Season 2, Episode 9: Diana Frazier and Alex Jacobson talk about Covid disruption, changing systems, hope and advent

Diana Frazier - Story-teller, musician, worship leader, mother, wife and entrepreneur who's on sabbatical from her business Poulsbo Elderberry.

Alex Jacobson - Leader, speaker, writer, avid book reader and book reviewer, activist, advocate, lives on her hobby farm with her husband of 12 years and their five children. She's an excellent cook and provides tips and tricks on her instagram and blog @inspirationclothesline

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We check in with these ladies who were on our podcast back in April (season one episode 25):

Diana’s business was booming back in April, so much such so that she was killing herself with up to 60 hours a week AND she had all her kids home from school. She knew something had to give.

Most days now, managing her children with distance learning is deeply challenging: There’s just not enough of her to go around. “It feels like you’re sucking at everything all the time and no one is getting the very best you.”

Alex and her husband feel like they are handling things differently than most; they have very limited contact with the outside world because they have autoimmune disorders in their family. One of things that she has learned in this season from an online parenting class is around the idea that kids have “buckets” that need to be filled in order for them to even be able to behave properly. Basically she came to realize that she can’t ask or expect her kids to function without some shifts in the way they are as parents. They are trying to get one-on-one time with each kid for ten minutes twice a day. It doesn’t happen everyday but the intention is to fill their kids’ buckets up so they have the energy and emotional bandwidth to behave when they are asked; and they are being asked to do more than before covid out of necessity. It has increased the quality of their nuclear family. The biggest shifts have been in these internal systems. Everything is always changing, and even person to person.

Alex says, “Life moves on in a pandemic. Life moves on in quarantine. Life has real issues, whether that is a presidential election, family drama or health issues… those things don’t stop. They get exponentially harder.”

But thank God for therapy over zoom!

Danielle says we are all trying to harness all the fragments of life, that normally other places in our lives would have collected for us. There is a spiritual and collective weight to what we’re all bearing. Trauma forces us to shift systems and perspectives, to cut out the [unnecessary] fat in our lives.

Diana says this year has been “a walk in the wildness that I didn’t know I needed.” She has come to realize that in so many ways in her life she has been silenced, through trauma, abuse, theology… And it has forced her to not be able to show up as herself, bringing all of who she is. That she has had to shut down who she is in order to make others more comfortable. As she has been healing in this season, that means "I’ve been really unpopular with my family for sure and a lot of people this year because they are not used to this version of me. I’m not used to this version of me.” It’s a continually living in the “messy middle.”

Diana said to her husband that he may have thought he was marrying a quiet, compliant church girl 15 years ago but instead has married someone very different. “We never could have known.”

Maggie named that it has been costly for Diana; She’s become aware of that places she has been silenced and the ways she has had to shave off her sides in order to fit into other people’s spaces. She is reclaiming herself now. This covid season has in some ways given her the freedom to hold those boundaries and say, “No, this is who I actually am.” Maggie also noted how beautiful it is that in this season Diana is stepping into her prophetic truth-telling gifting, calling things out and becoming the best version of herself in the middle of a global pandemic.

Alex says one of the things that happens when you are doing an internal work is that you realize you’re a part of systems. Whether that be systemic racism, a religious system, a familial system… the way that you were was a component of that greater system. “When I change, the system around me will be forced to change. And I can’t manage how someone else feels about that change.”

Alex mentioned a quote by Maryam Hasnaa “Be prepared for the emotional reactivity that’s going to come when you decide to release the pattern of trying to make everyone else comfortable at your own expense.”

Alex says, if you are at all evolving, in your faith, in yourself, in family dynamics…If you’re evolving in anyway you are changing the systems around you.

The questions Alex are asking are what will come out of this when we all are actually able to get back to interacting in the world? With people changing and systems changing, what will it look like to reenter with each other again? How am I going to react or respond to other people’s change, or changes in the systems that I am a part of? “We’re all literally going to come back into our communities different people.” Some more different than others.

Danielle brings it to our physical bodies; how do our bodies interact with other bodies? We are going to have to deal with our scratches. How will we regulate — will it feel like coming home or coming into strangeness?

Diana brings a quote from Emmanuel Acho from Uncomfortable conversations with a black man: Proximity breed