Salaam and hello friends. Consider this a sharing session.

A few nights ago my 17-year-old daughter told me, “I low-key miss last March/April when quarantining and all the COVID stuff started.”

“Oh, because of all the baking and different things you were doing to try and pass the time?” I asked her.

“No. Because schools didn’t know any better and so we weren’t asked to do much. I had time to do whatever. We weren’t actively doing virtual learning last spring, and so even though it was hard, it was more like summer break started three months early.”

What she was nonverbally telling me was that especially now, as winter begins to wane and kids are in their third nine weeks (or second semester) of the school year, as people are starting to get vaccinated but also the COVID-19 death toll in the United States has passed half a million and science is telling us to still be vigilant, it’s hard to shake the muddled and ongoing low-key depressive feelings many of us may be experiencing.

I’ll raise my hand up first. Hello. It’s me. This is hard.

I can’t tell you how many articles keep popping up in my newsfeed (darn algorithms!) about the stress of this past year of COVID-quarantine life. Or the disproportional work placed on mothers (and their “primal scream”) who are the go-to parent when it comes to supervising virtual learning and working from home. Or the inequities laid bare this past year that are faced by communities of color, those who live paycheck-to-paycheck or those with unstable housing. Or because my eldest is profoundly autistic and therefore I’m tuned into disability news, articles about how lack of vaccines for disabled people or how students with intellectual and physical disabilities have been shortchanged through virtual learning.

Writes Huda Fahmy of Yes, I'm Hot in This, "If you got out of bed today, give yourself all the awards." Shared with permission.

I took a burnout assessment after attending a webinar about “Disrupting Distribution” and research-based tips for addressing the muddled feelings so many of us are having with home and work becoming so blurred, which was conducted by Saher Yousef, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California-Berkeley. It placed me squarely in the category of “at risk of burnout.” That made me chuckle.

While it’s risky to generalize, I’d wager to say that most anyone living with a disability or chronic illness or loving and supporting someone who is disabled or living with a chronic illness is probably at risk for burnout. Like this is a fairly normal way of living, and we all (hopefully) develop our own coping mechanism. Now compound that after nearly a year of sheltering-in-place during a global pandemic in which you are trying to make sure vulnerable members of your family are protected and stay safe.

Not a lot of manageable coping mechanisms to be found.

Here at the HH, we’ve been having a series of discussions on how to manage our stress better and avoid burnout, specifically in the workplace, but you can also extrapolate these suggestions to home life as well. The challenge I find is the things we cannot control in our lives, the things we simply cannot let go of because they are fundamental parts and responsibilities of our lives.

Or, when we’ve been living a low-level funk for awhile – a sort of depressive state that is not officially diagnosed nor even seen during the light of day (because we continue to function and maybe smile too) – and that freezes us from being able to seek any sort of help, respite or even simply a venting session.

I’ve got no words of advice for you for this season of COVID and life we’re in. I know my kids are watching me, and so I try and model a life of positivity and gratitude while also acknowledging the suck, the hard, the difficult, the things we cannot control and things we must keep doing. I try to model grace and be patient when I see them pulling away from me. It’s hard when pretty much the only people we’ve been around for the past 11 months is ourselves.

I remind myself of “Fa inna ma usri yusra; inna ma usri yusra.” Verily with difficulty there is ease. Verily with difficulty there is ease. I pray that if I dwell on it enough, hold it in my heart as tightly as I can, remind myself of what I’ve been given and still allow myself to sit in the funk for what I hope is a healthy amount of time, the ease will come.

And for every religious lecture, meme, hadith or piece of advice that tells me I need to trust Allah (S) more and that He should be sufficient enough for me, I say yes. Absolutely. But also Allah (S) knows my humanity and is big enough to be patient with me. He is big enough to be patient with you. So if you are where I am, sit in the funk with me a bit. And then we’ll get up and keep going, Insha’Allah