many things,” she says. “It’s partly responsible for getting a man on the moon and a rover on Mars and all the things we’ve done in this country that are wonderful. But it’s a very destructive way of thinking when you’re faced with a problem that has no solution, at least for a while.”

That means reckoning with what’s called ambiguous loss: any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution. It can be physical, such as a missing person or the loss of a limb or organ, or psychological, such as a family member with dementia or a serious addiction.

“In this case, it is a loss of a way of life, of the ability to meet up with your friends and extended family,” Boss says. “It is perhaps a loss of trust in our government. It’s the loss of our freedom to move about in our daily life as we used to.” It’s also the loss of high-quality education, or the overall educational experience we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, such weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” such as going to gym. One of the toughest losses for me to adapt to is no longer doing my research and writing in coffee shops as I’ve done for most of my life, dating back to junior high.

“These were all things we were attached to and fond of, and they’re gone right now, so the loss is ambiguous. It’s not a death, but it’s a major, major loss,” says Boss. “What we used to have has been taken away from us.”

Just as painful are losses that may result from the intersection of the pandemic and the already tense political division in the country. For many people, issues related to Covid-19 have become the last straw in ending relationships, whether it’s a family member refusing to wear a mask, a friend promoting the latest conspiracy theory, or a co-worker insisting Covid-19 deaths are exaggerated.

Ambiguous loss elicits the same experiences of grief as a more tangible loss — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — but managing it often requires a bit of creativity.

A winding, uncharted path to coping in a pandemic

While there isn’t a handbook for functioning during a pandemic, Masten, Boss, and Maddaus offered some wisdom for meandering our way through this.

Accept that life is different right now

Maddaus’ approach involves radical acceptance. “It’s a shitty time, it’s hard,” he says. “You have to accept that in your bones and be okay with this as a tough day, with ‘that’s the way it is,’ and accept that as a baseline.”

But that acceptance doesn’t mean giving up, he says. It means not resisting or fighting reality so that you can apply your energy elsewhere. “It allows you to step into a more spacious mental space that allows you to do things that are constructive instead of being mired in a state of psychological self torment.”

Expect less from yourself

Most of us have heard for most of our lives to expect more from ourselves in some way or another. Now we must give ourselves permission to do the opposite. “We have to expect less of ourselves, and we have to replenish more,” Masten says. “I think we’re in a period of a lot of self discovery: Where do I get my energy? What kind of down time do I need? That’s all shifted right now, and it may take some reflection and self discovery to find out what rhythms of life do I need right now?”

She says people are having to live their lives without the support of so many systems that have partly or fully broken down, whether it’s schools, hospitals, churches, family support, or other systems that we relied on. We need to recognize that we’re grieving multiple losses while managing the ongoing impact of trauma and uncertainty. The malaise so many of us feel, a sort of disinterested boredom, is common in research on burnout, Masten says. But other emotions accompany it: disappointment, anger, grief, sadness, exhaustion, stress, fear, anxiety — and no one can function at full capacity with all that going on.

Recognize the different aspects of grief

The familiar “stages” of grief don’t actually occur in linear stages, Boss says, but denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are all major concepts in facing loss. Plenty of people are in denial: denying the virus is real, or that the numbers of cases or deaths are as high as reported, or that masks really help reduce disease transmission.

Anger is evident everywhere: anger at those in denial, anger in the race demonstrations, anger at those not physically distancing or wearing masks, and even anger at those who wear masks or require them. The bargaining, Boss says, is mostly with scientists we hope will develop a vaccine quickly. The depression is obvious, but acceptance… “I haven’t accepted any of this,” Boss says. “I don’t know about you.”

Sometimes acceptance means “saying we’re going to have a good time in spite of this,” Boss says, such as when my family drove an hour outside the city to get far enough from light pollution to look for the comet NEOWISE. But it can also mean accepting that we cannot change the situation right now.

“We can kick and scream and be angry, or we can feel the other side of it, with no motivation, difficulty focusing, lethargy,” Boss says, “or we can take the middle way and just have a couple days where you feel like doing nothing and you embrace the losses and sadness you’re feeling right now, and then the next day, do something that has an element of achievement to it.”

“Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass.”

Experiment with “both-and” thinking

This approach may not work for everyone, but Boss says there’s an alternative to binary thinking that many people find helpful in dealing with ambiguous loss. She calls it “both-and” thinking, and sometimes it means embracing a bit of the irrational.

