I was chatting with some friends (Outside! Safely! We are not out of the woods yet!) about how much I struggled with guilt in early 2020 cleaning out my Mom’s condo in preparation to sell it and move her here. The first weekend I started working on it she was still living in it and so I was taking time to sort through everything with her and make trips to the Rescue Mission to donate things. The problem was, it was taking forever because Mom was a borderline hoarder and had a LOT of stuff and NONE of it was organized. It was just in piles in every corner of her house. And every day I was in Knoxville working on her condo was a day I was not in Huntsville with my family.
Once she moved in with her sister temporarily, I rented a dumpster and started throwing a lot of stuff away instead of sorting and donating. I was able to condense a 6 month job into under 6 weeks that way. But man…I still feel a lot of guilt.
One of my friends introduced me to a term: Crisis Mode. She said something like, “You were in Crisis Mode, you just do what you can to survive.” And it was like labeling that phase: Crisis Mode suddenly gave me an easy path to forgiveness. I just embraced the idea that if you’re in Crisis Mode, you are allowed to lower your standards.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I feel like it applies all of the last year for most of us. We let our kids have more screen time, we ordered more pizza, we binged more TV…we removed all of the limits on things that we had previously set for reasons of physical or mental or maybe even financial health.
And we all kinda felt guilty about it.
But I love the idea of naming this time of the pandemic: CRISIS MODE. When you are in Crisis Mode, you get a free pass. For example, the Homeschool Crisis Mode meant I read my kid’s homework to him instead of making him read it himself. We chose which assignments to just skip because they were busy work.
When I was cleaning out Mom’s I didn’t donate Mom’s cookware to charity because I didn’t have time to clean it all. (Mom’s “clean” dishes were never “clean.” I blamed her eye sight and her difficulty standing for too long at the sink.) And since I was in Crisis Mode, I don’t need to feel bad about it.
Because when you’re in Crisis Mode? The only thing that should matter is: SURVIVAL.
When I quit smoking in 2003, I honestly believe I was finally successful because I read a pamphlet somewhere that said something like: Do whatever you need the next 7 days to not pick up a cigarette. Nap as much as you want. Lock yourself in your bedroom to avoid your kids. Get all the meals from the Drive Thru so you don’t have to cook. Don’t worry about diets or productivity. Just get past the first 7 days and then worry about the rest of your life.
It was AMAZING how much that framing really helped. I timed quitting for when Eliah was spending a week at his Dad’s in Georgia and I basically did just what the pamphlet told me. I stayed in bed for a week. I mean, I still went to work. BARELY. But I didn’t do much else. And now I can look back and say: That was me in Crisis Mode. I gave myself permission to JUST SURVIVE and so I did and I never grabbed another cigarette. I stayed quit.
I also think this is a good classification for me when I think of all of my variations of mental health spirals. Whether I’m having uncontrollable anxiety or unmanageable depression or days of overwhelming grief. I think I need to label those times: Crisis Mode. Especially when it comes to my family, that label could be a shortcut that says: Mom needs patience, grace, and maybe some help.
I’m not good at admitting when I’m in those dark phases. I sometimes write about it here and no one in my house will know about it. But I think incorporating the term: CRISIS MODE into my lexicon will be useful. I’ll make sure to explain it to them, that if I use that term it’s like waving the white flag of surrender and they’re free to do whatever they want to A) make my life easier or B) help me in anyway.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but I am in a type of Crisis Mode today so I’m doing the bare minimum until I get out of it.”
That way no one gets upset if I am not up for Movie Night or if I don’t feel like going for a walk. No one will have expectations of folded clothes or grocery shopping. Everyone will maybe TRY TO GET ALONG AND NOT FIGHT.
(Ha. Who am I kidding?)
Here’s to simplified language to categorize complex feelings in a way that keeps my anxious brain from cycling around emotions of shame and guilt while I’m also in crisis.
I’m sharing all of this with you in case you also need that easy classification to give yourself permission to just survive.
This is amazing. Thanks for sharing. I love your pic.
I am determined to get this down on paper. I have typed it and accidentally deleted it 2 times😳
Your post today really resonates with me. My current challenge is to stop drinking wine. I quit for a couple of months last fall. It wasn’t hard, but went back to drinking it in November and have been drinking off and on since then. I don’t believe it impacts my life significantly, but I like it and don’t have a off switch. I have been reading a lot and joined some Alcohol Free or Moderation groups so I have good tools to go either way.
I used a Crisis Mode strategy when I quit smoking many years ago and I was fine after a couple of weeks but I knew that if I had just one cigarette it would start that habit all over again.
Thanks for the listen and thanks for sharing your life with us.