In March 2020, I was a flight attendant. At the time, it was by far my favorite "day job" I had ever had. It had its difficulties just like any job, and came with an unpredictable schedule, but I loved it. I grew up in an aviation family, and to be honest, airports kind of always felt like home to me. So when COVID started, it threatened not only my own health and others', but it threatened to take that home away.
I worked through 2020, and it seemed almost inevitable that I got COVID in November. At the time, there were no vaccines available yet, so I got it bad. I was sick for months. Not days, not weeks, not a month, months. Although it came with a slew of weird symptoms, the scariest part was the massive jump in heart rate every time I would just stand up. Eventually, my leave ran out and I had to make the extremely difficult decision to leave when I knew that my body still couldn't handle the physicality of the job.
This was a massive blow. I had no idea what I would do to pay the bills. I had things I was passionate about, sure, and before COVID I was even teaching yoga and playing music which helped supplement my income and give me much needed time working on those passions. But, I couldn't do either of those things now. I was completely lost, emotional, stressed out, and had no idea what to do - I'm sure like so many other people in the world during this time.
My depression grew, anxiety grew even more, and I felt powerless to do anything about the situation I was now finding myself in. Should I have pushed myself to go back and risked the safety of people I was supposed to serve? Did I give up too early? Is this all my fault? Was I really that sick or was I just being a wimp? All of these questions swirled around in my head while I was still trying to recover and get back to feeling "normal".
When I took time to dig into those questions and thoughts, I realized how much I was relating who I was to what I did for work. I was allowing this negative self talk to take away time spent on my passions, motivation to find a new way to pay bills, and even talking to friends and family about how I was feeling. So, I had to figure out what I was going to do from that point on...
Acceptance
I accepted that things sucked. I spent so much time working against this acceptance, that it actually stressed me out and overwhelmed me more. Once I accepted that things were absolute shit, I could move on and focus on what I could actually control.
Focus On My Passions
Just because I wasn't able to teach yoga or play music out in public, didn't mean that I had to give up on them altogether. I continued to earn certifications in yoga remotely, posted yoga classes, and taught Zoom classes. I challenged myself to learn a song a day, and saved up for when live music would eventually come back. I even started to learn bass, which I now play in a few bands in Austin, Texas.
I Am Not My Job
I had to realize that I was not my job. Jobs are the way we pay our bills. They are not who we are at our core. The thing I had to learn the hard way is that we need our jobs, but our jobs don't need us. This means that our job can change at any time. Even if we make ourselves "indispensable", all it takes is a turn in the industry or a pandemic to take away this part of our lives that we tend to identify with more than we probably should.
Focus On My Health
This may seem obvious when recovering from an illness, but how much do we really focus on our health in our daily, hectic lives? For most of us, probably not much. Eating healthy, whole foods, exercising (even if it's just going for a walk), and taking time for our mental health as well is so key for these especially difficult times. The more I focused on my health overall, the better I started to feel both physically and mentally, and the more motivated I felt!
Talk To Other People
I felt so isolated, as I'm sure everyone else did, during this time. If I had taken just a little more time to reach out to someone and talk about how I was feeling, I probably would've found that they were dealing with something similar. Even as an introvert, this was something I had to push myself to do if for no other reason than to feel less alone. When we take time to reach out to our community, or to build one if we feel we don't have one yet, we can start to see how similar some of our problems are and how we can help each other solve them.
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