For the families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam that Boss studied early in her career, or the family members of victims of plane crashes where the bodies aren’t recovered, this type of thinking means thinking: “He is both living and maybe not. She is probably dead but maybe not.”

“If you stay in the rational when nothing else is rational, like right now, then you’ll just stress yourself more,” she says. “What I say with ambiguous loss is the situation is crazy, not the person. The situation is pathological, not the person.”

An analogous approach during the pandemic might be, “This is terrible and many people are dying, and this is also a time for our families to come closer together,” Boss says. On a more personal level, “I’m highly competent, and right now I’m flowing with the tide day-to-day.”

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s existence, but when you can’t change the situation, “the only thing you can change is your perception of it,” she says.

Of course, that doesn’t mean denying the existence of the pandemic or the coronavirus. As Maddaus says, “You have to face reality.” But how we frame that reality mentally can help us cope with it.

Look for activities, new and old, that continue to fulfill you

Lots of coping advice has focused on “self-care,” but one of the frustrating ironies of the pandemic is that so many of our self-care activities have also been taken away: pedicures, massages, coffee with friends, a visit to the amusement park, a kickboxing class, swimming in the local pool — these activities remain unsafe in much of the country. So we have to get creative with self-care when we’re least motivated to get creative.

“When we’re forced to rethink our options and broaden out what we think of as self-care, sometimes that constraint opens new ways of living and thinking,” Masten says. “We don’t have a lot of control over the global pandemic but we do over our daily lives. You can focus on plans for the future and what’s meaningful in life.”

For me, since I missed eating in restaurants and was tired of our same old dinners, I began subscribing to a meal-kit service. I hate cooking, but the meal kits were easy, and I was motivated by the chance to eat something that tasted more like what I’d order in a restaurant without having to invest energy in looking through recipes or ordering the right ingredients.

Okay, I’ve also been playing a lot of Animal Crossing, but Maddaus explains why it makes sense that creative activities like cooking, gardening, painting, house projects — or even building your own imaginary island out of pixels — can be fulfilling right now. He references the book The Molecule of More, which explores how dopamine influences our experiences and happiness, in describing the types of activities most likely to bring us joy.

“There are two ways the brain deals with the world: the future and things we need to go after, and the here and now, seeing things and touching things,” Maddaus says. “Rather than being at the mercy of what’s going on, we can use the elements of our natural reward system and construct things to do that are good no matter what.”

Those kinds of activities have a planning element and a here-and-now experience element. For Maddaus, for example, it was simply replacing all the showerheads and lightbulbs in the house. “It’s a silly thing, but it made me feel good,” he says.

Focus on maintaining and strengthening important relationships

The biggest protective factors for facing adversity and building resilience are social support and remaining connected to people, Masten says. That includes helping others, even when we’re feeling depleted ourselves.

“Helping others is one of those win-win strategies of taking action because we’re all feeling a sense of helplessness and loss of control about what’s going on with this pandemic, but when you take action with other people, you can control what you’re doing,” she says. Helping others could include checking in on family friends or buying groceries for an elderly neighbor.

Begin slowly building your resilience bank account

Maddaus’ idea of a resilience bank account is gradually building into your life regular practices that promote resilience and provide a fallback when life gets tough. Though it would obviously be nice to have a fat account already, he says it’s never too late to start. The areas he specifically advocates focusing on are sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, connection, and saying no.

“Start really small and work your way up,” he says. “If you do a little bit every day, it starts to add up and you get momentum, and even if you miss a day, then start again. We have to be gentle with ourselves and keep on, begin again.”

After spending an hour on the phone with each of these experts, I felt refreshed and inspired. I can do this! I was excited about writing this article and sharing what I’d learned.

And then it took me two weeks to start the article and another week to finish it — even though I wanted to write it. But now, I could cut myself a little more slack for taking so much longer than I might have a few months ago. I might have intellectually accepted back in March that the next two years (or more?) are going to be nothing like normal, and not even predictable in how they won’t be normal. But cognitively recognizing and accepting that fact and emotionally incorporating that reality into everyday life aren’t the same. Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass. But humans can get better at anything with practice, so at least I now have some ideas for working on my sea legs.

[differentnutpeace]

Why Pandemics Give Birth To Hate: From Bubonic Plague To COVID-19

The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19. During this surge in attacks, the perpetrators have made their motives clear, taunting their victims  หวย บอล เกมส์ กีฬา คาสิโนออนไลน์

The numbers over the past year in the U.S. alone are alarming. As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year to Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.

