Please get a Grip, Humans!
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Mental Health, Humor, Culture, Social Media, Self

Perceived helplessness shouldn’t draw our attention away from what matters most: We can all do something.

Every single one of us can, even when our life is falling apart and we have our back against the wall, which many freelancers like me do. Then again, I’m not sure writing about the extent of the mess I’m in is going to achieve anything beside stoking schadenfreude. At a time when we need to stick together, I don’t want to encourage it because it is partly how the internet turned into the cesspool it is.

Also, many of us are experiencing all kinds of adversity, from food insecurity to having no clue where next month’s rent is going to come from. Rocking myself into the corner wailing is unlikely to conjure up either but maintaining my sanity might so that’s what I’m doing.

While trying to figure out ways to weather this pandemic, everyone in my household arrived at the same conclusion: Now’s not the time to mope. We air out our concerns periodically but we don’t let them take over. Sure, the struggle is realer than ever and it has just intensified to unprecedented levels. But the economic impacts of the pandemic are out of our hands so we started focusing on what we can do instead.

Take it from a chronic depressive: When your sanity is only hanging by a thread, you need to get out of your head and fast otherwise you’ll end up trapped in there. This is a risk none of us can take; stress, fear, and despair are all highly communicative and a recipe for cabin fever.

And as a humorous side note to anyone who thinks we have it easy in the Netherlands because of our relaxed cannabis laws, it depends on whether one has one’s finger on the pulse. Along with schools, cafés, restaurants, bars, and gyms, the government closed all coffee shops aka pot shops from the evening of March 15 until April 6. And promptly reopened them so street crime wouldn’t take over.

True to the clueless stoner cliché, many folks who don’t speak Dutch and have no TV didn’t find out until well after the fact, twice.

“This aggression will not stand, man,” all the dudes who could no longer abide said with a shrug. Now that real life is stranger than The Big Lebowski, it can turn into an endless source of amusement if you let it. Who would have thought toilet paper would ever be the new celebrity status or that the Dutch sometimes behaved like hamsters?

These are the small victories we’ve come to celebrate with good humor and grace in those uncertain times.

Scoring disposable paper products. Realizing you can turn cat-spotting into a daily task and then stretch the fun by adding up the number of ears, the number of paws, and the number of tails at the end of the day. And even whiskers if you and the feline got up close and personal for any length of time.

“Cat!” is a battlecry around here. We systematically drop whatever we’re doing to go observe the creature before it vanishes from view. For extra fun, we shout silently with pointed fingers and silly faces if one of us is on the phone. Even my father and my stepmom in Paris are in on it now, and our nightly conversations all start with “Miaou, miaou !” instead of “Bonsoir !”

You may not be able to control the number of cats (or dogs, or birds) you get to spot on any given day but you can turn every sighting into a joyful occasion.

How else are we going to get through this?