Life Transitions: Today I am sitting at my second makeshift desk trying to find the determination to send out this newsletter. We had the unexpected happen. When we returned home from Texas, after my book publisher’s conference and an extended stay for our 50th wedding anniversary, we found warped floors from a water leak. Currently, I am working in the bedroom. It is much quieter here, being further away from the drying fans and air scrubbers in the main area of the house. At some point, we will transition into temporary housing, while construction takes place in a few months. With the hurricanes on the other side of the country, the insurance agents are swapped. Continually renegotiating a reasonable reimbursement contract will also delay getting a contractor. Compared to those whose lives have been devastated by the latest hurricanes, we consider ourselves lucky. Ours was a leak from a corroded pipe in a ten-year-old house, not a force of nature sweeping in to whip out everything around you.
Nevertheless, unexpected losses caused your equilibrium to be rattled. When you have to depend on others to decide how a situation is dealt with, including what they will and won’t do and what they will and won’t reimburse you for, you feel a loss of control. Nobody likes that… right? We humans like predictability and self-determination. When we lack control over unexpected situations, stress hormones are triggered. For me as a writer, it was stressful not having access to my office when we stayed for 3 days in a motel. When we returned home, we temporarily moved the office into the only carpeted area in the house. Not being the best place, we’ve now moved my computer into the bedroom. Again, temporarily, until construction forces us to move into temporary housing. Temporary is the operative word. Disruption. I have an editing deadline looming; thus, emotional turmoil.
Nobody says you must laugh, but a sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the day. ~ Ann Landers
Here is what we have done to cope. These are things you might try if you ever face an unexpected, challenging circumstance.
- Take care of your health. After three days in a motel, we came home so we could fix our own meals and sleep in our own bed. We’ve had to wear sound protective headgear while cooking and we eat outside as a result. That seemed better than eating out meal after meal. With lack of sleep and emotional exhaustion, we’ve taken naps and went to bed super early.
- Create a sanctuary. Our bedroom is far enough away from the machine noise to make it sound more like a white noise machine. The bedroom has a separate heating unit, so when the other end of the house was 83 degrees and humid, we had somewhere to go to cool off and take our blasted headphones off. There we could relax in bed to watch a movie or tv show. (I would recommend the new Matlock on CBS.)
- Write things down. Your brain under stress does not work as well. My husband created a 3-ring notebook to keep estimates, contracts and contract revisions, along with notes from people we consulted, phone calls with personnel from remediation, insurance and construction. Having that information in one place will ease your mind and keep you on track. Both of us have always been list makes, but every day distractions have caused some things on the list to be moved to the next day’s list. Remember, you can only do one day at a time.
- Take time away from the chaos. This will clear your mind, at least temporally, and help re-energize you for what’s ahead. Keep social. As soon as he could, my husband joined his weekly hiking groups and the neighborhood guy’s kaffee klatsch. I attended the ladies’ monthly neighborhood coffee meet up and my writers’ group brunch.