CODE SWITCH

Screams And Silence

Then came mass shooting in Atlanta last week, which took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent. The shooter's motive has not been determined, but the incident has spawned a deeper discourse on racism and violence targeting Asians in the wake of the coronavirus.

This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. And in the '80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that's considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.

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Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.

According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best." This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn't able to control it.

SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS

OPINION: 5 Ways To Make The Vaccine Rollout More Equitable

"The other side of that assumption is, 'Had this started anywhere else, like in the U.S. or the U.K. or Europe, somehow it would've been better controlled, and a pandemic wouldn't have happened,'" says Karan, who was born in India and raised in the U.S. He has previously worked with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to respond to COVID-19.

China's response was not without fault. The government's decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.

But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.

The Twitter Blame Game And Its Repercussions

Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or the "Wuhan Virus." They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase "China virus" during a March 16 call to Fox News.

A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump's first tweet about a "Chinese virus" to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.

"Diseases have often been racialized in the past as a form of scapegoating," says Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and lead author of the study on Trump's tweet. Sometimes, it's to distract from other events that are occurring within a society, such as the early failures of the U.S. response to the pandemic, says Hswen.

Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D'Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR's Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.

"What you're seeing in the U.S. is this pre-existing, deep-seated bias [against Asians and Asian Americans] – or rather, racism – that is now surfacing," says D'Silva. "COVID-19 is just an excuse."

A Racist History In Global Health

For Karan, though, the problem lies deeper — with the colonialist history of global health systems.

"It's not that the biases are necessarily birthed from global health researchers," he says. "It's more that global health researchers are birthed from institutions and cultures that are inherently xenophobic and racist."

For example, the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.

"[Western health workers] come in with a bias that in San Francisco or Boston, we would never let [these crises] happen," says Shamasunder, who is co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative, a global health fellowship that works in Navajo Nation in the U.S. and in eight other countries.

In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.'s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn't at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.

"Inadvertently, we [did] a disservice both to patients who need[ed] care and to public health," says Kass.

It's reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a "gay disease," there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren't diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.

That's not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it's appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.

But there's a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like "Chinese virus," that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.

Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.

Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.

Without such commitments in place, "it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?" says Shamasunder.

Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.

Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.

Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like "COVID-19" should be used instead of "Chinese virus."

"Public health people know there is a history of racializing diseases and targeting particular groups," says Hswen. "They could have done more to defend the Asian community."

Joanne Lu is a freelance journalist who covers global poverty and inequity. Her work has appeared in Humanosphere, The Guardian, Global Washington and War is Boring. Follow her on Twitter: @joannelu

[sunshine-soprano]

51 and/or 75 for Jamilton, if possible? That would be really nice!!

I’ve done 75 below, and I’ll write 51 separately tomorrow!

75. “You fainted,straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention, you didn’t have togo to such extremes.”

Hamilton wondered what the record was for days gone without sleep.A quick Google search told him that it was eleven days. Hamilton had been awakefor almost ten. He could feel the long arm of sleep gently tugging at hissweater sleeve, but he shook it off and drank another mouthful of now coldcoffee. He needed to finish this plan. Just a few more paragraphs, and then itwas done.

Hours passed, and Hamilton came out of his tunnel vision to findthat it was dawn and the plan was finished. He sighed as he pressed print.Jefferson would probably find a million holes in the document’s logic, butHamilton was so tired that he didn’t even care. After giving the plan toWashington, he could sleep for as long as he wanted. He just needed to stayawake for long enough to actually make it into the office.

Hamilton’s vision was blurry as he walked down the busy pavement,and everything sounded as if it was coming from the other end of a long tunnel.He was barely awake enough to keep from knocking into people as he walked. Eventuallyhe made it into the building, saying an exhausted hello to the receptionist,and waited for the elevator while trying desperately not to drift off.

“Hamilton.”

The voice behind him jarred him awake. “Jefferson,” he replied.

“You look like hell. More so than usual,” Jefferson said,sneering.

“Well excuse me if I’m too busy being productive to spend fivehours every morning trying to look decent.”

That shut Jefferson up.

The elevator ride was even more uncomfortable. In a way, Hamiltonwanted to continue the conversation, if only to prevent him from fallingasleep. But his brain wasn’t functioning well enough to produce any goodconversation topics. So, they both walked out of the elevator having saidnothing.

