Bouncing back

I recently bought a pillow.  It turns out that normal pillows are very bad for me, and I need something a bit different; so now I have a memory foam pillow.  Memory foam is funny stuff.  The pillow came screwed up into a tiny box, and when it was taken out looked frankly pathetic.  Far too thin to be a useful pillow; no discernible shape to it.  The instruction was to leave it for up to 72 hours before use, to allow it to regain its shape.  With no previous experience of memory foam, I was a bit sceptical, and wondered if I'd been scammed.  But lo and behold, a couple of days later the pillow looked just as it was meant to, and I have slept better and had less neck pain ever since.

So, in case you've not already worked out where this parable is going, and perhaps think I'm just telling you an anecdote about a pillow for no reason, let's assume that being in lockdown has been a bit like being shoved into a small box for quite a long time.  We are all naturally bigger than this, but we've compressed, shrunk down, adapted to a more confined way of life.  And now we're being gradually let out of the box, and there is some pressure to bounce back, to get back to normal as much as possible, to get everything restarted.

But for some of us - certainly for me - we still feel flat, thin, unshaped.  It's going to take some time to decompress.  It is, hopefully, possible to recover our former shape, but we're not there yet.

Sleeping on the pillow before it was properly decompressed, according to the instruction booklet (and I have to say, I've never had a pillow that came with instructions before!), would have resulted in it never recovering its right shape.  My pillow would have been flat and useless forever because I was impatient.

You see where this is going.

We need to take this slowly and allow ourselves (and others) the time needed to grow back into shape.  We need to recognise this will happen more slowly for some than others.  Patience will be needed all round.  We should probably also take the time to just check ourselves for damage - maybe we're not just going to recover naturally, even over a long time, but have taken spiritual, emotional, even physical hurt during this period which will need attention.  (I think at this point the pillow analogy has broken down, as all good analogies must at some point).

Anyway, take it easy.  You are more valuable than many pillows.