I have gone quiet for the past two months. I found it much more difficult than usual to engage with what's going on in the world, be it environmental breakdown, health breakdown or societal breakdown. I believe this is because, on top of the world going to shit, I have not been feeling at peace in my personal life either. The anxiety triggered from a crumbling inside and outside world didn’t leave me the space and confidence I need to write about the environment and politics the way I usually do here.
When the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum amongst a still expanding Covid-19 situation, I felt even less compelled to write: because systemic racism is fucked, and because mostly, I don’t know what to say and I am definitely not the most relevant person to say what needs to be said.
Along with my writer’s block, I have also been thinking extensively about what I want to write about, and whether I want to write about the same things. Do I still want to write about the environment and climate change, when we're clearly on the wrong path? I have been increasingly interested in writing about more personal stuff, focused on feelings, relationships and humans. How we work and build our relationships with one another. How we react in moment of panic, doubt and confusion. How we deal with anxiety and depression. I know I don’t feel depressed at the moment, because I have experienced depression before and I know what it is and isn’t. However, I have been experiencing strong anxiety that I find very hard to deal with because I can’t manage it. This led me, as stated above, to want to write about it, and share my thoughts, even though it's not about the climate.
Nevertheless, I feel a strong imposter syndrome, going like: “you can’t publish something about mental health and humans, your areas of expertise is climate change! That’s what you do”. It is indeed what I do, but not right now, not as much, not in the same way. Writing has been a coping mechanism for me since I was a child. I have always written, whether a diary or fiction, as a way to express myself, to let go of things that didn’t make me feel good or that I couldn’t explain. This hasn’t changed, apart from the fact that today I rant about the global system rather than about my latest boyfriend (in public at least).
It’s interesting to observe the paradox between groups and individuals regarding how we cope in adversity. I think we’re pretty useless on our own, but if we either come together, or share with one another that we're struggling, it makes things easier to cope with. This is the difficult part isn’t it? We have the reflex and tendency to retract in a ball when things go to shit around us, instead of reaching out to others, be they friends, family or therapists. It takes an actual effort to tell ourselves that we need to talk about what is wrong and that we need to address it to ease and heal it. Some people never do this and believe that they can just heal everything themselves by burying the issue deep down inside. This, of course, never works, but people can go on feeling like shit for a surprisingly long time.
This struggle to address and talk about mental health issues comes from two things.
Firstly, the fact that we live in a society (and I don’t believe it’s only the Western world, although I’m not too familiar with other cultures around mental health) where talking about problems and sharing our issues around mental health, is seen as being weak, partly because emotions are related to women. The imperial, racist, sexist, capitalist system which currently structures the way we live forces us to live deprived of emotions (which also explains why we’re so obsessed with robots replacing humans). Bad news for us though, emotions and feelings are as important as the rational and logical part of our brain – they can’t be suppressed.
Secondly, this same society wants to make us believe that everything should always be fine. That happiness is a state of mind, a goal, the reason of our existence.
Well, no.
Happiness comes and go, like sadness, feeling blue, joy or fulfilment. Being happy all the time is impossible. We’re designed to just be. Whether that is happy, sad, anxious, annoyed or merry fluctuates in the space of a day or a year and is not always up to us. Feeling all these emotions isn’t failing to be happy (and therefore successful): it’s normal.
Which leads me to the point of this article (I know it took some time): as you all know, the world is fucked (I also had to reconsider my rule not to swear on this platform, but in regards of the current situation, and reading too much Mark Manson lately, I am just going to let go of this rule for now).
The world is fucked, so how can we actually expect to be happy and fulfilled?
Disclaimer: even if the world wasn't fucked we wouldn't feel happy all the time because it's just not a thing.
People are dying because of the colour of their skin.
We live in an oppressive society, where being who we want to be is a problem if it is not being a cisgender white male.
People are still dying of hunger while many in the Global North are dying from eating too much.
We are on the course to catastrophic climate change which is going to kill and displace many of us due to extreme weather events.
A global pandemic is still going on strong, taking lives and forcing us to live in ways we never even imagined before.
We feel powerless and useless (I do, big time) as all these issues are occurring because of the current global system which is extremely hard to dismantle.
I don’t know if there is a solution to this. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe we just need to go along and do our best. There is definitely a time and space for revolution and I think it could be now: but revolution also means violence and death, and I’m not sure this is what we want. On the other hand, how do you abolish an inherently violent and oppressive system without violence? Is it possible? I don't know.
I’m not saying we should lose hope (there is not point to go on if we do), but we also need to accept that things are very fucked up right now and we might need time to process it before we feel strong enough to come up with a solution. I do at least. I also believe there are solutions; after all, there is no growth without discomfort.
I’ll leave you on this.
Love,
Mathilde