The Overwhelm
In the late 2000s, I was off the shores of St Lucia in a rickety little boat with some friends and my husband. The rest of the group wanted to go fishing, and I wanted to appear as if I liked group activities on the open seas, so I tagged along. As the gorgeous island shrank on the horizon, the skies turned dark green, opened up, and sheets of rain fell on us. Our vessel teetered in the ocean, and I clung to the side of the boat and gritted my teeth. “Are there sharks nearby?!” I shrieked at the captain. “Oh no, darling. There are no sharks in this part of the ocean.” “Thank god,” I said.
Fifteen years later, one of those friends visited us in our new forest dwelling. My friend, who’d arrived from the heart of Toronto, was wary of going for a run. “Are there bears in the forest?” she asked. “Nooooo,” I said, because I’d never seen one. But, were there bears in the thousands of acres of trees around us? Absolutely. As I watched her dash down my porch steps, I remembered the St Lucian boat captain, and it was only then, after all those years, that I realized he’d probably lied to me.
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“I’m surprised you haven’t written about the overwhelm in your newsletter,” my husband said in early January. “Many of the European papers are advising people about how to deal with the overwhelm.” The overwhelm of living through multiple concurrent crises.
Hm. Basically all I’ve been writing about lately is the overwhelm, I'd thought, but mostly as personal essays about living in the permacrisis, which has involved a lot of crying and ruminating and meditating.
My sincerest delusion is that I’ll wake up one day soon having discovered the piece of self-help advice that will transcend all other pieces of self-help advice. I’ll finally crack the code, and together, we'll solve the overwhelm. Instead, as each day goes by, I’m less sure of anything.
At this stage of the overwhelm, what’s the right guidance to offer? What’s the kind of self-help advice that’ll support us during climate collapse and chaos and war and the smug greed of broligarchs who don’t care about us at all?
Do individual self-help solutions even work? Will a sound bath or equine therapy or a yoni egg or ayahuasca or binaural beats help you right now? Like, for sure, maybe they will. I could offer a heavy critique of the self-help industry, because it's too focused on individuals, and we need collective solutions for the permacrisis. But that perspective would be disingenuous, since I haven’t had a drink in nearly eleven years. Because I went deep into addiction, I had to go deep into recovery, and that means I’ve gorged myself at the self-help buffet. Much of it has helped me.
And, we can’t effectively fight big collective battles when we're at war with ourselves. It’s important to tend to our inner work – our mental, emotional, and spiritual selves. Individual healing and wellness and resilience are intimately tied to our collective wellbeing.
As I pondered what to write about the overwhelm, to show my husband that I am in fact on top of this subject, I kept circling around the problem. And then my Zen training kicked in. Wherever you are with your overwhelm, go deeper into it. Don’t let it be a partial state. Only then, when you’ve dropped your resistance to feeling overwhelmed, and let yourself be the overwhelm, can you actually know what to do with it. This is the stage I’m in.
And if that feels like an unreasonable demand, it’s ok. Perhaps you can’t be the overwhelm right now – you have bills to pay and mouths to feed and you have to take it one day at a time. This weekend my Buddhist friend quoted an old teacher to me: everything needs to be under the control of compassion. So I mean it when I tell you that there are no sharks in this part of the ocean, and there are no bears in these woods.
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