The Gift of Empowerment in Isolation
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In March, my job which consisted of traveling, meeting with my team, and being in front of customers, shifted to working from home. I went from face-to-face interaction with tons of people to staring at screens all day. Even my church went to digital services.
When COVID hit, our oldest son Jarelle and his wife Heaven sheltered in place at their house to protect their one-year-old baby. We went from seeing them weekly to not seeing them at all. We didn’t see them in person for two and a half months.
It was extremely painful.
At first, I fought all the change and the things I had to give up. The stakes were high.
I grew up poor, raised by a single black mother. Family vacations were on movies and magazine spreads. I became a mom at sixteen and raised my two sons mostly on my own. As I got an education and built my career, I wanted to show my boys the world, but family vacations still alluded me. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that kind of money.
Last year when my husband and I discussed what to give our kids for Christmas, it hit me. We’d finally gotten to the place where we felt like we could do a family vacation. It was still scary, but we jumped off a cliff and booked everyone at the Disney Aulani Resort in Hawaii. We planned it for the same week in May that my youngest son Evan was graduating from college.
In other families, graduations are good but part of the expected course of events. But in my immediate family, so far, I’d been the only one to graduate from college. Jarelle, a successful animation artist, hadn’t gone the traditional college route. And it didn’t seem like Evan would either. Evan didn’t love school. It had been a source of conflict even before I pulled him out of public school his sophomore year to home school him. And, after all the work of balancing that while I worked full-time, he’d chosen to take a gap year after high school. His college graduation was the culmination of much blood, sweat and tears. He and I were both ready for it.
On Wednesday, March 11th, I met Evan at his college campus.
It was a usual, busy workday but I put everything aside, excited to attend CSUN’s Grad Day.
“Mom, it’s just ordering graduation stuff. I don’t even know if other parents are coming.”
But within minutes we were picking out a gorgeous African American sash to wear over his black gown. After finding the right tassel, he stopped at the college ring table. I paid for everything on my own for my high school, undergrad, and graduate ceremonies. I’d never indulged myself a class ring. I watched his green eyes as he tried on the samples.
Of course, we left with a ring order. Nothing was going to stop me from fully celebrating this momentous event, a sign that the cycle of poverty in my family had truly been broken not just by me, but by both of my sons.
That night, the NBA shut down was announced.
I scrolled through my feed. Every news channel and social media outlet was suddenly talking about the dangers of large gatherings. I sat up in bed, stunned, and agitated. What did this mean?
In an instant, I knew I wouldn’t see Evan in his cap and gown with the African American sash walking across a stage and accepting his degree. I wouldn’t be in the Aulani pool splashing around with my chubby little grandbaby.
But I couldn’t accept it.
Instead, I focused on figuring out how to adapt my work, how to coach a team of high performing outside sales reps to make an impact and accomplish our goals even though we were stuck at home.
Then there was the societal narrative being promulgated on social media and television that we were on some type of extended staycation. People were learning how to bake bread or posting about taking a moment to breathe while I had to work even harder. It felt unfair. It touched on my oldest wound from childhood.
The sense that God is taking better care of other people than he is of me.
The loss and the stress was exacerbated by thoughts like “I should be grateful for this time at home” and “you’ve trained for this.”
For two years, I’d been studying the spiritual practices of silence and solitude. My journey started with a book called An Unhurried Life by Alan Fadling. Then, attending silence and solitude retreats led by Alan and his wife Gem. Through them I was introduced to Christian contemplatives like Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, and Dallas Willard who taught the benefits of slowing down and cultivating the presence of God.
I’d also studied the benefits of regular rest and recovery to your emotional, mental, and physical health. People who make intentional time for recovery are more productive, better problem-solvers, and more creative.
Prior to COVID, I was making intentional space for this in my life through weekly sabbaths, daily quiet times, and retreats. But I was always craving more. And here I was with more time at home. A chance to slow down and put what I’d learned into practice.
I couldn’t figure out why it was so hard to accept the gift of being at home.
I was restless, either overflowing with tears or completely numb. I was filled with negative emotions I didn’t know what to do with, my grief over my losses, an intense fear of the virus’s implications for our future.
My routine spiritual practices like reading the bible, journaling, and praying felt empty. I had no words and with the lines between work and home blurred, I couldn’t quite find the same intentions I’d had before. It was exhausting.
I finally gave up and leaned into the solitude.