Hamilton made his way straight to Washington’s office with hisplan, typed up with perfect formatting, size 12 font, double spaced, with pagenumbers and clearly labelled graphs. He knocked on the door.

“Come in. Oh, good morning Alexander.”

“Good morning, sir. Here’s the plan you wanted.”

Washington stared at the one-hundred-and-twenty-page plan Hamiltonhanded to him. “I only asked you to do this ten days ago. I wasn’t expecting itfor another month.”

Hamilton shrugged. “It’s just a first draft. I wanted to do it assoon as possible so that I could make any changes you wanted.”

Washington frowned. “You have been sleeping though, haven’t you?”

Hamilton nodded. “Of course,” he lied.

“Mm-hmm. Well, thanks for that Alexander. I’ll see you in thismorning’s meeting.”

“Yes, sir.”

The meeting was uneventful. Well, it was from Hamilton’s point ofview, as he was constantly trying to keep his eyes open. His eyelids feltheavier than they ever had. and he was unsure whether even the strongestespresso could help him now. Washington’s voice was getting further and furtheraway, and Hamilton had no idea what he was talking about any more. Maybe hecould just sit and listen with his eyes closed…?

—

Jefferson took notes in all his meetings. He was constantlyworried that he might forget something important, and then if he wanted tospeak up, someone – ahem, Hamilton –would call him out for not listening to that one very specific point. Hamilton had made fun of Jefferson’snote-taking habit several times, but at least Jefferson was one step ahead ofHamilton when it came to presenting an argument in front of the whole board.

Suddenly, a heavy weight on his arm made him mark his notepad witha long, straight, black line. He looked down to fine Hamilton’s head on hislap, trapping his right arm. “Hamilton, what the hell are you doing?” hehissed. When no reply came, Jefferson shook Hamilton’s shoulder gently.“Hamilton.”

“Mr Jefferson, is something wrong?” Washington asked.

Jefferson looked up, feeling his face grow hot. “Uh… yeah. I thinkHamilton just fainted.”

Washington sighed, exasperated. “He probably hasn’t slept in days.Okay, I think we’d better postpone this meeting for now. You’re all dismissed.Jefferson, make sure Hamilton gets some rest.”

“But-” Jefferson whined, but was quickly silenced by a Look fromWashington. He sighed and gently picked Hamilton up (the man needed to eatmore; he was lighter than Monroe’s eleven-year-old daughter) and carried himback to his office. He placed Hamilton on the couch in there and sat at hisdesk, watching- no, just waiting forHamilton to wake up. Not watching. That was weird.

—

Hamilton awoke to fluorescent lights, the smell of food andsomeone shaking his shoulder. “Hmph,” he grunted eloquently.

“Come on Hamilton, it’s about time you ate something. Knowing you,you probably neglected to do that alongside your attempt at record-breakingsleep deprivation.”

“I did eat,” Hamilton grumbled, propping himself up on his elbowsand coming face-to-face with Thomas Jefferson. “Why are you in my office?” heasked, the tone of his voice very clearly telling the other man to get out.

“After everything I’ve done for you, that’s how you speak to me?”Jefferson replied in mock offence. “I just bought you lunch. And I’ve beenwaiting for you to wake up since you fainted this morning.”

Hamilton swallowed. “I fainted?” How could he have let thathappen? He’d probably humiliated himself in front of all his colleagues.

Jefferson nodded. “Youfainted. Straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention, youdidn’t have to go to such extremes.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Hamilton said, scowling.

Jefferson handed him a sandwich. “Here. Eat. And I also got yousome coffee. Decaf, because you’re going straight back to sleep after this. No,don’t give me that look. Washington told me he gave you that plan to make tendays ago. Is that how long you’ve gone without sleep?”

“Yes,” Hamilton said through a mouthful of sandwich.

“Jesus Christ, Hamilton. Tendays? Are you crazy?”

“Probably,” Hamilton replied through another mouthful of sandwich.

Jefferson sat down next to Hamilton. “You need to start takingbetter care of yourself. Believe it or not, I do care about you. And youfainting on me during a meeting makes me worry. Washington too.”

Hamilton stared at Jefferson. “You care about me?” he asked indisbelief.

“Of course,” Jefferson replied, shrugging. “Where else am I goingto get a heated debate about whether cream or jelly goes on top of a scone?”

