March 4, 2022

Tunnels

I’ve had a very tough mental health week (what I mean by this is that I’ve spent a significant amount of my time experiencing the physical symptoms of abject terror for someone who is not immediately endangered) but I finally slept okay last night for the first time in a week and it’s helping. It is a lot to be a person who lives in the world right now, even if one is fortunate enough not to be a person in immediate danger, but one thing I am grateful for is that when it all fell apart for me in December, it was because I’d finally had enough to looking for light at the end of the tunnel. That light in the distance for me had been the most sustaining force for me, always, but then I’d become so tired of reaching, or maybe the light seemed so far away I couldn’t see it or else I was afraid I’d just imagined it was ever there, or maybe what I really mean is that reaching such light is as far away as one could possibly get from experiencing life in the present moment, and I was just so tired of missing out on that, of always looking ahead for a moment that might never come.

And so this has been my objective throughout the weeks of this new year, to learn to be here now and meet the moment whatever it’s bringing. To be open and strong and brave in the case of whatever fate may deliver, and when I made such plans, it was mainly Omicron I had in mind, and what’s come to stir my soul instead has been so much more messy, heartbreaking, and terrifying. For me the way so much unrest in Ottawa blended right into the invasion of Ukraine is not entirely disconnected, and in some ways, practically speaking, it really isn’t, though of course I wholly recognize the different of scale. But the point is that I’ve been scared for a month, and really for two years now, and now this, terror on such a potentially annihilating scale.

I’m beginning to wholly understand how everyone in the mid-20th century was on Valium…

But I’ve got away from my main point, which is not to say the light will never come. (It does. It’s all around us. We’re entering our third year of a pandemic, and yet hospital capacity is fine, we’re going out for dinner tonight, my kids have been in school since January, we’re planning to visit our family in the UK in April, green things are beginning to poke through the earth—I could not be more grateful for all of this if my heart were tied up in a sparkly bow.) But just that I am glad that I committed to learning to get along in the meantime, to learn how to be mostly okay even when most things aren’t okay, when all of my ducks aren’t in a row, and that I couldn’t have picked a better year to build up these muscles, and instead of trying to rail against reality, I choose to meet it open-heartedly, which is hard, and it hurts, but it’s also so much less impossible.