Monday, August 13, 2018

Intrusive thoughts

I was tempted to hit up my therapist the other day.  It's been maybe four months since I last saw her, and while I had my shaky days, I thought I was ultimately handling life pretty well.


And then I read about the Orca. The grieving Orca, who carried her dead calf for a thousand miles, nearly starving herself in the process.  And I felt fucking gutted.  Just completely numb with sad.


Today I read that she has let her calf go, and is back to what appears to be "normal" behavior.


The Orca story captured so much.  The enormous pain of losing Celine, and grief for letting her go.  The no-longer existential ecological threat we're living under (the Orca population is endangered because we have obliterated their primary salmon source).  Climate inaction and maternal grief in one click.


Tack on to this the horrific child casualties in the middle east, and the trauma endured by immigrant and refugee children in the US and abroad.  All just scrolling and scrolling while nursing to the light of one's phone at 3am.


I don't really think your particular political persuasion matters - the pain of innocents is sometimes too much to bear. 


I wonder whether as a species we were built to absorb the quantities of information we're absorbing. But make no mistake about it, we're hooked, it's an addiction.


"Just stay off of twitter and facebook," I could hear my therapist saying.  Maybe just stick to Instagram, right?


The thing is I can *feel* the cortisol levels rising in my bloodstream every night.  And yet I can't quit.  I removed the apps from my phones, but short of throwing them away I feel stuck.  And occasionally hopeless.


I work to improve wages and benefits for low-wage health care workers. I like to think that I am helping democratize the workplace, and as a result, providing a more stable economic life for families in my very VERY poor city.  I also do a lot of research on population health outcomes as related to workforce training.  But at the end of the day I feel utterly useless. 


The only thing that seems to sustain me these days are the three humans I live with, who happen to share the same face (I'm the "one of these things is not like the other in my family").  Viking, Niblet and Nutmeg are my tether to sanity.


That's a very heavy burden for them. I know, because most of my life I've played the same role for my own depressed parents.


Unlike my parents, I don't actually spend a lot of time in that dark place.  People who know me IRL know I laugh a lot.  I entertain friends constantly.  I surround myself with children and feed on their silliness.  I hug my husband and get him to give me nightly backrubs.  I dance.  I move.  I endorphin the fuck out of my life.


But it all comes to a head at 2 or 3am.  How will I keep my girls safe?  How do I raise them with optimism and strength? 

3 comments:

  1. I kept seeing that orca in the headlines but kept scrolling past. That’s way into the “I can’t deal” range for me as a loss mom. It’s outrageous to me that I can connect and sympathize with an ORCA and fellow HUMANS in my own damn country lock kids in cages because their parents dared to take them across a mostly-imaginary line in the sand… so there was that part for me to.

    The world is a wreck. I’m surprised at this point when anyone with a heart and the ability to access the news isn’t at least a little bit depressed. Hang in there!

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  2. I purposely avoided reading about the Orca b/c I figured it would hit a nerve if I read more than just the headline (which is sad enough).

    Humans are resilient and can only handle so much information and grief. There are so many awful things happening that if we were to get upset and angry about everything, it would overpower us. As to your questions, you raise them as best you can. We only have so much in our power and control--hopefully that will be enough to keep them safe. I also try to talk at dinner about one thing we are grateful for or something good that happened that day. It's a way to focus on the good and hopefully when my four year old is older, he'll have that optimism and strength to see through all the madness and know there is a lot more good in the world. We just don't hear about it as often in the news.

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  3. Thank you both. I love the idea of talking about something we're grateful for every day.

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