Friendship Is a Sheltering Tree

By Laurie Rippon, M.Ed. Advocate & Writer, A Brain Injury Life

Do you feel that something is missing from your life that used to be there before? My first “before” and “after” was big: brain injury. But now there’s a second: the pandemic. Both came with loss, with something missing that I had to accept, work around, and learn to live with in the best way I could.

Somehow, getting used to the first made the second one harder. Being alone because of brain injury was like retreating from the world, but the social isolation of COVID-19 felt like the world retreating from me. One on top of the other left me struggling, my cognitive and behavioral deficits creeping back. I was unable to be productive and I wanted to sleep all day. I longed for human contact and wondered what happened to my friends, but I never thought of calling them.

For a long time, I denied the friendships I’d lost because I always kept busy and ignored how sad solitude can be. After a while, I realized how much I needed to be part of the world, how the social isolation was hurting me, and that what really mattered was keeping friends.

So, I’ve been working to reach out, open up, advocate, and even accept help in order to find my way back to life. As you can imagine, it’s not easy. I get scared, but try to reason with my fears. I get depressed, but go take a nap, and, when I’m really lonely (or really excited), the best thing I can do is turn up the music and dance!

The funny thing is that my life seems to be a dance, too; from having expectations to sustaining a TBI, from being struck down to climbing up, from feeling fearless to crashing, rebuilding, and so on. I know my experience is not unique – we’ve all been navigating this pandemic in our own ways. Read on for strategies to help you stay connected with loved ones as you try to find your new normal yet again.

How Do You Avoid Getting Stuck in Social Isolation? Focus on Others, Not Yourself

• Connect. My most important tip is to reach out – don’t wait for someone to reach out to you. Keep a list on your fridge of everyone you might call and set up a regular call with a friend. Add to your calendar as a “repeat” event and set your alarm so you don’t forget. To reduce stress in conversations, I avoid politics and COVID-19 complaints (unless they’re personal).
• Share. Sending funny photos, videos, or pet pictures are all fair game when you’re communicating with friends. Check out the newspaper for cultural events like museum tours, concerts, fashion shows, and invite a friend to come along if you feel safe.
• Create. Try some group activities. Some examples include making a story circle, where each person takes a turn adding a twist or surprise, or picking a play and letting each person act a part. Do you like cooking? Consider cooking for two or more, having an outdoor picnic, delivering a meal to someone’s front door, or dining with a few friends virtually.
• Discover. Keep an eye out for activities where you can meet people like art openings, outdoor movies, exercise classes, or neighborhood tours. Use these as reasons to get moving, relax your mind, or strengthen your body with a friend. Other fun things to try include online chair yoga, tai chi, meditation, exercise, or dance. Getting outside helps minimize your risk of infection, so try exploring a neighborhood together, taking a stroll, or jogging in the park.
• Give back. Help is always needed. Find a cause you care about, make contact with the organizer of an upcoming event or initiative, and ask how you can help.
• Do. The best medicine for isolation is being active in the company of others, physically or virtually. In this COVID-19 world, we need each other more than ever – even if we think we have the answers and can go it alone.

So do your friends a big favor: keep an eye on them and offer help when they need it. And you’ll be doing yourself an even bigger favor by thinking of them first. You’ll learn that you are capable of more than you realized, have grown stronger and more generous than you were, and have become a better friend. Your trust of them, and theirs of you, will grow as will your hope for the future – because friendship really is a sheltering tree.

“Friendship is a sheltering tree” is a line from the poem “Youth and Age” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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This article originally appeared in Volume 16, Issue 1 of THE Challenge! published in 2022.