“England?” Hamilton suggested. “And the right way is still jam ontop, by the way.”

“Are you kidding me? It’s cream on top! Were you raised in abarn?” Jefferson exclaimed. “Anyway, drink your coffee.”

Hamilton pulled a face at the cup. “Decaf? Really?”

“Well, you’re not going to sleep with two shots of espressorunning through you.”

Hamilton sighed and sipped the drink. He hummed in satisfaction. “Howdid you know I liked my coffee with caramel syrup?”

“Um, well, you seem like the kind of person who would want theircoffee sickly sweet,” Jefferson replied, refusing to meet Hamilton’s gaze as ablush crept onto his face.

Hamilton drank the rest of his coffee in silence before yawning.His eyelids were already beginning to feel heavy with sleep. He leaned intoJefferson’s side and rested his head on his shoulder – just to make Jeffersonfeel uncomfortable, for no other purpose than that, nope, no ulterior motivesthank you very much.

He felt Jefferson stiffen. “Do you really have to do that?” heasked. Hamilton could feel his chest moving.

“Yep,” Hamilton replied before falling into silence. The lastthing he remembered before sleep took hold of him again was Jefferson pattinghis thigh gently, resting his hand there.

“You’re an idiot,” he said fondly. “It’s a good thing you’re cute.”

[marlaluster]

The devil going CRAZY attacking just now, it was obsessing w pressing I'm supposed to think of my face as old, IT WAS GOING TOTALLY INSANE; then I was yelling over it n Karla came in n it was pressing i was supposed to be less than as who is deemed less than here in this sick as fuck society. .....

I'm supposed to be someone less than here, poor etc. It's extremely sick n disgusting as fuck here. It is so disgusting here. But Karla came in as i was yelling n it was very startling. She was saying something n it sounded weird. She said it sounded loud, different from how it sounded I'm assuming inside. But the devil was pressing after Karla came inside n said what she said that i was less than as someone that's supposed to be less than in this society as who's poor n not able to afford a place to live. It is extremely sick n disgusting as fuck here. But it has been doing this excruciating tormenting about my face n other things, it presses personas like crazy, it's been attacking extremely bad. But just now or just a bit ago there was some knocking on the wall n it seemed kind of weird. Earlier there was some knocking outside on the roof, it seemed the roof n some other places. "Can I include you don't think I'm less. But I must not do that," the devil said after it was pressing a sense some typo could be included on the blog that was misleading since I haven't been reading the posts much that I've posted or so it seems. It had changed the typing to "for" from the intended word "do" just there in its quote above. I fixed it. But it does autochanging stuff like that at points. It should not be unclear really on the blog because I write a lot n really Uncle Tom is not really what a person would be as the devil pretends in devil land. A break here. Something just happened where it seemed that a government document that is like the bill of rights or something tried to be on my side or something. I said I'm not really supported by the way of things here etc n it's very bad here to me, I've been attacked here by this society. But this was said to be that itwas about that this country is falling apart as something that would have been or seemed okay n it's really something bad for me to be not supported to be okay or it could be said it's bad for people to be something not okay. But anyway, the devil has been attacking very bad. It's been obsessing so bad over my face n attacking so bad tormenting me about my face. It keeps making a sense I'm supposed to have jowls n that my face is saggy at the bottom. It feels better to press the back of my hand against my face. It is such a disgusting n horrible place here. I never saw stuff that was supposed to be ugly w people's faves etc as something not disturbing n not bad it was happening. I'm someone that's not normal, I'm someone that's supposed to be less than n I've been attacked here very bad by this society. It is such a sick n disgusting place, so horrible n disgusting. It's very attacking. It worships the devil. The devil threatening things could be worse like something w pain or discomfort. It's very bad. It was just pressing I'm supposed to be aware the neighbor is okay. It's pressing I'm supposed to experience I think I'm less than for saying it's disgusting here that I'm attacked here n that it's not something that's not really seen as bad for people to be having all the ugly n bad stuff happento them.

[xenderforwindows]

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[moodboardinthecloud]

Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful

Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life

Tara Haelle

Aug 16·13 min read

Itwas the end of the world as we knew it, and I felt fine. That’s almost exactly what I told my psychiatrist at my March 16 appointment, a few days after our children’s school district extended spring break because of the coronavirus. I said the same at my April 27 appointment, several weeks after our state’s stay-at-home order.

