This article on grief was making the rounds about a week ago. It’s a great read, in case you somehow missed it. The article begins with this thought: What you’re feeling is grief, and “if we can name it, perhaps we can manage it.”

Manage it. It’s what you’ve been doing since your infertility diagnosis. The difference being that you were alone, navigating the loss of normality while life continued on around you, and now everyone is in the same boat. Before, you were navigating anticipatory grief alone, and now everyone is navigating it, too.

“Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain.”

It made me wonder if we’ll emerge from this experience a more understanding society. Will we be able to reference COVID-19 and say, “What I’m feeling is anticipatory grief” about something else, and everyone will nod and say, “Oh, I get it.”

In fact, one of his recommendations is to “stock up on compassion.” To understand that someone is not themselves and is in a stressful moment and to have a little grace and leniency if they’re not on their best behaviour.

But maybe my favourite part of the article is this:

The truth is a feeling that moves through us. We feel it and it goes and then we go to the next feeling. There’s no gang out to get us. It’s absurd to think we shouldn’t feel grief right now. Let yourself feel the grief and keep going.

This too shall pass. Right? I need to believe that.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I love quiet. Before COVID-19, I spent six hours of my day in near silence. There was the hum of the refrigerator and an occasional meeting, but in between, there was just the click of the keyboard or my own breathing.

When I first heard about sound-canceling headphones, I thought they actually blocked out sound. Like all sound. That would be amazing. But then I tried a pair on and I could still hear everything. It sounded dull and faraway, but that just made the sounds more annoying because now my brain was trying to figure out what I was hearing vs. knowing what I was hearing and trying to ignore it.

I am balancing out missing quiet with being thankful everyone is sheltering in place so I can turn off worrying about them. But… like I wouldn’t mind a silent hour now and then.

Do you like background noise, or do you like to relax or work in silence?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Pesach begins on Wednesday night. I am not feeling it this year. I was making the soup stock for the matzo ball soup a few weeks ago, and it felt like playing violin on the deck of the Titanic. What is the point in continuing to take part in certain rituals when the rest of them—especially ones that mean a lot to me like seeing my parents—are null and void?

Yet here I am, spending the weekend engaged in Pesach cleaning. I’m not doing a complete flip of the house (where you get rid of all non-Pesach food) because there is zero chance I’ll be able to get another box of pasta again in the near future. But I’m doing the cleaning the best I can. Making the meal. Telling Linus that he can’t have the parsley until the end of the second seder.

I feel like I have such a tenuous connection to the old normal. Skipping a holiday means snipping another thread.

I think many will understand this, even if you’re not Jewish. It’s hard to NOT celebrate a holiday, even if celebrating the holiday is hard. I imagine that it is hard to skip Christmas or even change Christmas if you’ve built traditions over the years. Even if celebrating Christmas is equally hard.

I think it will be okay. It will be different and a little sad and I’ll probably end up crying at the seder table. But… that’s just Pesach 2020. Next year will be better.

When I look back on my bullet journal years from now, I will notice that I had an unhealthy obsession with soap. I was scanning March before I flipped over the page to start April:

• All the stores are sold out of… everything. Including soap.
• I cannot believe how hard it is to buy soap.
• What if we can never find my soap again?
• One of my biggest anxieties is not being able to easily get soap.
• Josh found a place selling soap online! Now I’m worried the order will fall through because immediately afterward, it said it was sold out…

I am well aware that this is what my brain has chosen to latch onto because considering COVID-19 itself is too scary. A soap shortage is much more manageable.

This is where it’s completely irrational: We have plenty of soap. I mean, sure, talk to me about this a month from now, but for the time being, we are fine on soap. It’s just the idea of not being able to buy soap that is keeping me awake at night.

Must go write another journal entry about soap because my family has told me to stop bringing it up as a conversation topic at dinner every night.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “My 5th Survivor Anniversary” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dreaming of Diapers recounts a secret IVF cycle she did on the heels of her last one, explaining that she needs to know she did everything she possibly could to feel at peace. She writes, “But I cannot help but think or believe that… there is an extremely thin line between insanity and a miracle… right? Miracles happen… but it’s mostly to people who takes chances in the most impossible circumstances… right?” It’s about proving ourselves to no one but ourselves.

Life Without Baby has a post about the hierarchy of loss. Because people are realizing what those who have experienced infertility or miscarriage have known for a long time: You will be sad within that new normal. She writes: “As many of us are now facing a different kind of loss as we adjust to life alongside COVID-19, it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge that small griefs can trigger our dormant deeper grief, and that the feelings of loss many are experiencing right now can be compounded when we’re dealing with other losses.” It’s a really helpful book excerpt to read right now.

Lastly, I nodded my head straight through this Pesach post from Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles. So, first and foremost, if you’re not Jewish, imagine trying to hold Christmas over Zoom. But also imagine that your Christmas tradition has a ritual meal where a book is read—but everyone has a different copy of the book. THAT is what Pesach is like this year. Some people want to try to hold the seder over Zoom. Any maybe some people will be able to get that to work, but I’m not hopeful about having a meaningful experience that way. So… yeah… But that’s excitement for next week.

The roundup to the Roundup: Does anyone else want to talk about soap? Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 27 – April 3) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

The New York Times had a helpful article on the difference between worry, stress, and anxiety, and how to deal with each one because they’re three separate things.

“Worry is what happens when your mind dwells on negative thoughts, uncertain outcomes or things that could go wrong.” The expert in the article makes the distinction that worry only happens in the mind, not in the body.

So it’s running through scenarios in your mind: some helpful, some not. I mean, it’s helpful to think through potential problems so you can prepare or deflect. It’s not helpful to think through far-fetched scenarios.

I do this a lot. The new stories making predictions about a recession or job loss or everyone dying (or Facebook posts from people regurgitating said news stories) sends me into worry. It’s sort of based in reality in the sense that components are there that could set those possibilities into motion, but it’s not a concrete worry such as, “Did I turn off the burner on the stove?” Because one worry is helpful (hint: the stove one) because I can act on the worry, stop a fire from happening,  and then take the worry out of my head. And the other worry is just… imagination. I don’t have enough information at the moment to do anything beyond what I’m already doing.

The article recommends giving yourself a worry budget (20 minutes of worrying, and then cutting it off), pushing yourself to look at whether or not the worry is actionable, and writing out your worries.

Stress is the physical manifestation of encountering a situation that is outside your control. “In order for the cycle of stress to begin, there must be a stressor. This is usually some kind of external circumstance, like a work deadline or a scary medical test.” The expert recommends exercise (“to recover from the increase of adrenaline and cortisol”), looking for things you can control, and not comparing your stress response to someone else’s stress response.

Finally, anxiety is the bringing together of worry and stress. It’s in the mind AND in the body. The article gives refocusing and distraction ideas to get you out of the anxiety cycle when it pops up.

What are you doing right now to deal with worry, stress, and anxiety in this situation that is fraught with worry, stress, and anxiety?