We made it. Can you believe it? I am both shocked and pleasantly delighted because this February has been a(n): ass kicker, doozy, shit show, mess, dark time. Seriously – take your pick of any of those words and they’ll be spot on for what this insufferably long short month has felt like.

I realize we’ve faced harder times than the past four weeks in our family, but to hit this gray, super snowy, super cold month right at the end of the Pandemic Year Calendar (that’s a thing, I’m telling you) has made things feel extra challenging. The hard stuff has been just that – hard, and more days than not have felt like I’m grasping at straws a bit to hold things together. And trust me, I’ve been trying and doing all the things to make the load feel lighter.

Here are some of those things:

For one, I’ve been keeping a Gratitude Journal daily since mid-November. I’ve done this on and off through the years and my favorite method is to list three unique things per day for which I am grateful. I can’t just say a person’s name or repeat what I said the day before – it has to be specific to a person or thing that happened during my day.

I love this gratitude practice right before bed because it helps reframe my brain just before sleep and helps me parse out my day a bit while the lights are still on in hopes that my brain won’t take off running in 20 directions at once the second my head hits the pillow. I also appreciate how it helps me document the days without taking as much time or effort as it would to write a full journal entry.

Another practice I’ve adapted in February is my seasonal affective light therapy routine. I don’t normally get the SADs this bad but this year has been far from normal and those lights are pretty inexpensive, so I got one and started using it every morning as directed for 20 minutes, even on the few days I’ve been able to get outside for actual Vitamin D.

I didn’t know if the light was helping all that much until this week when it got legit nice on Tuesday and I plumb forgot my light therapy session for the day (and then the next day, too) and then holy moly cow, did my mood ever slam in to me hard by Wednesday night. So. Note to self: keep doing the daily sit in front of the uber-bright lamp, even as actual spring approaches. It IS working!

Also working for me is the fact that I broke up with coffee, perhaps for good, but certainly for the foreseeable future.

It’s been three weeks now since I quit. Throughout the insanity of the last year, I’ve tried so many things to help my sleep and my anxiety, but it seemed that no matter what I/we did (drink less, make it weaker, etc.) nothing kept me from getting the shakes and getting more spun up in my head after my daily cup(s) of bean juice. But also, this was a total conundrum because I’m a mother of five, so how to survive (pandemic) life without some (damn) caffeine?

Enter: the help of good friends and some good old Big-Brother-targeted-marketing thanks to the fact that our phones listen to everything we say (you know it’s true) and mine heard my need for not-coffee loud and clear.

In January a friend and I were texting back and forth about yoga and knowing she was a life-long tea drinker, I asked for her secret recipe of her favorite cuppa. I don’t actually know that it was so much secret but knew it would definitely be British, and I was willing to give it a try. Over the course of a month+, I started doing a combo of coffee then tea and then finally flipped the switch to just tea (Irish or English Breakfast in the morning/green tea in some form in the afternoon or, thanks to my phone, a mushroom-based cacao drink) and guess what – no shakes! Still caffeinated enough! WhooHoo!!!

The other component to working through all the mental/emotional stuff has been, of course, the physical side of things. After starting off the year with a solid YWA challenge of 30 days straight of yoga, I jacked the heck out of my back on the final practice and had to take the next two weeks getting that and my forever sore knee back to OK. Spoiler alert: when you twist your knee, ask your dang chiropractor to look at it. You already see him once a month so don’t just assume it “just needs time” – ask him to check it and adjust it already! Seriously – I went about two months too long trying to be patient when really I needed to give my body direct attention and now that I have, things are finally back in place and feeling better.

As a result, I’m back in the movement game. I’m not doing any yoga at the moment but I have started up again with our elliptical and plan to keep at it, logging 39 miles on it before my 39th birthday in March. It takes longer to do two miles on that thing than it would for me to walk/jog that distance, but I like the workout aspect of it and since we’re still going to have more cool days than nice calm ones in the next four weeks, I like my chances with the indoor route for now.

Looking back, that’s a heck of a list. I didn’t even realize I’d taken on so many survival strategies until I started writing this, and now that I see it all, I’m both glad I did each thing and still a bit flabbergasted by how hard everything has felt even with all that good stuff mixed in to my daily habits. But that’s the kicker of all this…this isn’t about the last few weeks…it’s about the fact that we’ve been at this careful, cutoff way of life for so long now, of course my system is worn out despite all the trying and doing to keep me/us afloat.

I think acknowledging that exhaustion and the grief surrounding everything that as been these last twelve months is just as important as all the other coping skills mentioned here. And, while we’re at it, we can celebrate as we flip the actual calendar (and maybe the bird, too) and kiss this F**cking February goodbye.