Yes, it was exhausting having a kindergartener and fourth grader doing impromptu distance learning while I was barely keeping up with work. And it was frustrating to be stuck home nonstop, scrambling to get in grocery delivery orders before slots filled up, and tracking down toilet paper. But I was still doing well because I thrive in high-stress emergency situations. It’s exhilarating for my ADHD brain. As just one example, when my husband and I were stranded in Peru during an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands, we walked around with a first aid kit helping who we could and tracking down water and food. Then I went out with my camera to document the devastation as a photojournalist and interview Peruvians in my broken Spanish for my hometown paper.

Now we were in a pandemic, and I’m a science journalist who has written about infectious disease and medical research for nearly a decade. I was on fire, cranking out stories, explaining epidemiological concepts in my social networks, trying to help everyone around me make sense of the frightening circumstances of a pandemic and the anxiety surrounding the virus.

I knew it wouldn’t last. It never does. But even knowing I would eventually crash, I didn’t appreciate how hard the crash would be, or how long it would last, or how hard it would be to try to get back up over and over again, or what getting up even looked like.

Psychiatrist and habit change specialist Dr. Jud Brewer explains how anxiety masquerades as helpfulelemental.medium.com

How to Live When Your Mind Is Governed by Fear

In those early months, I, along with most of the rest of the country, was using “surge capacity” to operate, as Ann Masten, PhD, a psychologist and professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, calls it. Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

“The pandemic has demonstrated both what we can do with surge capacity and the limits of surge capacity,” says Masten. When it’s depleted, it has to be renewed. But what happens when you struggle to renew it because the emergency phase has now become chronic?

By my May 26 psychiatrist appointment, I wasn’t doing so hot. I couldn’t get any work done. I’d grown sick of Zoom meetups. It was exhausting and impossible to think with the kids around all day. I felt trapped in a home that felt as much a prison as a haven. I tried to conjure the motivation to check email, outline a story, or review interview notes, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t make myself do anything — work, housework, exercise, play with the kids — for that whole week.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Or the next.

I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an “anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,” along with a complete inability to concentrate. I spoke with my therapist, tweaked medication dosages, went outside daily for fresh air and sunlight, tried to force myself to do some physical activity, and even gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks. We were in a pandemic, after all, and I had already accepted in March that life would not be “normal” for at least a year or two. But I still couldn’t work, couldn’t focus, hadn’t adjusted. Shouldn’t I be used to this by now?

“Why do you think you should be used to this by now? We’re all beginners at this,” Masten told me. “This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s expecting a lot to think we’d be managing this really well.”

It wasn’t until my social media post elicited similar responses from dozens of high-achieving, competent, impressive women I professionally admire that I realized I wasn’t in the minority. My experience was a universal and deeply human one.

An unprecedented disaster

While the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” has been repeated endlessly since March, it’s easier said than done. How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?

“This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives,” says Masten. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with. Even those who have worked in disaster recovery or served in the military are facing a different kind of uncertainty right now.

Americans are faced with more risk than ever. Understanding how the brain navigates this new reality can build…elemental.medium.com

Life Is Now a Game of Risk. Here’s How Your Brain Is Processing It.

“I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster,” Masten says. “It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.”

Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, “you have to adopt a different style of coping.”

“How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the ‘new normal’ is indefinite uncertainty?”

Understanding ambiguous loss

It’s not surprising that, as a lifelong overachiever, I’ve felt particularly despondent and adrift as the months have dragged on, says Pauline Boss, PhD, a family therapist and professor emeritus of social sciences at the University of Minnesota who specializes in “ambiguous loss.”

“It’s harder for high achievers,” she says. “The more accustomed you are to solving problems, to getting things done, to having a routine, the harder it will be on you because none of that is possible right now. You get feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and those aren’t good.”

That’s similar to how Michael Maddaus, MD, a professor of thoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, felt when he became addicted to prescription narcotics after undergoing several surgeries. Now recovered and a motivational speaker who promotes the idea of a “resilience bank account,” Maddaus had always been a fast-moving high achiever — until he couldn’t be.

“I realized that my personal operating system, though it had led to tremendous success, had failed me on a more personal level,” he says. “I had to figure out a different way of contending with life.”

That mindset is an especially American one, Boss says.

