Square one

Emotionally, I feel like I have been put in a metal barrel and rolled down a hill.

I feel like my identity, thoughts, and emotions have all become untrustworthy, leaving me no guidance on what feelings to trust or what to do. I feel very literally like I have lost my mind; I don’t know which fragments are the healthy seed crystals to begin reconstituting an identity from and which are toxic waste that need to be expelled or wrapped in an unreactive layer to advance that rebuilding process.

I feel like just being so distressed is costing me my only hope at a future, but there is also no way out of these omni-crises without expressing these feelings somehow.

[Edit: 1:09pm] I am not and have not at any point in this crisis been suicidal. No actions based on the assumption that I am or could be are justified. I emphatically do not want any strangers checking on my welfare, and any such imposition would only worsen matters.

From Waiting for Godot

VLADIMIR: Do you remember the Gospels?

ESTRAGON: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.

VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.

ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?

Silence.

Active Hope

Any situation we face can develop in a range of different ways — some much better, others much worse. Active Hope involves identifying the outcomes we hope for and then playing a role in moving toward them. We don’t wait until we are sure of success. We don’t limit our choices to the outcomes that seem likely. Instead, we focus on what we truly, deeply long for, and then proceed to take determined steps in that direction.

…

Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be or guide.

Macy, Joanna and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power, Revised Edition. New World Library, 2022. p. 37, 5 (italics in original)

Feeling in three waves

When I was very young, I learned that there are good emotions (loyal obedience, approval of authority figures) and bad emotions (anger, sadness, simply feeling down) and that I had to avoid expressing the latter.

That trains in incredibly unhealthy emotional reflexes. Before I have even properly felt what comes naturally, I have begun a frantic plan to behave the right way externally. So, for example, if I feel fear, even before I have fully felt it I am feeling guilt and shame about feeling the wrong feeling. Perhaps most oddly of all, when the underlying emotion is already more than I can handle, somehow the extra guilt and shame can be even stronger.

I have put years of effort into breaking that long-trained instinct to rapidly interrogate and suppress ‘wrong’ feelings. It has taken literally years of practice to simply be able to feel and identify my original feelings, holding back the impulse to jump immediately from feeling their beginnings to implementing an instantaneous response plan. Despite all this work, I struggle with a sense that all strong feelings are suspect or somehow the wrong ones, or that they are something that I can and should change. The ideas that emotions are good and bad and that they are controllable are both massively, tragically wrong but they are near-impossible to fully extract from yourself after being programmed in during childhood years.

That whole effortful process of questioning childhood training is a third layer. I don’t just feel my natural emotions with the destructive programming now removed. Instead, I feel the emotions that I have grown so much better at naming and teasing apart. Then I can’t help but feel the training from early childhood to never express the wrong ones, and to feel awful if I do or even for feeling those things in the first place. Then I have to go through all the memory and knowledge and experience about how damaging and inappropriate that training is, remember that emotions are a natural internal phenomenon not appropriately subject to the judgment and control of others, and work on experiencing emotions in a healthy way instead of through dismissal or short-circuiting.

Two things I suspect about this process are that it will never be entirely done, and that progress toward a healthier relationship to my emotions can be knocked back and derailed through exposure to people who assume inappropriate and authoritarian control over them. I can’t keep the old obedient mode available in a box for use with the people who demand it. The only way to get healthier is to commit to the gradual and irreversible erosion of that old trained mode, without reversing or abandoning course for the sake of demanding others.

Cause of stuggling

I think a root cause for why I have been struggling so much with everything in life is that I am desperately fearful and unhappy, and I don’t know what to do about it. Our civilizational crisis makes me feel more anger, sadness, grief, and isolation than I know how to cope with. Since I don’t have a stable emotional platform, everything else feels precarious and I am constantly both anxious and self-rebuking for having ended up in this situation and not knowing what to do.

This sense of profound and inescapable crisis traces back at least to my time in government, when I realized that it is in no sense capable, or even directed toward, solving our actual problems. Our government works for the car companies and fossil fuel companies, and hardly thinks at all about the long-term future. Life since has felt like more rejection by dysfunctional systems. These emotions are intensely alienating, since people are naturally drawn to and want to please people who seem to have it all figured out, while they are repulsed by those in despair.

The world in which our minds and emotions evolved bears little resemblance to the world which they are now trying to cope with, leaving us unbalanced and floundering. It is hard to even imagine what the way out could be, when it seems like we citizens collectively respond to each new challenge and setback with another round of self-destructive choices. We see the cliff edge approaching, and choose to jam down the accelerator even harder.

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