Self-care And Finding Peace: How Some Women Have Coped With The Stresses Of COVID-19

LAUREN COSTANTINO Brittany Frizzelle is no stranger to hard work. During the pandemic, she completed a joint degree in law, community and social change at...

LAUREN COSTANTINOBrittany Frizzelle is no stranger to hard work. During the pandemic, she completed a joint degree in law, community and social change at the University of Miami. A former kindergarten teacher, she works as an Intergenerational Organizer at Miami’s Power U Center for Social Change, where she can feed her passion to mentor Black and brown youth. In March 2020, she started her own publishing company, Unlearn 2 Relearn. She’s just 26 years old. To get all that done, Frizzelle has a highly scheduled life. “Seven to eleven, every hour has something written by it,” she said.And yet during the pandemic — like many other women — the North Carolina native felt a shift in her thinking from external achievements to her inner self. She started building in time for rest and began writing poetry again. “I have to prioritize what I’m actually able to give my time and energy to,” Frizzelle said. “I needed to do something that’s me.”Three months into lock down, Frizzelle published Sometimes I Cry, a book described on her website as “a poetic unpacking of some of the realities of growing up young and Black in the USA.” She said it was a way for her to tell the world exactly what she was feeling. “What I needed from that book was to know that my voice was important in this situation,” Frizzelle said. “That my experiences were valid. That somebody somewhere could benefit from me sharing them.”YES, THERAPYFrizzelle moved to Miami for law school in 2017. She had attended Howard University and taught at predominantly Black schools. Miami came as a culture shock. She had wanted to become a lawyer so she could help marginalized populations, but by 2019, Frizzelle started to feel disconnected from those goals. After her schooling went fully online, she felt isolated, too.“March 2020 to May 2021 was very hard for me. I would name that entire Zoom school experience as difficult,” she said. But the pandemic also helped her realize the importance of therapy. She’s had to let go of the stigma attached to needing mental help. “Therapy is a resource. It’s something that’s helpful to all people,” Frizzelle said. “Everyone needs someone to talk to that’s neutral.”Time to think about what’s important was also what motivated Lourdes De la Mata-Little to simplify her life during the pandemic. The nonprofit advocate and vice president of marketing and communications for Goodwill South Florida wants to get rid of clutter so she could focus on what is important.“In a nutshell, it was really about self-care and thinking about what is essential,” she said.She started cleaning out spaces in her home and going through her stuffed email inbox. She worked on her physical health by exercising and eating better. She lost 60 pounds, though that wasn’t her primary goal.“We have so much stuff and we’re so cluttered, both mentally and physically,” Mata-Little said. “We don’t really need much.” During the beginning months of the pandemic, Mata-Little recalls missing, not material things, but experiences. A kiss from a grandparent, the hug of a friend, the celebration of a birthday. DECLUTTERING LIFEMata-Little said she could see parallels between her need to reduce the clutter at home and the work she does at Goodwill. She joked that “everything winds up at Goodwill” — and that was especially true during the pandemic when many people reevaluated their physical spaces.Mata-Little took it a step further, too. She began meditating and praying, practices to help her feel present in every day activities. She still worries about her son who’s graduating college and about taking care of her mother, whose health is declining, but she tries now to acknowledge the tough feelings instead of trying to numb them. “This is life and this is the way it is,” she said. “How do I maintain my peace through it?”She said she has learned that she doesn’t have to handle everything on her own and she tries to stay aware of when she’s taken on enough for one day. “Really prioritize self-care,” she urged. “No one said it’s going to be easy, but you gotta just do it.”