“Our culture is very solution-oriented, which is a good way of thinking for many things,” she says. “It’s partly responsible for getting a man on the moon and a rover on Mars and all the things we’ve done in this country that are wonderful. But it’s a very destructive way of thinking when you’re faced with a problem that has no solution, at least for a while.”

That means reckoning with what’s called ambiguous loss: any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution. It can be physical, such as a missing person or the loss of a limb or organ, or psychological, such as a family member with dementia or a serious addiction.

“In this case, it is a loss of a way of life, of the ability to meet up with your friends and extended family,” Boss says. “It is perhaps a loss of trust in our government. It’s the loss of our freedom to move about in our daily life as we used to.” It’s also the loss of high-quality education, or the overall educational experience we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, such weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” such as going to gym. One of the toughest losses for me to adapt to is no longer doing my research and writing in coffee shops as I’ve done for most of my life, dating back to junior high.

“These were all things we were attached to and fond of, and they’re gone right now, so the loss is ambiguous. It’s not a death, but it’s a major, major loss,” says Boss. “What we used to have has been taken away from us.”

Just as painful are losses that may result from the intersection of the pandemic and the already tense political division in the country. For many people, issues related to Covid-19 have become the last straw in ending relationships, whether it’s a family member refusing to wear a mask, a friend promoting the latest conspiracy theory, or a co-worker insisting Covid-19 deaths are exaggerated.

Ambiguous loss elicits the same experiences of grief as a more tangible loss — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — but managing it often requires a bit of creativity.

A winding, uncharted path to coping in a pandemic

While there isn’t a handbook for functioning during a pandemic, Masten, Boss, and Maddaus offered some wisdom for meandering our way through this.

Accept that life is different right now

Maddaus’ approach involves radical acceptance. “It’s a shitty time, it’s hard,” he says. “You have to accept that in your bones and be okay with this as a tough day, with ‘that’s the way it is,’ and accept that as a baseline.”

But that acceptance doesn’t mean giving up, he says. It means not resisting or fighting reality so that you can apply your energy elsewhere. “It allows you to step into a more spacious mental space that allows you to do things that are constructive instead of being mired in a state of psychological self torment.”

Expect less from yourself

Most of us have heard for most of our lives to expect more from ourselves in some way or another. Now we must give ourselves permission to do the opposite. “We have to expect less of ourselves, and we have to replenish more,” Masten says. “I think we’re in a period of a lot of self discovery: Where do I get my energy? What kind of down time do I need? That’s all shifted right now, and it may take some reflection and self discovery to find out what rhythms of life do I need right now?”

She says people are having to live their lives without the support of so many systems that have partly or fully broken down, whether it’s schools, hospitals, churches, family support, or other systems that we relied on. We need to recognize that we’re grieving multiple losses while managing the ongoing impact of trauma and uncertainty. The malaise so many of us feel, a sort of disinterested boredom, is common in research on burnout, Masten says. But other emotions accompany it: disappointment, anger, grief, sadness, exhaustion, stress, fear, anxiety — and no one can function at full capacity with all that going on.

Recognize the different aspects of grief

The familiar “stages” of grief don’t actually occur in linear stages, Boss says, but denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are all major concepts in facing loss. Plenty of people are in denial: denying the virus is real, or that the numbers of cases or deaths are as high as reported, or that masks really help reduce disease transmission.

Anger is evident everywhere: anger at those in denial, anger in the race demonstrations, anger at those not physically distancing or wearing masks, and even anger at those who wear masks or require them. The bargaining, Boss says, is mostly with scientists we hope will develop a vaccine quickly. The depression is obvious, but acceptance… “I haven’t accepted any of this,” Boss says. “I don’t know about you.”

Sometimes acceptance means “saying we’re going to have a good time in spite of this,” Boss says, such as when my family drove an hour outside the city to get far enough from light pollution to look for the comet NEOWISE. But it can also mean accepting that we cannot change the situation right now.

“We can kick and scream and be angry, or we can feel the other side of it, with no motivation, difficulty focusing, lethargy,” Boss says, “or we can take the middle way and just have a couple days where you feel like doing nothing and you embrace the losses and sadness you’re feeling right now, and then the next day, do something that has an element of achievement to it.”

“Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass.”

Experiment with “both-and” thinking

This approach may not work for everyone, but Boss says there’s an alternative to binary thinking that many people find helpful in dealing with ambiguous loss. She calls it “both-and” thinking, and sometimes it means embracing a bit of the irrational.

