The power of story

The beginning

I remember the moment in 2020 I knew COVID was a big deal and not a big deal. My partner Rebecca and I were standing with our landlord Horia outside our apartment in Timișoara, Romania. It was the morning of March 12, 2020 and I had just learned from my phone that America’s National Basketball Association had just suspended its season. “The NBA has shut down its season,” I exclaimed expecting at least raised eye brows. Rebecca, to be fair, not a sports fan, shrugged her shoulders as if to say “what’s your point?” Horia, a sport’s fan, bridge aficionado, and Florida regular, shrugged his shoulders and said “shit happens.”*

Americans believe history should bow to them. Romanians know otherwise. To Horia, perhaps, COVID was just the next big thing. He was old enough to remember life under Nicolae Ceaușescu. What could be worse? Since “shit always happens,'” why dramatize? To Rebecca and me, particularly me, the natural response was to dramatize, as in “how dare COVID change our plans?” And then it did.

On March 27, we reluctantly packed up and left Romania, after only 33 days of what was supposed to be a four-month Fulbright-sponsored stay. Horia took the loss of three months rent in a shoulder-shrugged sort of way and offered to drive us to the airport. As I look back over this year, Horia’s colloquialism loomed large in my assessment. Assume life will throw hard things at you. Focus your energy on managing life’s challenges. It turns out I’m better at this than I thought I would be 12 months ago. Maybe you are too.

As of this writing, more than 50 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, with millions more added every day. So many, like me, can now begin to put COVID fear behind them. And we can reflect on what a COVID year taught us. And use what we have learned to help with life’s next challenges.

My initial response to COVID

When COVID started spreading in March 2020, I was teaching two classes at the University of West in Timișoara. The university’s first move was to suspend in-person classes for a month. Some instructors immediately began virtual meetings. I had never used any webinar software and so my initial response was to ride COVID out using email, a technology I had become comfortable with.

It soon became clear COVID would not accommodate my fear of transitioning to something new. And so I began meeting my Romanian students on Google Meet and this would continue through June long after we had returned to America. Today, I am a virtual veteran having taught six online courses and participated in 10’s of Zoom conversations with family and friends.

My first response to all the changes in my life COVID would demand was NO. To put it in Horia’s terms, it’s a way of saying “shit should not happen to me.” Where did this NO come from?

Self-doubt

How have you responded to new things? For me, they’ve always been a challenge. Google Meet or Zoom technologies were only the most recent. I fought email for years. I let my first mouse languish in a drawer resenting its intrusion into my comfortable keyboard command world.

From the time I was a kid, everything new has seemed overwhelming. Maybe it was because I started kindergarten at 4. Or because I was always the the second smallest boy in my Sacred Heart elementary classes. And the smallest, Greg Melroy, had broken both his legs when he was four or five and that, I thought, slowed down his growth. Otherwise, I’d be the smallest. Regardless of the why’s, I have always carried this sense of being overmatched by life. This has lead to built-in self-doubt and a default position of NO on anything new or challenging that comes my way.

I used to think others did not doubt themselves. Lately, I have begun to reassess that notion. My Romanian students were open about their doubts about how they would handle online learning. From April through June we met weekly on Google Meet and something went wrong every session. The same has been true with the Zoom sessions for the Life Long Learning courses I have been leading. Nothing ever worked perfectly and everyone was open about their Zoom insecurities. So I no longer felt alone with my self-doubt. More important, as I reflected on this COVID year, I encountered a new friend, self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy

In Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard writes that everyone has self-doubts but not everyone develops self-efficacy which he defines as

Confidence in one’s abilities to develop strategies and complete tasks.

How do we develop self-efficacy? Karlgaard says we learn to tell stories about our lives. Stories “offer a framework for enduring the vagaries of life.” In telling stories, we find meaning “in progression from one event to another.” That’s what I have done in this essay. I have reminded myself of my ability to “develop strategies and complete tasks.” Muddling through Google Meet and Zoom sessions, and reflecting on this muddling, helped me tap into a deeper vein of competence that has always been there competing with my nemesis, self-doubt. Maybe you have a similar story. I suspect my Romanian friend Horia’s “shit happens” comes from a life of successfully managing difficulties.

The Power of Your Story

Think back over your COVID year and select your own examples of how you surmounted challenges thrown at you by this pandemic. Perhaps you too experienced initial doubt about wearing a mask or shopping online or spending more time at home or waiting for your COVID year to end. I’ll bet in each case you followed this doubt with some experimentation until you developed a new habit. Beneath the vagaries of everyday life, you too can discover a narrative of resilience that will put you in good stead for whatever the future brings.

So, my friends, use and reuse this COVID year by reflecting on your success stories.

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*Rebecca writes about this conversation in “Being a Stoic in Romania.”