Before we get into today’s essay I wanted to tell you I am doing a talk!!! On the 8th of November, I will be exploring the pressures younger people are placed under to save the world and the guidance that is needed from elders. I ponder on how we can find ways to collaborate to tackle the challenges we face whilst staying resilient and effective. If you liked my Gen Dread post, you’ll like this. Find more details here, or grab a seat here.
Growing up, my empathy levels were dialled to 100.
I’m not sure whether it was simply a personality trait or a case of being a sheltered home-educated child less exposed to the horrors of the world, but I was painfully empathetic. I would cry at those TV adverts raising money for disabled or starving children and adults in the global south. I would cry at documentaries retold by adults when they didn’t think I was listening. I even cried at a Victorian museum once when they told us about the day-to-day lives of the kids alive at that time.
Obviously, this isn’t a sustainable way of acting in our world, and it also got pretty embarrassing at friends' houses when a TV advert or show would come on and I would get all teary-eyed. So through a mixture of effort and general exposure to the Big Bad World, I hardened myself, ‘grew up’ and ‘stopped being so sensitive all the time’.
This hardened persona is essential for all of us to survive a day in this world–with constant barrages of climate change news, wars, genocides, and the like. If we didn’t harden ourselves, we would lose our minds to these horrors.
At times like these with ever-increasing political conflict, ever-increasing climate disasters, and ever-increasing daily horrors happening across the world, the walls of our mental and emotional resilience are being battered, hard.
Although I’m not quite sure these are true walls of resilience. Emotional resilience should be about our ability to respond to ‘stressful or unexpected situations and crises’, whereas we aren’t healthily responding to these situations. We are just expected to be able to take on more horrors every day and hold them on our shoulders, or push them deep down into a box in our brain, knowing that there isn’t anything we can do to stop them and then continue to function in this capitalist world as we would on any usual day.
Then there's another layer to all of this which feels off. I am not in a live war zone right now, I am not being affected by climate disasters, I am not in any immediate danger and neither are my loved ones. I feel a bit whiny to write about these things from my nice, safe, warm, and dry apartment. But I guess this is just another unknown complexity of life, the fact that I was born here and not elsewhere, the fact that this is my experience of the world and I am trying to make sense of it.
I question whether it's necessary to fill our eyes and ears with the relentless bombardment of negative news because I don’t believe our monkey minds are built to hold, understand and grieve the horrors of the world. From my experience, keeping up the capacity to grieve for horrors so far removed from us will drain you until there is nothing left to give.
I wonder if the way we’ve hardened ourselves so much emotionally is a contributing factor to the climate crisis—and other atrocities—we find ourselves in today. When we know our fellow human beings are dying, but feel emotionally distant from it because it’s the third horror story we’ve heard just that week, it’s hard to extend the mental capacity for grieving–or even for caring.
It’s incredible the ways the internet has connected us, it provides us with an incredible amount of information about situations we would have no other way of knowing about. We don’t have to listen to just one ‘expert’ or read one newspaper and take their opinions as fact, we can search far and wide and gain an incredible amount of knowledge on endless topics. But I think we’ve got some of it backwards.
It feels wrong that I can keep up with live accounts of situations happening halfway across the world, but don’t know a thing about the people who live in my apartment block, my community, or even my wider city. There could be so many people in my town alone who need support but I am so mentally drained by the constant horrors of the world that I am unable to provide it to them. How are we meant to help others when we can’t even look after ourselves?
I’ve been working gently to unharden myself. It wasn’t initially a conscious decision, but after I came off antidepressants and the birth control pill my emotions rushed back to the forefront. I could finally feel things fully. I’m cautious to admit it, but I’ve become soft again, and I’m not sure if I can look at the horrors anymore. Is this a privilege? Or am I simply taking care of the only person I truly can–me? Think putting on your own oxygen mask first, before you help others.
If I'm taking care of myself, it adds to and grows my capacity to be responsive to people around me. How can I make good choices if I’m afraid or angry? How can I help others when I’m acting from reactivity rather than a strong, healthy, and resilient base?
I wonder that if we looked after our own shit, maybe we wouldn’t feel the need to pillage the earth, colonise and steal from other places, or get involved in things we shouldn’t? If we looked after ourselves, would there be fewer horrors in the world?
Everything I write is obviously shaped by the goings on in the world, and thoughts I have been pondering for a while have been amplified by certain situations. I don’t want to end this with any specific opinion or thought. I am just a politically and scientifically uneducated person who was born in a certain place at a certain time. I can’t say I understand the complexities of the issues we face in the world and make sense of them or even attempt to provide any sort of solution in one article.
Though I believe it’s not a question of whether we should care, it’s a question of whether we truly have the capacity to care. To hold all these issues in our brain and function to our fullest ability.
I’ll leave you with these words from Deb Ozarko: “Once I dropped from my shoulders the self-imposed burden of having to ‘save the world’, I could breathe a sigh of relief and ask myself ‘What can I still do?’’
Right now I’m writing Finding Sanity free for all readers, but in the long term, I’m going to need some support to make this financially viable. If you think my work is worthwhile, you can pledge a future subscription. 💕
I like the way you write and I agree that we need to take care of our inner world much more than we usually do. However I feel it goes hand-in-hand with growing our belonging with our communities around us, and taking collective action with others. Part of healing ourselves comes from feeling we belong and are useful in collectives, in community. We can't just resolve our own shit first, and then go out and 'save' the world. Its a bit like in many socialist revolutions, many male leaders would profess that first the revolution needed to take place and then they would talk about women's rights and equality. Its all part of the process, or if not we've missed the point.