Finding Peace in an Uncertain Time with Kristina Aran
I’m so excited to share this conversation with Kristina Aran, mental health counselor, disability rights advocate, career coach, writer, and entrepreneur. We’re coming up on the one-year mark since the world shut down, and we’re still in a place of uncertainty and anxiety. Kristina and I discuss the emotional toll the global pandemic has taken on us and so many people. We talk about learning to accept the place you’re in and taking care of yourself the right way so that you can still function and be productive and present in uncertain times.
Who is Kristina Aran?
Kristina Aran is a mental health counselor, disability rights advocate, career coach, writer, and entrepreneur. Kristina immigrated to the United States from the former USSR at the age of 16 in the pursuit of the American dream. She was always fascinated with the study of the human mind and behavior. Therefore, she pursued her studies in Psychology by obtaining a Bachelor degree from Queens College, CUNY, and a Masters Degree in Mental Health Counseling from NYU.
Writing has always been one of her passions since she was a little girl. Her expression through writing has evolved as she continued growing through many challenging and rewarding experiences in life. Being a writer has always helped in preserving her authenticity and gaining resilience. She published her first book of poetry, Words as Weapons* in November of 2017, which is being sold worldwide on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and many other online bookstores. Currently, she is working on her second book of poetry and jotting down ideas for a romantic novel.
Besides her extensive work experience in the field of mental health, Kristina has always aspired to become an entrepreneur. She previously tried her luck in the world of tech startups and at this time has launched a line of natural high-active skincare products, called ATARA Skincare. She hopes to inspire like-minded female entrepreneurs by developing an online community that will provide education and resources to other female founders. Her motto in life is to seek inspiration in everything you do and that’s exactly what she strives to continue doing. She currently resides with her two sons in New York and works in Higher Education.
A Passion-Fueled Career
Kristina has always had a strong interest in mental health and the study of the mind and human behavior. She wants to understand what really happens in the human psyche, the way we emotionally react to things, etc. Part of this passion stems from seeing people in her life struggle with mental illness and feeling hopeless herself because she couldn’t help, so she pursued studying further to learn how to. This passion has played a strong role in all of her career choices throughout life as well, she used to work as a mental health counselor, now she works in higher education. She’s been able to make a huge difference in people’s lives, it’s become her life mission to make a positive impact on other people and “to help them learn how to be better and how to navigate through different environments in a more successful way.”
Kristina has also been able to focus on her other passion in life, writing. For her, writing is a way to “stay centered, and true to who I am to preserve my authenticity. It's been a huge part of my life since I was a little girl.” Kristina had been writing in Russian from the age of 12, but when she emigrated to the US, she had to go through a transformation to start writing in English. It helped her develop as a person and a writer. She used her hardships of being a teenager in a foreign country as a source for her writing. Kristina has always used writing as an outlet for when she was dealing with difficult things.
She’s able to be authentic and raw. Her dream for her writing now is to publish her second book. “I can't even describe the amazing feeling it gives you when you hold your own book in your hands. I actually have it right here on my desk, and just kind of open it and smell it and be like, oh, my God, I've created this.” While writing her first book, she experienced a lot of hesitation because of how personal the content was. She was about to put this out into the world for everyone to see and judge. But she decided that she wanted that feedback and the feeling of accomplishment knowing she had published her own book was reward enough.
The Emotional Effects of the Global Pandemic
Looking back to the beginning of when the pandemic hit, Kristina has realized then when we go through difficult times, we just have to experience it in the beginning. Let it affect us however it affects us. We have to “sit with that pain and just kind of assess yourself, what it’s doing to you, how it's affecting you, how it's affecting your environment. But don't let it stay there for too long, because you don't want it to completely debilitate you, it does require a lot of self-control.”
And really, that’s always going to be something we can work on, but what’s most important is to identify your emotions when you’re in these difficult experiences. And everyone will experience things differently. Kristina has dealt with anxiety for most of her life, triggered by situations like immigration and having to grow up fast to help take care of her parents. So of course, when you already experience anxiety, a global pandemic is only going to magnify that and overwhelm you.
At the beginning of all of this, Kristina had a ton of anxiety about taking care of herself as a single mother. Making sure her two sons had a healthy, safe environment to learn from remotely. Creating her own environment to work remotely. Making sure her elderly parents were safe and healthy too. All of these worries and anxieties started to flood her mind.
How to Manage the Anxiety
To get in touch with how she was really feeling, Kristina started doing “daily self-assessments, like how am I feeling today? How is it affecting me? What is in my control and what is out of my control?” What ended up helping her through it was just creating a bubble for herself and her family to make sure everyone stayed healthy. So it’s so important to be self-aware and do those self-assessments because when you don’t deal with your emotions it can “sometimes debilitate you to the point where you cannot even function on a daily basis or complete like daily living skills.”
And be easy on yourself, be adaptable, because it’s a process, “it doesn’t happen very quickly. And for everyone, it's a different type of process. You have to believe that it's possible to control that anxiety, you have to believe that it's possible to continue to take care of yourself in a way that you did before, just with certain adjustments and those adjustments that work for you personally.” Another way she coped was through her writing. It was her outlet. She says, “I would write about everything and anything. I also started meditating a lot more. For me, solitude is something that really works, I have to, at least a few times a week, have those couple hours, mostly late at night, without my phone, without the TV on my kids sleeping, it's just me, in solitude, kind of going through everything that happened during the day, and sort of putting everything in place, and just kind of sitting with my own feelings and experiencing it in my own way.”