I just sat there and waited for God to show up. To tell me something, anything. It reminded me of what the Trappist monk Thomas Keating calls “Centering Prayer,” simply resting in the presence of God without an agenda.
So that’s what I did because I couldn’t do anything else.
I sat in my backyard and cried out to God, pleading for renewed faith. At the time, I was reading an 18th century book by the French Jesuit priest Jean Pierre de Caussade called Abandonment to Divine Providence. In it he talks about accepting the present moment as a gift. Especially the hard moments.
That’s when it hit me that I hadn’t accepted my losses and allowed myself to grieve.
I had to let myself adapt and trust that I would get there in time. That one day I’d be crushing my goals or seeing my grandson again. And I had to accept that even if I didn’t get those things, ultimately it was me and God and He was enough.
I realized that God was giving me an opportunity to get away from bringing my performance —my words, my prayers, my thoughts—to my spiritual practice.
And the outcome of many weeks of this was something new.
Keating talks about the False Self which is created when we experience emotional trauma throughout our lives. As we experience wounding in areas of our core psychological needs like power, esteem, and security, we develop what Keating calls "emotional programs for happiness."
For example, my parents were explosive and violent, so I learned an “emotional program for happiness” that said, “if you want people to love you, stay quiet and make them happy.” I was the oldest of four and they were both alcoholics and drug addicts so another “program for happiness” was to take on all the responsibility in any given interaction, especially if things didn’t go well.
During this time, I noticed that I stuff how I feel and care more for the feelings of others. Even taking responsibility for their negative feelings. And yet not taking full responsibility for my own. I also allowed myself to notice negative feelings I got when invited to talk on the phone or be on a zoom call with certain people.
One of the good fruits of my pre-COVID contemplative practices was a greater awareness of my codependency and lack of boundaries with my physical family. Because of my awareness, God had been able to bring a lot of healing to that area of my life through better boundary setting which led to finding my voice in places I’d suffered in silence.
This aversion I felt toward certain people was a little flag that I needed to bring the learnings about boundaries and finding my voice to other areas of my life. I saw that while I had these aversions, I also had a knee jerk response to push the aversions down and carry on as if they weren’t there.
Prior to COVID, I’d been interacting and holding space for people in my heart and mind because of obligation and a sense of duty rather than examining whether they were good for me or not. I hadn’t been allowing myself to land on how they made me feel. Instead, I cared way too much about how I made them feel or what they thought about me. Or how they’d react if they knew the truth of how I really felt.
So, with this isolation, I’d been given the gift of this greater self-awareness. And now that I knew how I really felt, I could choose to do something differently.
I could say no.
In the past, saying no was so scary that I’d avoid it until I absolutely couldn’t take it anymore. And by then, I would have built up such a case against the other person that my no would come out stronger and more loaded than I would want.
But this was different.
Invitations to interact came and I stopped the impulse to reply right away. I allowed myself time to check in and see how I felt. And, if I didn’t want to do whatever I was being invited into, I simply said no.
I was asked to adapt and lead an addiction recovery group over video conferencing. Even though I’d been helping and benefiting from the organization for the previous ten years, I said no.
I’d been going to the same church for almost fourteen years. Faithful and loyal, I never missed a “meeting of the body” unless I had no choice. In 2020 we volunteered to lead a small group at church with the vision of creating a space for hospitality and fellowship. When our church stopped meeting in person, our small group moved to Zoom. I loved the people but after being on web calls all day, all week long, it was killing me to do Sunday church online and small group over Zoom. My husband and I decided not to do it anymore. We found a small church that met socially distant and started doing that instead.
These were signs of a vastly different me. One led by what I felt God was calling me to do rather than what I thought people expected me to do.
And these opportunities to practice finding and communicating in my true voice and not being afraid to disagree keep coming. People reach out to connect and if I feel like they’ll pull my energy in ways that aren’t beneficial to me, I lovingly decline without the guilt I would have felt in the past.
This has been the true gift of isolation.
Loved ones, lean into the solitude. Use it as a time to check in with your inner wisdom. As you are checking in, explore how you truly feel about situations and dynamics with people in your life. With this greater awareness, decide if there are areas, people, or situations where you should move away or ones you should move toward. And most of all, detach yourself from what you think other people think about you or expect from you.
In doing these things, I promise, you will get closer to finding your true voice. The essence of who you really are not just who you are in relationship to other people. Then you can make time for the experiences and people that make your heart soar.
