You don't have to stay positive right now
It's cute that people are decorating things and coming up with ways to keep each other's spirits up. But some of the messaging is less about encouragement and more about enforcing mandatory happiness.
The last time I saw my great aunt she told me she'd rather leave her apartment through the window than in an ambulance. But the ambulance is what she got.
I was talking to my dad on the phone about how she spent a week in the hospital before dying. It doesn't matter that I'm 3,889 km away, since she wasn't allowed any visitors and there's not going to be a funeral.
As we were talking, I was passing a line of painted rocks telling me to "smile," that "everything's fine" and I should "bee happy."
It was pretty tempting to pick them up and chuck them through a window.
Inspiration and support is great. Telling us to stay cheerful in the middle of a pandemic -- or any time, really -- is not kindness.
Thinking about my great aunt all alone in the hospital feels awful. As does not being there with my family. As does knowing the granddaughter she raised is mourning alone right now. I'm grateful we got as much time together as we did, especially since she lived a decade longer than her prognosis suggested, but that doesn't change how she suffered in the end.
You don't need to smile right now. You don't need to have a good enough reason to be upset. You can be angry because you stepped on a lego or just woke up in a funk.
Esther Perel reminds us: "We can be grateful and complain. We can be accountable and slack off. We can be peaceful and loving and we can talk shit and blow off steam. Kvetching is a survival tool. Use it wisely. It will help us cope during these scary times. Complaining is juicy. So make your complaints good."
Need a little help coming up with some good complaints? Complaining is different from venting and there are ways to make it more effective.
PS. It's official: the forums are dead. We tried, eh? But there's still the Facebook communities if you want to kvetch about things big or small.
PPS. If you're in the US, PBS is screening Bedlam, a documentary by a man who took care of his mentally ill sister about other fam