Chauncey Mozzarella became our roommate a little over three months ago. He’s a four-legged burst of energy. He’s got the longest tongue in the world (we’re still checking in with the Genius World Record on this) and the tiniest legs.

He came into our world in the middle of a pandemic, so by default he joined the “quarantine puppy” club. We’d been holding a space in our heart for a puppy for as long as we’ve been dating. Any time we thought about maybe getting one, we’d come back to the reality that we traveled a lot, more than what would make sense for a puppy. But in the long list of things that 2020 has changed, it nixed our travel schedules. We were suddenly home all the time. We had space, the means, and the time to take on bringing a puppy into the fold.

At some point in March or April, it became hard to ignore that the two week stay at home order we were under in NYC wasn’t going to only last two weeks. We were in this for the long haul and the fact that it’s August and not much has changed in our work-living arrangement proves this.

I went into quarantine knowing that it would impact my anxiety and that some days would be harder to get myself out of bed. I’ve always struggled with motivating myself to go outside after nesting too long - it’s like my brain tells me the inside world is safer anyway, so why try.

I’ve been working on getting a better relationship with my mental health during quarantine and a big part of this was developing a healthier relationship with our home.

In normal times I would start this piece with a rundown on what to expect when you’re walking into your therapist’s office for the first time, but given it’s COVID-times, this is both a rundown of my experience going to therapy in-person for the first time and what I’ve learned about doing virtual therapy for the first time.

The biggest caveat I want to introduce early on is that I started therapy over six years ago. It’s been a while since I had a first session with a therapist, but I can still remember the nerves I felt while sitting in the waiting room. I was the first person I knew who was going to therapy as an adult and the only other point of reference I had was a horrible experience I’d sat through when I was 11 years old and coping with my mom’s death.

From conversations with friends and strangers, I’ve learned that the two biggest hurdles to actually starting therapy at the beginning are finding a therapist and actually getting to the first appointment.

I’m reading this book right now that’s taking me to church every time I open it. I’m being asked to look (and I mean really look) at my life and how I grew up. I’m being challenged to relive bad days and respond to them differently than I did when I was a kid. Instead of avoidance as a way of survival, it’s like this book is screaming to me — “you can survive actually feeling now, don’t avoid it.”

I keep wanting to scream back, “Are you sure?” A world where surviving and feeling go hand-in-hand is foreign to me. The idea of feeling the range of feelings that both hard and good days bring to my door is more than I’ve ever asked myself to do. I was so scared to pick up this book because I wasn’t even sure I could survive reading it.

I grew up never being asked if I was happy. I didn’t realize this was strange until I got older. I took it as fact that since my family didn’t do feelings, no one else did. They didn’t talk about the hard or the good, so I never thought to even have those conversations with myself let alone someone else.

In retrospect I understand that my family mostly just strived for survival and any extra time in the day was spent sleeping, eating, or going down different spirals that would become intergenerational trauma.

I say this with little judgement because from my family I’ve learned we’re all just trying our best, even when someone else’s best isn’t necessarily how you would do it or live it or heal it.