Survival Mode Activated

Snuggly Sundays, Hammock naps, and cat cuddles

Mar 03, 2023

Hey Ya’ll!

Ok, so lissen, this space isn’t going to be curated, professional, or polished. If that is what you signed up for, I’d say unsubscribe b/c this ain’t it. Now if you want a space to take your bra off, unbutton those jeans we’re still not comfortable wearing after 3+ years of elastic waistbands, and maybe have some “woah that’s deep” conversations in-between dogging Camile’s self-sabotaging ways and her un-moisturized hair while simultaneously obsessing over the #BlackGirlMagic that is Angie and how she needs a spin-off: then you’ve come to the right place.

A lot has happened since we’ve last spoke. Em (my beautiful and handsome wife: she’s going to be making A TON of appearances, so get used to seeing that name!) and I caught up on Abbot Elementary and Harlem. We FINALLY bought a real grown-up sofa that didn’t come from the trash or FB marketplace, and we’ve been having sleepovers in the living room with our furbabies spread out over said sofa. I think we’re going on three weeks of sleeping on the sofa, so we’re officially fused to the cushions. We’ve also had some awesome breakthroughs in couple’s therapy!

We’ve both been diagnosed with depression, and during the winter, it’s compounded with winter blues, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD). I’m on anti-depressants but still, sometimes we have bouts of weeks in what we’ve dubbed “survival mode”: what gets done gets done, and we’re not gonna judge each other. Those have been these past couple of weeks. So what does survival mode mean for us? Well, meal prepping/planning goes out the window, and we end up eating ramen, uncrustables, and takeout. We love cooking together, but when we’re in these slumps, nothing quite sounds good to eat, and everything seems way too damn hard to do. For me, hygiene gets put on the back burner, and that’s hard to admit, and I carry a lot of shame about that. The pandemic, coupled with working from home, was the perfect storm to neglect me. I mean, nobody’s going to see me, right, so why worry about the matted sections of hair I have or the fact that I’ve been wearing the same oversized sweatshirt for a week? Lastly, tasks that appear commonplace amongst adults, like washing dishes, doing laundry, or refilling the toilet paper holder, all the little chores that keep a house running, come to a screeching halt. Survival mode is counting the hours till we can come together and refill our batteries, hoping that this charge will be enough to get us to 100%.

This all sounds grim, but there is a bright spot. Last week in couple’s therapy, we were talking about survival mode and how we were surprised that no squabbles occurred, and our therapist asked us to think about why that was. We are both feeling depleted, gritting through deadlines and meetings, it’d be understandable - even probable - that we’d lash out. But that didn’t happen. In response, Em said “I punted off the responsibility of figuring out dinner to Jess, and if I’m exhausted and don’t have the energy to cook, it isn’t fair for me to expect a home-cooked meal.” Before our work in therapy, we had unrealistic expectations of what it looks like to be an adult. Much of that comes from how we were raised. As our therapist put it, it’s the suitcase we carry with us that we filled growing up.

I used to feel guilty about dinner not being ready when Em got off work, or ordering takeout instead of cooking, and I read every movement from her as disappointment or anger at the fact that I couldn’t complete one adult task. At the same time, Em ran around like a chicken with her head cut off, trying to keep the dishes, clothes, and chores from piling up. There was resentment, shame, fear, and hurt swirling around in the space between us, a toxic combination that caused a rift in the fabric of our lives. But therapy taught us how to talk about it, in a vulnerable way, without defenses.

I’ve learned a lot about how ADHD manifests itself in my day-to-day life, and things like time-blindness and hyperfocus sometimes make it hard for me to step away and get dinner started. Before my diagnosis of ADHD, I’d get so angry with myself that I couldn’t complete the singular task I was given. I’m still working on silencing that negative talk but learning about ADHD and sharing openly with Em has been life-changing. She no longer feels I’m intentionally not contributing to our household, and we’ve learned tricks like instead of telling me, “I’ll be done in 50 minutes,” that “I’ll be done at 6 PM” is much easier for me to understand. We’ve also loosened the normative restrictions of how we should run our house and adjusted what that looks like: sometimes that’s ramen and uncrustables for lunch.

Survival mode is our way of giving each other grace, of loving ourselves fiercely when the ground beneath is a bit shaky, of caring for ourselves. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, survival mode is our form of communal self-care. We are open and honest about the load we can carry and forgiving if we’ve found that load is too heavy to carry alone. I guess what I’m trying to say is that therapy has taught us the importance of family, of community, and of creating your own “normal.”