For the families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam that Boss studied early in her career, or the family members of victims of plane crashes where the bodies aren’t recovered, this type of thinking means thinking: “He is both living and maybe not. She is probably dead but maybe not.”

“If you stay in the rational when nothing else is rational, like right now, then you’ll just stress yourself more,” she says. “What I say with ambiguous loss is the situation is crazy, not the person. The situation is pathological, not the person.”

An analogous approach during the pandemic might be, “This is terrible and many people are dying, and this is also a time for our families to come closer together,” Boss says. On a more personal level, “I’m highly competent, and right now I’m flowing with the tide day-to-day.”

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s existence, but when you can’t change the situation, “the only thing you can change is your perception of it,” she says.

Of course, that doesn’t mean denying the existence of the pandemic or the coronavirus. As Maddaus says, “You have to face reality.” But how we frame that reality mentally can help us cope with it.

Look for activities, new and old, that continue to fulfill you

Lots of coping advice has focused on “self-care,” but one of the frustrating ironies of the pandemic is that so many of our self-care activities have also been taken away: pedicures, massages, coffee with friends, a visit to the amusement park, a kickboxing class, swimming in the local pool — these activities remain unsafe in much of the country. So we have to get creative with self-care when we’re least motivated to get creative.

“When we’re forced to rethink our options and broaden out what we think of as self-care, sometimes that constraint opens new ways of living and thinking,” Masten says. “We don’t have a lot of control over the global pandemic but we do over our daily lives. You can focus on plans for the future and what’s meaningful in life.”

For me, since I missed eating in restaurants and was tired of our same old dinners, I began subscribing to a meal-kit service. I hate cooking, but the meal kits were easy, and I was motivated by the chance to eat something that tasted more like what I’d order in a restaurant without having to invest energy in looking through recipes or ordering the right ingredients.

Okay, I’ve also been playing a lot of Animal Crossing, but Maddaus explains why it makes sense that creative activities like cooking, gardening, painting, house projects — or even building your own imaginary island out of pixels — can be fulfilling right now. He references the book The Molecule of More, which explores how dopamine influences our experiences and happiness, in describing the types of activities most likely to bring us joy.

“There are two ways the brain deals with the world: the future and things we need to go after, and the here and now, seeing things and touching things,” Maddaus says. “Rather than being at the mercy of what’s going on, we can use the elements of our natural reward system and construct things to do that are good no matter what.”

Those kinds of activities have a planning element and a here-and-now experience element. For Maddaus, for example, it was simply replacing all the showerheads and lightbulbs in the house. “It’s a silly thing, but it made me feel good,” he says.

Focus on maintaining and strengthening important relationships

The biggest protective factors for facing adversity and building resilience are social support and remaining connected to people, Masten says. That includes helping others, even when we’re feeling depleted ourselves.

“Helping others is one of those win-win strategies of taking action because we’re all feeling a sense of helplessness and loss of control about what’s going on with this pandemic, but when you take action with other people, you can control what you’re doing,” she says. Helping others could include checking in on family friends or buying groceries for an elderly neighbor.

Begin slowly building your resilience bank account

Maddaus’ idea of a resilience bank account is gradually building into your life regular practices that promote resilience and provide a fallback when life gets tough. Though it would obviously be nice to have a fat account already, he says it’s never too late to start. The areas he specifically advocates focusing on are sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, connection, and saying no.

“Start really small and work your way up,” he says. “If you do a little bit every day, it starts to add up and you get momentum, and even if you miss a day, then start again. We have to be gentle with ourselves and keep on, begin again.”

After spending an hour on the phone with each of these experts, I felt refreshed and inspired. I can do this! I was excited about writing this article and sharing what I’d learned.

And then it took me two weeks to start the article and another week to finish it — even though I wanted to write it. But now, I could cut myself a little more slack for taking so much longer than I might have a few months ago. I might have intellectually accepted back in March that the next two years (or more?) are going to be nothing like normal, and not even predictable in how they won’t be normal. But cognitively recognizing and accepting that fact and emotionally incorporating that reality into everyday life aren’t the same. Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass. But humans can get better at anything with practice, so at least I now have some ideas for working on my sea legs.

This story has been translated into Portuguese, which you can read here.

WRITTEN BY

Tara Haelle

Tara Haelle is a science journalist, public speaker, and author of Vaccination Investigation and The Informed Parent. Follow her at @tarahaelle.