For many of us living in Victoria, particularly Melbourne, reality right now is messy and confusing.

Here are just some of the ways that life might feel contradictory during COVID:

  • We’re all in this together (which is comforting) AND our experience of this is different (which can leave us feeling alone).
  • You feel grateful for parts of your situation AND you feel waves of sadness and anger for what you’ve lost and what has changed.
  • You like some things about life right now AND you long for things to go back to the way that they were.
  • You can get through all kinds of challenges at work AND you can’t decided what to eat for lunch.
  • You feel lonely and miss your people AND you can’t bothered writing back to a text, let alone Zooming.
  • You agree with the restrictions AND you feel unhappy about how they impact your life.
  • You’re surprised by how well you’re coping AND other days you struggle to do basic self-care.
  • You fantasise about escaping to all kinds of beautiful places AND the thought of leaving your house for even one hour of exercise feels like too much.

When you notice yourself having contradictory thoughts or feelings about COVID life, if you can, try to give yourself permission to just feel what’s there. It’s human to feel more than one way about something, especially in the middle of a pandemic.

Notice what that’s like when you give yourself permission to just feel the way you do. Without judging it and without analysing it. When you acknowledge the contradictions in how you feel are you gentler towards yourself or does your inner critic start up? There’s no right answer here, these are just ideas for you to play around with, things to be curious with yourself about.

Whichever way you look at it our minds and our bodies are working over time to make sense of our constantly changing emotions and that’s exhausting. Just acknowledging this can really help.

Life feels like a lot right now and we’re all doing our best.

If this blog about COVID life peaks your interest, you might also like our post about “COVID reminders” and how they can bring up some big emotions or our blog about What to Do When You Feel Swamped by Emotions. We also have a guided mindfulness exercise that we created just for COVID.