We are all Coraline.
I’ve been noticing an awful lot of people reporting that they are struggling.
I have friends who can’t get much work done. May of them do creative work, and they just don’t have the bandwidth to be creative. I have clients who feel stuck, almost like their feet are in that quicksand so many of us were afraid of when we were kids.
Most people say things like, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me” or “I just can’t seem to focus” or “I can’t find my mojo.” Some of them are reporting fatigue symptoms, including tiredness and/or brain fog. Others report uncertainty, disquietness, and a feeling of being unsettled.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
Maybe you feel simultaneously bored and desirous of action, but not able to effect any movement or change.
Turns out that it’s essentially a form of malaise, “a general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify.” (Per the Oxford Dictionary.)
I’ve been trying to think of whether—or how—to talk about it, and then a while back I saw this on Twitter:
“The energy lately is ‘everyone is losing it’. I think we all thought everything would go back to ‘normal’ and honestly it just isn’t.”
Maybe it’s Halloween talking, but as I was trying to figure out a way to begin talking about this, I suddenly had this thought: “We are all Coraline.”
Coraline is a novel by Neil Gaiman. I am shocked that it’s been out for twenty years, but that is neither here nor there. The book itself was written for younger readers (middle grade and up), and a movie version was released in 2009 (with the addition of a secondary character who is not in the book).
Short and possibly badly told plot summary follows — skip if you’ve read it or seen the movie.
In the book, the main character (Coraline) makes her way into a parallel Universe where things are and are not the same as the real world. The other reality is controlled by The Other Mother, who wants to feed off Coraline’s soul and sew buttons for her eyes.
At first, the Other Mother seems nice and all seems better than her normal life, but the more Coraline looks around, the more she realizes that it’s an uncanny place. Things are weirder than they seem, nothing is exactly “right”, and the more she looks, the more she notices that everything is fuzzy and frayed around the edges. Coraline is in possession of a witch stone (also called a hag stone or adder stone), which is a stone with a hole in it that (in part) allows her to see things as they truly are.
When the novel concludes, Coraline has rescued her parents, defeated the other mother, and resumed her “normal” life. Nobody else in her world is any the wiser about what has taken place. Coraline, however, knows all that has happened and has to consider what “normal” means.
It’s a gorgeous book, full of gorgeous lines, but the one I have been thinking of is this, which feels very true for so many of us these days: “For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was.”
We are all Coraline.
What do I mean by that?
In February or March of 2020 (depending on who you are and where you live), things started to shut down. The world was decidedly not normal, as we all hunkered down and quarantined and tried to figure out how to live in a world with a brand-new viral threat.
On top of the uncertainty and seriously bad news from the pandemic, there were a lot of sad or disturbing world affairs, from the January 6th coup attempt in the US to the ongoing fallout from Brexit in the UK (and the change in monarchs) to catastrophic floods in India to famine in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Then there’s the war that Russia started in Ukraine, and the many disruptions it has caused, including to the energy and grain sectors.
And, of course, we all have personal stuff going on. Here in my house, I continue to ride the rollercoaster of fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis issues, which included a massive flare last month accompanied by cluster migraines. Morris had both of his knees replaced during early Covid days, and developed a-fib early this year that resulted in months of medical appointments and procedures. Fortunately for us, he is fine now!
But I also know people who have been diagnosed with cancer and other ailments, people who have lost friends or relatives (both to death, and to drifting apart or a rift), people who have broken bones or needed surgery for things . . . It has all been quite a lot.
Now that it’s the fall of 2022, many folks are convinced we are “back to normal.”
Over time, many things have changed. The CDC changed its definitions on when and how to count cases and to assess spread in ways that allow places to be open when they would have had to be closed under the older criteria.
Most people aren’t masking anymore (though I still do). Vaccinations exist to help lessen the severity of Covid. Many places that were allowing telecommuting are now back to working in person.
People are returning to in-person concerts and conferences and parties and religious services, usually without testing or masking. From the outside, things appear to be “back to normal.”
But for the past two and a half years, since at least February or March of 2020, we have all experienced a tremendous amount of trauma due to the pandemic, whether we’ve experienced losses personally or not. That trauma hasn’t exactly gone away, either, but is ongoing.
This is not “going back to normal,” since some things are irrevocably changed. There’s the ongoing health stuff, including folks wrestling with Long Covid and disability as a result of the virus. There’s an aggressive flu season, too, and monkey pox isn’t actually gone. And, of course, there’s the part where some folks tried to overthrow the US government on January 6th, and that hasn’t all shaken out yet. Plus the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and inflation (largely because of that war), plus natural disasters, etc. . . .
If you are feeling like it’s just one thing after another, it’s because IT HAS BEEN.
We are all Coraline: forever changed, despite a world that looks largely the same as it did at the end of 2019.
Like Coraline, we have had to do brave, hard things. And we may still have more of those ahead of us.
Like Coraline, we now know that we are stronger than we thought we might be.
Like Coraline, we are now hyper-vigilant for what might be coming next. On the one hand, that is good, since we will see things coming and hopefully be able to cope. On the other hand, our poor nervous systems are in near-constant overdrive.
And all of it is happening as we ramp up for the social “busy season” of the year: Thanksgiving in the US is on November 24th. Chanukah starts at sundown on December 18th. Christmas is on the 25th of December, with Boxing Day (UK) the next day. Kwanzaa begins on December 26th. New Year’s Eve is on December 31st, and New Year’s Day is (of course) January 1st, 2023. Ephiphany/Three Kings’ Day is on January 6th. Orthodox Christmas is on January 7th.
There may be work parties and family parties and friend parties again this year for any or all of these occasions, to say nothing of the rest.
I’d like to help make these next few months a bit easier.
A bit more expansive and abundant. A lot more joyful.
Let’s get together via Zoom to plan how we want to feel, and be, for November and December.
I would really love to help you plan out the end of this year and the beginning of next in a way that allows you to feel abundance and joy, without burning yourself out or getting so stressed that you can’t have fun. We will focus on how you want to feel, how you want to be, what you definitely want to do and what is a big ol’ “HELL NO” for you this year.
I invite you to join me via Zoom on Tuesday, November 8th at 12 pm noon, EST, for a FREE one-hour workshop to help you get your thoughts and energy organized for November and December.
The way I see it, we can all use a break from the frenetic energy of Election Day here in the US, although if that is your time to vote, GO VOTE. That is way more important than attending the workshop in person. The workshop will be recorded, so as long as you have signed up, you’ll get the video emailed to you!
