Life Disrupted: Finding Your Way Forward When the World is Upside Down

By Tracy E. Baldwin

Stop signs are a pause in the journey. Some are unique. Some are not. We all have them. It's the unexpected when hope seems absent.

Life Disrupted: Finding Your Way Forward When the World is Upside Down is a non-fiction book written in the shadows of the Covid-19 pandemic by a Gen-X working mom. Author Tracy E. Baldwin

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885048453

Book preview

Introduction

Where do you go when you are stuck in a dark place and you have given up on yourself? How do you gather the strength to carry on and get to a better place?

This book is a roadmap of how I did just that.

COVID-19 plays a big role in my book. It’s what pushed me over the edge, and it’s what’s infecting me now as I finish this book (poetic perhaps, but not fun). However, the book isn’t about COVID-19. It’s about how to find your way forward when the world is upside down. Everyone, at some point in their life, feels that their world is a bit upside down. Mine was rocked by the pandemic.

The ripple effects of COVID-19 are only just beginning to be understood. The virus directly impacted millions of people who suffered after it first appeared in late December 2019 and spread around the globe. Most of them lived, but too many died, over six million as of this writing. Then there’s the economic and social impact—and the mental toll.

Speaking of the mental toll, one of the symptoms of anxiety, as defined by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, is having a sense of impending danger, panic, or doom. I’d wager a large part of adults in the US—and likely most of the planet—felt that way at some point during the pandemic, especially in the early days.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, by the end of January 2021, about a year into the pandemic, 41.5 percent of US adults were reporting symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder. In 2019, before the world changed forever, only one in ten adults reported these symptoms (Panchal, 2021).

If you’re a woman, your odds were worse. Even before the pandemic, women were nearly twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in their lifetime (Harvard Medical School, 2007).

I am one of them.

I’ve been living with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) since 2005, a condition I was successfully managing prior to the pandemic—until I wasn’t.

Ten months into work from home, I was feeling more and more like a trapped, scared animal that needed to escape from the urban confines of my shelter. As someone who struggles with claustrophobia and as a working mom of two teens and a tween, juggling my job and remote learning left me with a crushing feeling in my chest. I was constantly navigating the evolving rules of learning and working in this new normal. I was extremely irritable and on edge.

I had a strong sense of impending danger, panic, and doom.

Let’s face it: many pre-pandemic moms who were trying to do it all—raise kids, run a household, and earn an income—were already at a breaking point. In fact, one 2018 study by Washington State University sociologist Katrina Leupp found working moms were more likely to be depressed than those who accepted their limitations of trying to do it all at once.

The fact of the matter is I can’t do it all, even though millions of women like me try to every day. For me, it’s my tendency to aim for perfection instead of good enough—my overactive brain concocting ideas of what I could or should be doing with my time instead of allowing space for rest, my lack of self-awareness around how much time tasks in life actually take, making me perpetually late for everything. I’m still learning that while my mind wants to do it all, my body just can’t, or won’t.

Then came March 2020. Everything shut down. The world turned upside down, both outside and inside of my house—and even inside of me.

The world crisis stripped away any armor I had built. My shortcomings and mental health issues were more raw and fragile, illuminated by the constant glare of uncertainty and fear of the unknown. I was having trouble sleeping, waking up in the middle of the night or wee morning hours, not able to get back to sleep. I’d end up doom scrolling on my phone, a news addict on crack, trying to feed my need for information. I was irritable and on edge, feeling claustrophobic and afraid.

In normal times I tried to control the chaos of life and make plans upon plans to keep on top of my family and our many activities. But COVID-19 upended it all. How can you make plans when everything is an unknown?

When the pandemic hit, I felt like my anxiety was a smoke monster I was trying to keep locked in a closet. But it was slowly oozing out, forcing itself into my life again. Being an extrovert and not seeing friends or family because of the threat of illness increased my anxiety and cut me off from a natural outlet for me to cope with life’s pressures.

Working hard is also a coping mechanism for me. When life gets tough, I just dig in and work more. I fill my time so I don’t have to reflect on anything other than the task at hand. I was rewarded for my hard work and good grades from an early age and basked in the praise. My work is always something I can take refuge in—a sure thing I can control by giving 110 percent.

I was also just shy of my fiftieth birthday, which brought all kinds of physical changes and mental reckoning of where I was at in life and where I wanted to be. My mind had ruled my body for nearly half a century. My body was over it. I regularly ignored the messages it was sending and how it was feeling. I always powered through life, not taking time to reflect, feel, or even go to the bathroom.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came on a Friday afternoon. It was January 29, 2021. It was the end of a long, tiring week of being trapped in my house with my family—remote learning and working—during the depths of a Chicago winter. I was blindsided by an unexpected work conference call that complimented and then condemned like a sledgehammer, the quality of my work performance. I was numb, speechless, and shattered after the ten-minute call concluded.

My version of a COVID-19 pandemic breakdown occurred two days later. The facade I had built to protect myself and function day-to-day crumbled against the powerful forces of the world—and I collapsed along with them on a cold, snowy, gray winter morning. I didn’t want to live anymore. I was done.

I was ashamed. I had given up on myself, my life, and my family. In my mind, I had failed. I was the glue holding our family together. I was the strong one. I was the successful one.

I just couldn’t do it anymore. I snapped.

While I had struggled with anxiety for more than fifteen years and had a few episodes where I needed additional help to get through with therapy and meds, the pressure cooker intensity from the pandemic pushed me over the edge. The coping mechanisms I had used in the past were not enough. Hiding in my glasshouse of performance and people-pleasing cracked. Wounds triaged with Band-Aids for more than a decade were now laid bare, gaping and bleeding—like so many other wounds exposed for so many people during this war with the unknown.

