What are These Times Doing to Us?
Where are the tears we've been unable to shed? Are we all in a state of overwhelm?
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Recently, I had two women friends tell me that they’d had difficult things to deal with, but were unable to cry. And I’ve been the same way. Earlier this year my brother died, and I have shed very few tears. Even though I loved him dearly, was his main emotional support for the ten months before his death, and even though I can still hear the sound of his voice clearly in my mind.
What’s up with this? How many others are feeling this way? And what is this doing to us?
I believe it was Gabor Maté who said that having to witness an ongoing genocide on our screens is a moral injury to all of us. I think he’s right.
On top of that, decades of austerity have severely limited our options, and have taken their toll on us personally. A lot of us are having to make tough choices, and experiencing hardships that would have been unthinkable before the turn of the millennium.
And seeing that now in the USA, people can be deported, with no trial, to prisons where people are tortured seems unbelievable. Not to mention the crackdown on free speech all over the western world.
It’s understandable that so many of us feel hopeless, afraid and numb.
Today I’ve been feeling particularly rudderless. Going through the motions, taking care of the tasks that need doing, out of sorts, heavy hearted, low energy.
This post contains no advice. It’s just a check in, an honest expression of where I’m at, a shout out to anyone who’s feeling the same way — or maybe I should say unfeeling in the same way.
Despite this, I tenaciously hold on to a deep commitment to do what I can to turn things around with whatever tools are available to me.
I want the genocide to stop. I want the USA and its allies to stop supporting Israel. I want to see NATO disbanded. I want the west to stop its colour revolutions, assassinations, propaganda and dirty tricks. I want us to be restoring our planet instead of investing in more war. And I want to have options again, have a liveable and supportive society. I want the emotional safety to shed those tears and feel into my grief.
I want this for all of us. We have the tools, expertise, money and everything else to have a world where every one of us has enough, where we can relax and get the care we need, get good educations, look after our health and implement environmental solutions.
We could have a renaissance the likes of which the world has never experienced. Just imagine the masterpieces, the wonder and healing that we could experience together.
If only saying these things would bring them about. Unfortunately, all I have to share are words.
One thing I know is that we can’t allow this to be our new normal.
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I love the BDS campaign and the effect it’s having on Israel’s economy.
Here's an excellent list of products from Israel: https://boycott.thewitness.news/browse/1
Here's a way to help others not in your bubble to boycott Israel: https://www.cjpme.org/stickies_2024_en
And here's where you can support Palestine by buying a keffiyeh: https://www.hirbawi.ps/
Western governments, among whom I count our Canadian government, owe their citizens major compensation for the psychological stress and emotional upheaval that they have put us through due to their callous, cowardly support for Israel. If our elected, may I remind them, politicians stood for the same values, if they had the same moral courage and clarity that their voters have demonstrated, we would not have to suffer the degree of frustration, despair, anger and desperation that has taken a toll on everyone of us! These people are not only irresponsible, they should be made accountable! They have betrayed us, they have forsaken us, they have turned their backs and farted in our faces!
Thanks for your honesty Diana. I've been wondering how to write my next sub stack and feel the load of guilt for being unable to write because I long to write with hope but I have to convince myself to feel hope first. I have to convince my family, my loved ones that I am hopeful. I have to make the glimmer larger. I've been thinking about how to widen the lens, to make it bigger, because only then can we see a different future.
And this means feeling the pain. We bear this differently, each of us, this pain. There have been times when I could not cry, but I am not this way now.
For me the tears are there, too close to the surface. They come up at random places in public - like the supermarket check out counter, when I feel someone looking into me, when I feel exposed, up it comes, like a wave breaking over the rock.
I wrote a poem some years ago, it contained the line 'every pore is a tidal pore'. The other night I collapsed. My husband held me as I lamented, wailed.
As a journalist I have covered some atrocities. I saw some terrible things and who was unable to stop the terror. So many reporters who reported on horrors carry guilt. I was driven by a desire to change the world and now I feel the tug of children who - in their dying gaze - tugged me so hard, begging me to do something to pull them back into life. The Palestinian children carry me back to the Aids babies I saw in Romania. For a long time after, I suffered from insomnia and finally realised my sleeplessness was due to regret, due to guilt. The guilt for not doing the most human humane thing. I had to go back to that place in my mind, I had to do what I should have done then. Hug every one, carry every baby out.
I have interviewed people who did not seem then to realise they were failing to act humanely. I came to realise that very few people look evil. Netanyahu is the exception rather than the rule. Everyone can become an angel or a monster and in a monstrous system so many people - people who in many spheres of life seem good - become monsters.
I want answers and I feel bereft. I feel guilty when I don't attend our Palestinian rallies and exhausted when I do. I belong to a group that has been labelled terrorist even though it is peaceful. I feel swept up and out of myself because the horrors we are witnessing are too huge.
Not only am I not writing my next sub stack I have staggered into a hiatus with the next novel. I was writing about adventurous women whose lives were hidden from our histories, I was writing about men who did some pretty rotten things, I was writing about conscience and choice, I was writing towards that glimmer on the horizon where hope and change can be found. But I cannot write at all if I cannot find that glimmer in or outside myself.
From all the carnage, all the losses, all the griefs and trauma I must rise somehow. Because you and I and others I meet here have been given a gift. It is the gift to write about the real world with honesty, it is the gift to write and that is a thing of beauty. Perhaps we carry them all with us as we write, all those who deserved to live, perhaps all we can do is write because if they were here they would use their gifts. If we hide, if we huddle, if we bury our heads in the sand we bury our souls while theirs rise.
The one place I do find healing is in nature. Away from the roar of man-made machines, away from the killing machines and the machines that signal progress, rolling back and undoing, unwinding, to being; being a feather or a stalk in the grass. Then I can stir, then I can fly.