January 31, 2025

How I’m Taking Care

I used to spend so much time on the internet telling people what to do and how to be because it felt nice to believe that there was somehow a way to be immune to the struggles and foibles and terrible times that are (I’ve since realized) a pretty standard part of human experience, and also in lieu of feeling my feelings about how difficult and uncertain life can be.

This kind of didactic posturing was also the way that so many of us had been programmed to tell stories on online platforms anyway, and so that those stories were actually a manifestation of the very anxiety that these same platforms were continually fuelling in my addled brain would turn out to be somehow…awfully efficient? (LIFE HACK! HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR NEUROSES AND ALIENATE PEOPLE!)

So now I’ve become superstitious about dispensing any kind of advice, and the very idea of doing so makes me anxious. (What a knot this is!!)

But I’ve also been hearing from a lot of people who’ve been struggling lately, and I recognize where they are so much from where I was eight years ago, and where I would remain until I had a mental breakdown at the end of 2021. This would be my second experience of mental illness, after a bout of postpartum depression following the birth of my first child, which I didn’t recognize as depression at the time (even though everybody else did!).

In both situations, walking around perpetually weeping seemed (to me!) like a reasonable response to the difficulties/crises in the world around me at the time, both at large, and at small. “I don’t feel bad because there’s something wrong with me,” I insisted. “I feel bad because this is hard and things are terrible.” And while I wasn’t incorrect about the latter point, what I was missing was that the burden didn’t have to be so heavy. I wasn’t obligated to carry it all, and thinking that I had to had absolutely destroyed me.

Here is some of what helped me figure a lot of things out, and get me in a place of relative steadiness, where I’m so grateful to be right now.

THERAPY: Therapy has changed my life, and given me the tools to meet this moment.
SLEEP: My mental wellness is irrevocably connected to being well rested. When I am tired, everything is impossible and anxiety-inducing. And when I am anxious, sleep is really hard. What got me out of my crisis in 2021 was meds that calmed my brain and let me sleep, and ended my panic. (Also, don’t use your smartphone after 9pm or sooner than 30 minutes after you wake up in the morning)
LET GO OF THE VIGILANCE: But even before I’d hit my crisis point, I’d got a glimpse of where I was going so wrong when I read an Instagram post from the writer Katherine May, who has spent a lot of time interrogating the ideas that got treated as dogma in progressive online spaces. That her message came as such a revelation (and relief) seems strange now, but it really shifted my thinking. She’d written about how none of us were obliged to watch over the whole world. Yes, there was a part of it that we were all responsible for, those things close to home, but this sense of needing to keep vigilance over our huge and wondrous planet is an awful lot to ask of an ordinary person. You don’t have to do it. Breathe, and let it go.
MAKE FRIENDS WITH UNCERTAINTY: The vigilance had been important because it seemed like control. Turned out, I was not in control. (WHAT???) She’s a cliche, but reading Pema Chodran helped me find this less agonizing. As always, it’s a process.
FAREWELL TO SOCIAL MEDIA: I watched the first entire Trump presidency unfold on my Twitter feed, refreshing over and over, and it made me terrified, furious, and powerlessly beholden to an app which was absolutely manipulating my feelings and emotions. I’m so angry about that now. When he won again in November, I took Instagram off my phone, and while I still download it to use once or twice a week, I delete it immediately after. Because these apps are not worthy of my attention and my being, and they are sending a no more meaningful news update than a glance out my window does. In fact, that glance may be truer and more essential than any app I’ve ever refreshed. I do not need everyone else’s feelings and anxieties in my brain, voices which drown out my own thoughts, with so much fear and speculation. It’s a terrible way to read the world, and not a meaningful form of engagement.
REDISCOVER MY FOCUS: I am enjoying writing essays on Substack, and reading other people’s essays and blog posts in a variety of places, because all of this requires sustained focus, which is so much more satisfying and meaningful than the world in 280 characters. Same with reading actual books. (And hot tip, saying Farewell to Social Media frees up so much time for books!)
FIND THE NEWS IN PLACES THAT DON’T MAKE ME FEEL TERRIBLE: Another hot tip, if I paid no attention to the news at all, the world would keep turning and we’d all be fine. But I’m also interested in the world, so I follow the news, but I follow in a measured fashion, with an awareness that often “the news” is somebody telling me what to think, and fear, and feel. I used to wake up every morning with my clock radio alarm playing CBC World Report, until opening my eyes to a daily soundtrack of sadness and disaster became untenable, and now I wake up to whatever song they’re playing on Classical FM instead. I read the news on paper at the weekends. I (somewhat obsessively!) listen to political podcasts that contextualize what’s going on. I receive the Guardian Weekly magazine in my mailbox once a week. I read newspapers online, but sparingly. I DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS. I don’t read Reddit Threads. I have enough trouble with my own anxiety, so don’t need everybody else’s. I also remind myself that my experience of being in the world is as real and meaningful as whatever stories The News is telling me. So are the stories on a site like Fix the News. (Listen here to founder Angus Hervey’s interview with Matt Galloway on CBC’s The Current)
CONNECT WITH PEOPLE IN MEANINGFUL WAYS: Group chats. Get-togethers with friends. I’ve joined a singing group. I write my neighbourhood’s community newsletter. Participating in a fundraiser for my local food bank. Going to the movies. When people ask me to show up, I aspire to always say YES (unless I don’t want to).
MAKE PLANS FOR FUN THINGS: Booking campsites for summer. Purchasing theatre tickets (do you know about the Stratford Festival’s Bravo Zone?) I go swimming every day because it’s my favourite thing. Pencilling coffee dates into the calendar. Things to look forward to. At my lowest, I’ve had trouble believing in such thing as a future, and so mapping mine out can actually me a wild and subversive thing
DO WHAT YOU CAN: Pick a few places to put your money and time. (I am big on The Nature Conservancy of Canada, Action Canada, and The Toronto Public Library Foundation.) But remember again, you don’t have to hold it all.