I was broken—mentally, physically, emotionally. I became a despondent zombie. I was weepy. My sleep was all over the place. I’d wake up in the middle of the night but couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I had experienced this feeling a few times in my life, but never this bad. The smoke monster was devouring me. I knew I needed help. But where does one go when you’re broken on the ground?

The pandemic is what pushed me over the edge. I now think about it in more positive terms, as a course correction. While the pandemic was what stopped me in my tracks, it may have been something else for you. I call it my stop sign. We all have them—those times in life when you don’t know which way is up, or which way to go.

Since I’ve course-corrected, I’ve learned to walk away from my shoulds and perfectionistic, people-pleasing ways. Being broken allowed me to reset my path to be more in alignment with my lifelong goal to help others. It switched my momentum from a downward spiral to a slower, steadier, and more purposeful, patient, positive force.

My book shares my story and the brave stories of a few others. It tells how we move from stop signs on the road to get to a more authentic version of ourselves.

The world needs more light. My desire is that this book helps you, even in a small way, and puts more light in the world.

This is for those of you who need the inspiration to move forward if you feel lost, or to rise again if you are in the depths of despair.

It is for those who may have been high achievers all their lives, trying to be perfect, more productive, and the best they could be until they just couldn’t anymore.

This is for those who struggle with anxiety and depression and ask themselves if they can ever be normal.

This is for those in the next generation of women: my sister, my daughters, my nieces, and beyond. I hope it offers support and a roadmap to weather the storms of life and achieve their dreams.

This book is also for me too, as it has helped me process what happened.

We owe it to ourselves to live our most authentic life with love, hope, and courage—not hate, despair, and shame. Our time on Earth is short.

I hope it inspires you to face your fears and walk through life fully present. To do this, you will need the support of your body, mind, and soul. But you can’t do it alone! You need other humans and spiritual energy.

My hope is this book can be one of the tools to help you stand back up when you get knocked down or prevent you from falling down in the first place. (You will still get knocked around, just not knocked down or out.)

Part One

The Stop Sign

Chapter 1

Stop Signs

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.

- Louis L’Amour

Stop signs are a pause in a journey. The semicolons in life. Some are unique. Some are not. But we all have them.

It’s the unexpected, when hope seems absent: the devastating diagnosis, the breakup, the job loss, the miscarriage, the sudden death of a loved one.

It can also be the expected, when hope seems abundant: the first day of school, graduation, the first job, marriage, having children.

Some stop signs happen whether we like it or not. Some may halt you in your tracks rather than allow a rolling stop. They may knock you down, take the wind out of your sails. These are the ones that radically change the trajectory of your life.

Snowstorms and Sarah Silverman

The day I unexpectedly hit one of the hardest stop signs in my fifty-year road trip on Earth was also the day Chicago experienced a significant snowfall event. It was significant in meteorological terms, as we recorded 10.3 inches of snow in a twenty-four- to thirty-hour period. It was the most snowfall at once in five years, and the month was the tenth snowiest January on record.

The snow in the Midwest can be heavy and wet and come down in big, sticky flakes. It can also be light and airy. Either way, it accumulates in huge drifts in inconvenient places, such as narrow alleys lined with garages and garbage containers.

This particular snowstorm started on a Saturday and ended Sunday morning, January 31, 2021, at the precise moment I most needed it.

I had struggled with anxiety on and off for a little over fifteen years—truthfully, probably most of my life. It rears its ugly head when I take on too many tasks and face a huge amount of uncertainty. It manifests as panic attacks, claustrophobia, not wanting to get out of bed, sleeping all the time, or all of the above.

I was struggling again. My anxiety was amplified by the uncertainty and stress of a global pandemic—a city and nation on edge and politically divided, remote work, remote school, dealing with two teens who were struggling with mental health and schoolwork, navigating the unknown. I was trying to hold it all together, feeling like one more thing could push me over the edge.

My job has been a respite for me—a place I could control and excel. I have always been a high performer, recognized and rewarded for my work my entire career. Until one Friday afternoon, when I was blindsided. My performance was abruptly and unjustly called into question. The dread I was constantly feeling from the pandemic, my toxic workplace, and life, in general, came to a boiling point. I crashed, broke, and spiraled downward.

On Saturday the snow started outside, covering the city, and inside, it clouded my mind. Heavy thoughts floated downward and covered the common sense synapses firing in my brain.

Then came Sunday.

You see, that morning, I was in a sad, hopeless, distressed, and dark place. I needed to escape my bedroom, my house, and my life. It is not a place anyone wants to be and is a place that borders on delirium and desperation. During normal times, pre-pandemic, I maybe could have pulled myself together. But the stifling unknown made me feel like a trapped animal. My fight-or-flight system kicked in; I wanted to flee and just disappear.

So I took off with my keys and purse, disheveled in my flannel pajamas and down coat, not knowing where I was going to go. I was just going to drive. I wasn’t sure where, but I didn’t want to come back.

I passed my ten-year-old daughter on the way out of the house, who innocently asked, Where are you going? I honestly replied, I don’t know, as I stormed out the sliding glass door through the back, stomped through the newly fallen snow, and forced my way to our standalone garage. I opened the side door and immediately turned to push the button to open the lumbering, two-car garage door.

The eerie silence that happens after a fresh snow greeted me, soon broken by the sound of neighbors clearing snow with their muscles and machines. I grabbed a shovel and started to dig a path through two feet of snow so I could get my car out. After twenty minutes