Solitude allows Kristina to go into a state of healing, but it’s different for all of us. For some people it could be cooking or working out, “anything that kind of disconnects you from that chaos, and brings you back and centers you to yourself to kind of continue that spiritual journey of where you can stay true to who you are, and not become completely overwhelmed.” Even now, with this pandemic, the majority of us have had to adapt and find ways to move forward.
And it’s so important to always have that vision of moving forward, “we all sort of have our own thing that we want to accomplish. We all have dreams and goals. Don't let things that happen outside of your control, to control what you can actually do for your future. It can put things on hold, it's absolutely normal to take a pause and focus on other things right now. But don't let it affect you in a way where you're giving up because your dreams and goals are everything that drives you forward.” It’s imperative to have goals because they give to a purpose and a way to move through what’s happening in the outside environment.
Acceptance and Self-Care
Over the past (almost) year, we’ve had to learn to adjust to an entirely new way of life. We were forced into this situation, but what’s important is finding ways to, as Kristina says, “come to terms or more like acceptance and figure out how to make this new way of life work for me.” Maybe planning is something that works for you, so you can plan some, she continues, “time out of your schedule just for yourself. And you know, be selfish about it, there is nothing wrong with taking care of yourself, there's nothing wrong with giving time to yourself, just like you give time to everyone else.”
It’s important to take good care of yourself, recenter yourself and recognize what your mind and body are needing. Sleep is important. Good food is important. As Kristina says, “being exactly in the moment for yourself, and doing exactly what makes you feel amazing about who you are, is as important as those basic skills.”
Think about what you do for fun. She says to “come back to what makes you, you. How long has it been since you’ve actually taken the time to do something for yourself? Think about it this way, if you don't take care of yourself, and something, God forbid, happens to you, how are you going to continue taking care of other things, when you are the one crumbling?” Kristina used to push and push herself and never put herself first, but then she entered the mental health field. And she burned herself out she says, “working with very difficult patients. And I would bring those problems home. And I would think about it all the time, I would kind of let it get to me on an emotional level.”
It wasn’t until she had a real conversation with herself that she realized she needed to stop and take care of herself, otherwise she wouldn’t “be a successful mental health counselor, you won't be there for your family, and you can completely get sick. you know, this is where you kind of decide and you make a decision, and you stick to it.” Self-care really is a commitment.
Right now, with the pandemic and social distancing, it’s hard to feel like you can do normal life things like hang out with friends or go to the gym, but we still have ways to connect and live our lives, it just takes accepting the circumstances and adjusting to a new way of doing things. What’s most important is being able to take some time with your thoughts and your emotions; then find ways to make sure you’re taken care of, whatever works for you.
Intuition Knows Best
We all feel burnt out in one way or another sometimes, it can affect our motivation and creativity. When you are having these feelings, you have to check in with yourself. Kristina has moments all the time where she wants to write but her brain doesn’t cooperate. So, she starts thinking “what's going on? Like, is there something toxic in my environment that's affecting me so that I'm having this writer's block? And there's always a reason behind it, why I'm not able to be creative. And it's either because I worked all day, and I'm exhausted, and I can't even have that mental stamina to commit to writing. Or it's because of something that's happening with my relationships, or whatever, that's affecting me in a negative way.”
Self-control also plays a huge role, being able to control your emotions and control what you allow to happen in your environment is huge. What are you letting in? What do you take in from social media and notifications and news? You have to control what you actually pay attention to and allow to affect you. For Kristina, limiting what news she searches for and what sources she trusts is something she does to control what she lets into her emotional environment.
She says, “I do tend to read more like scientific types of magazines; like I'm part of some discussion groups that I trust. But if I allowed myself to completely succumb to all of this news media, to everything that's happening on social media and people constantly being in your ear, it would probably be so overwhelming. And I probably would not be able to even continue, you know, dedicating myself to the work that I do you it can really affect you in an additive way.” Make sure you really control what information you want in your life and what information can be toxic to you.
It’s always important, especially in such uncertain times, to realize when your mental health is suffering and you do need help. It doesn’t always have to be professional help but it is important, now more than ever, Kristina says, “to open conversations about mental health, what affects your mental health and what you can do, to preserve, you know, your mental health and to continue taking care of yourself in the right way.” Part of having these conversations is also being able to recognize when someone else in your world is struggling.
Kristina says, “I think your intuition sort of tells you when something is off about someone, and it doesn't hurt to ask just a simple question, how are you? Are you okay? Or is there something I can do?” For the most part, people will let you know how they’re feeling. “And I think we are in the moment right now, where we should be checking in with each other more often. It's not necessarily that can they need some kind of help, maybe they just want to know that someone is there for them. You know, empathy is a life changer and when we do something from a place of empathy, from a place of compassion, we can really accomplish some amazing things together.”
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Affirmation
I intend to inhabit a feeling of peace at all times and allow it to radiate through every experience I have.
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