One Sunday last year I volunteered with a group called the Period Project. It’s a great group run by a caring couple, and twenty or so volunteers show up monthly to turn mountains of donated pads & tampons & personal care items into care packages that they distribute to people experiencing homelessness. Making those packages was hugely uplifting—I loved being part of the assembly line that made these bright bundles, and I was genuinely moved to see 200 or so of them lined up for distribution, each containing colourful inspirational notes that said things like “Stay Strong.”
When it was time to distribute the packs, my team and I were in a pretty tough neighbourhood—one I bike through regularly. We ended up pounding the pavement for a couple of hours, squinting into the shadows, both literal and figurative. We had to look closely: was that person resting in the park with some stuff, or were they camped out? Was that woman with a companion, or was that her pimp? Was that person safe to approach? Was that woman too old to still menstruate? You’d be surprised how many questions come up, how carefully you have to look. We didn’t want to embarrass or offend or, worse, end up in an unsafe confrontation. Over the two or three hours, despite seeking out the most likely places, we actually ended up with far more care packets than we could distribute, and left extras with a safe injection site that had been set up in the park.
I ended up missing a bus up Sherbourne, which added another half an hour’s walking alone, right up through the heart of all the areas we’d just passed. I was exhausted, sore-footed—in short, a bit worn down—and I found myself still looking compulsively into the shadows. I couldn’t unsee it. All of my elation, my tidy sense of accomplishment from earlier had seeped out of me like a deflating balloon. I’d spent only an afternoon looking carefully at human suffering we so regularly gloss over, and I felt so guilty, so small, so inadequate. These people deserved someone to help, someone to bear witness, and yet doing this for just one afternoon took the wind out of me.
This week I was feeling similar. I was, admittedly, hormonal, and then I spent too much time reading bad news stories on Monday morning before work. There are so many bad news stories. Right now even the good news stories are so often laced with the bad—for all the triumph of a politician resigning over harassment charges, there is the suffering of those who came forward, and probably that of many others who didn’t. Since Trump was elected I’ve spent a lot more time listening to the news, reading it, feeling like I need to know what was happening even if it’s not happening in my country. I’ve tried to take a spoonful-of-sugar approach to a lot of this news consumption, relying on Samantha Bee or Seth Meyers or Call Your Girlfriend to make it easier to swallow. But even so, a kind of tidal despair was rising in me.
It’s trendy to talk about self-care these days, and for activists and frontline workers, those people who look in the shadows daily, who work there, it seems necessary and justified. But me? I’m hardly doing anything. I’m just trying to pay attention.
I recognize the ridiculous privilege of being able to opt out when the overwhelm rushes in, and it makes me ashamed that I might need step back. But I can’t deny that I am in need of a little reassurance re: the world. Rationally, I know it’s not all a dumpster fire, but the bad news input is so intense, so unrelenting, and we’re not exclusively rational creatures. I’ve reassured myself recently that our fallible human brains are perhaps not equipped to deal with so much bad news at once. The negativity bias served us when we were hunting and gathering, but its legacy is now we need five positive interactions to compensate for one bad one. Once we might have only dealt with problems in our family, in our community, yet in the age of the internet, we can have a non-stop negative news stream. You could absorb a lifetime’s worth of bad news in a week, maybe even a day.
And so what to do? Keep up the activities that support my mental health: exercising, yoga, meditating, sleeping eight hours, spending time with people, spending time without people. I think I’ll dial back some news (especially of the U.S. variety), for a start, but also I’m seeking some big-picture reassurance. My partner reminded my of Steven Pinker’s much-loved The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, so I might pick that up, or at least start with a podcast of an Oxford talk he gave on the book. I’ve been reading Tim Ferris’s Tribe of Mentors*, and the most recommended book is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. If this man could find purpose and meaning in a concentration camp, that might be the perspective I need. There’s also Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, or I could go back to my beloved Rebecca Solnit: reread Hope in the Dark, or pick up A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Maybe I just need to watch this Mr. Rogers clip and sob.
In any case, I think I need to adjust the ratio of my inputs, and to try to pay closer attention to the things right in front of me. This week when the overwhelm threatened to crash down like a wave, I’d focus on my feet on the floor (my favourite meditation strategy). Because if your feet are on the ground, well, that’s a start, and it can pull you temporarily out of the mental catastrophe spiral. (And of course the metaphoric resonance appeals.) My therapist once advised noticing three new things to be grateful for each day and writing them down, which might be something to pick up again, at least until spring means that hope and beauty will push to the surface. Here are three things I’m grateful for right now:
- a relatively free and open schedule for the day
- last night’s dinner party that was a chance to connect with old friends, who always offer laughter and intellectual discussion
- that most times, even in this giant city, you can hear or see a bird
Don’t get me wrong, it is vital to look to the shadows, and it’s something we all should do more. There’s so much work to be done, after all. But recently I’ve neglected the other attention that should be so easy to give: to beauty, to kindness, to comfort. Sarah Harmer is one of my favourite songwriters, and I listened to her a lot on Monday to self-soothe. There’s a song called “Uniform Grey” about descending in a plane through the fog and rain, about things not going as you hoped. And it has one of my favourite Harmer lines: “He said, ‘Buck up, baby, it’s okay. The sunlight on the floor will always fall.'” Because that’s just it. Even when the world is a uniform grey, even when I’m feeling blue, there’s always a sliver of light you can count on.
* I’m not a Ferris superfan, and I generally find his podcast too long, but I do really admire his desire to learn, assess, reassess, get better, faster stronger. And Tribe of Mentors is interesting because it’s almost exclusively the advice of people who have done extraordinary things. If you like this kind of advice anthology, it’s worth diving in to this 500-page brick of a book, which makes for surprisingly easy reading.
Echolocation 