AskPolly: “When you face our dark reality without hiding from it or avoiding it, you recognize that survival itself is worth celebrating and this planet is worth fighting for, even when the fight looks hopeless,” says hhavrilesky
In many ways, my affliction is the sensible reaction to the world today, but that doesn’t really help. I can’t stop worrying, and it’s stopping me from living. I’ve lost a good three weeks of this year in absolute paralyzing terror about climate change. Reading the news can send me into a spiral of panic where I can’t do anything, I just sit there and think about how we’re all going to die in a desert.
This looks like freedom to those who aren’t free. “I believe him,” they say of the liar, because the liar sometimes seems like the only one who isn’t paralyzed by the terrors of this doomed planet. His ignorance is a bliss that the ignorant masses want to taste for themselves. I was your age on 9/11. I was unemployed, anxious, and depressed, isolated from friends and living with someone who was also anxious and depressed. I watched the towers fall on live TV, and then I spent two months staring at the news for updates and replays of the towers collapsing. It felt like my job. It felt wrong to abandon my post by going outside and breathing in the fresh air. I couldn’t believe it when other people started to get on with their lives.
If you believe that by lessening your depression you’ve somehow deepened your anxiety, that’s a sign to me that therapy has rerouted your despair into a kind of hyperactive bout of circular thinking. You need to get back into therapy and discuss the fact that you’re feeling a lot of despair and anxiety. If you’re taking medication for depression, it could be making you anxious, and you should ask about adjusting it.
The other morning, I saw footage of indigenous women from Brazil marching together to protest President Bolsonaro’s rapid destruction of the Amazon. “There are lots of women at the head of this fight,” one woman told the camera. “If we die, at least we’ll die together.” But once you can see the sun shining outside your window without feeling immediate dread, you can join in the fight. You can channel your energy into battling denial and passivity, spreading the truth, engaging in civic actions, taking a stand against corrupt companies and leaders, divesting from fossil fuels, and signal-boosting those who are on the front lines of this battle.
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