On Enough ~ A Lesson from the Pandemic

Cat Li Stevenson
3 min readJul 8, 2021
Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

Last night, I was feverishly baking paleo cookies at 9:30pm at night, while chit chatting with my sister on the phone about how I’m trying to cut out dairy to support an anti-inflammatory diet. This is really code for saying I’m trying to lose the extra pandemic weight that stacked up over the past year and a half. My husband walks by and smooths his hand over my crinkled forehead, “Relax.”

Since the world began to open back up, I’ve felt a bit more tense, my mind quicker. “Time to get rid of those extra pandemic pounds! OK, go figure out your work! Make those summer plans! Get back to the friends who text you!” There are more pull in demands. Admittedly, mostly self-imposed.

I saw this weekend that in the backdrop there is this building of agitation, a feeling of constant annoyance. I’ve been bringing my curiosity to it.

Hello there, agitation, what is it you need?

The response isn’t crystal clear. It is coming in little clues.

One, is noticing how much more I’ve been striving in response to the world opening back up. In pandemic life, there was really nowhere to go and nothing to achieve — while this limbo was uncomfortable, for the type of forward-leaning person I am, it was also deeply settling and grounding. On the weekends, there weren’t a collection of social…

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Cat Li Stevenson

SF via AZ. Explorer of the human journey, and waking up in Mamahood. I write about healing, mothering, grief, & love.✨