It feels like everything is just bad now. Everything is heavy, everything is hard, everything is scary. It’s just bad. And it’s been bad. For years (decades?) it’s been bad. And it feels terrifying and it feels suffocating and it feels like how did we even get here?
Israel is at war.
Ukraine is still at war.
Black men are being murdered during routine traffic stops.
Women aren’t getting a say in what we do with our bodies.
Kids are being shot at at schools.
Earth is burning and flooding and heating.
Our elected officials can’t agree on basic human rights.
We can’t even go to grocery stores anymore without worrying we won’t come home.
The list could go on and on. It’s hard to breathe. Was it always this bad? Was it always terrifying to turn on the news, never knowing what atrocity was going to be blasted into your face?
And I know that for a large portion of the population, that answer is YES. It has always been bad. It has been bad for years, decades, centuries. As a privileged white woman, maybe I didn’t always see it. Or maybe with the rise of social media, I’ve just seen more of it than I would’ve in the past by turning on the nightly news. Maybe both are true.
But this isn’t a world that I can breathe in. This isn’t a world I want to leave to my children. This isn’t a world that I want them to see.
We turned on the TV to watch the Barbie movie yesterday and were hit with images of children being kidnapped by terrorists. I couldn’t click out of it fast enough. My nine year old knows more about the terrifying state of the world than I ever could’ve imagined when I was his age. And I hate that for him.
I don’t want him to be afraid to go outside.
I don’t want him to be afraid to go to school.
I don’t want him to be afraid to breathe the air.
My Instagram feed made me want to vomit. Every story, every post, every reshare, it was hard, and it was scary. I read it, and then I needed something to clear the air, so that I could move forward in the only way I knew how. So that I could get up and parent and try to make sure I was raising good humans.
I followed a couple of “good news” accounts and spent some time going through their reels and while the videos did make me smile (and occasionally cry happy tears, so thankful that there is still good in the world), the comments just brought all of the anxiety back. When did we get so mean to one another?
It is likely this post reeks of the privilege I’ve had to read it all, to clear the air, to move forward in raising good humans.
But I also know that what is flowing from my fingertips is the desperation I feel. It’s that clawing sensation on my throat, squeezing and squeezing as the anxiety claims my thoughts.
It’s really fucking scary to live in this world in 2023. And I think that what scares me the most is how commonplace it’s become to feel this scared, to live this suffocated, to not have any hope that things are going to get better.
How do we keep putting one foot in front of the other when we’re left without hope? How do we come back together as humans? How do we see our humanity, our commonness? When will it change? How will it change?
Where do we go from here…
Where do we go from here…
Where do we go from here…
Where do we go from here…
Where do we go from here…
Holding on to hope, refusing to surrender our joy, not giving up on wonder...these are powerful acts of resistance in a fragmented world. (A paraphrase of something Molly Remer said.)
It’s so hard not to be swallowed by the suffering. xo Take care of yourself right now, my friend.