And yet Woods keeps planning, too, whatever
she can. “One of my ways of regulating my life
and my mental health is that I have to write
everything down,” she says. “My notebook and
my calendars are my lifeline.”
Michelle Bushee, a real estate broker in
Pittsburgh, has always been an avid planner.
And she’s old-school: Bushee eschews digital
planners for the paper kind — not little black
books, but those big spiral volumes with
expansive pages that she normally fills up
with meetings, house showings, closings and
volunteer activities.
“My weeks used to look really scary,” she says,
meaning scary busy. Now her planner instills
a different kind of fear: The entire month of
April is empty — big white pages of miserable
nothingness. “Now THIS,” she says, “scares me.”
A couple weeks ago, Bushee had what she
admits was “a really bad mental health week, I’ll
be honest. I think it was the shock and the anger
of the situation. I kind of got off track.”
She decided to double down on her morning
routine. For years, this has included rituals like
journaling, writing down three things she’s
grateful for and deciding what will be the “win”
of the day.
“Just something so that at the end of the
day, regardless of how crappy it was, there’s
something that was a win — even taking the
dog for a walk,” she says. Most helpful, though,
is when she’s able to do something for others
— for example, a recent initiative to deliver 500
catered meals to a hospital emergency room for
health care workers.