In Case of Emergency / Break Glass
This essay went out through my newsletter on 3/29/2019.
I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot to panic about these days. Things are very bad! Like, existentially! I could list some of the many, many, many reasons why, but no one needs that. You know all the global reasons, and then I'm sure you have your own, private ones, too, things that haunt you in the middle of the night. For me, those private things include my continued and agonizing unemployment, a difficult relationship that I know I'm navigating all wrong, half a dozen emails that I am afraid to send, and just generalized regret for lost opportunities and lost friends and bad choices, the almost unbearable recognition that time only moves in one direction, the fear of change but also the yearning for it, and WHOOPS it's 3:30am and I am fully awake and losing it.
Panic, at least for me, is always the result of feeling out of control. As a rational person, I recognize that I cannot control climate change, or the election, or the plastics industry (and there I go listing all the things I promised not to). And this feeling of helplessness tends to bleed into my normal life--suddenly I become sure that I'm going to lose everything, that I can't hold on to my husband or my cats, that I'll never be able to find a job, that nothing I do matters and I can't make a better life, much less a better world, and WHOOPS I'm no longer in the present but drifting in an unbearable imaginary realm of eternal loss.
When that happens, I find it helpful to call up this list, which I made after one particularly bad night. It is a list of action items, to-dos that manage to help EVEN THOUGH all the bad things are still bad and tend to visit one in the middle of the night (which is really fucking unfair and, frankly, seems like very bad planning on someone's part). Reading this list pulls me out of that terrifying shadow realm and back into the present. If that's a place you know at all (and I'm so sorry if it is), I highly recommend making your own emergency list. Here's mine.
The Things That Help
1. Working. Even though it's stupid and the world will likely end in ice (or maybe fire? Probably both!), it does make you feel the teensiest tiniest bit better to be working towards something that will keep my busy and engaged and doing good work. This is very annoying.
2. Reaching out to your people. Your mileage varies on this! Sometimes it's very embarrassing! You don't always want to do it! But it's always a good idea.
3. Telling yourself, over and over and OVER as necessary, that depression lies. Depression lies! Depression LIES. Depression. Lies. We know this! It is known.
4. Recognizing the things that made you sad, but also taking a minute to think of the good and consistent things, for instance:
Art (even--maybe especially--art about sad and scary things)
Architecture
Art Museums
Bullet-pointed lists
Marina Abramovich
That Icelandic artist you love so much and can never remember the name of
Novels
History, which includes the history of lots of sad things that people sort of mostly get through!
Flowers
Cockroaches and pigeons and raccoons and rats and other really fucking resilient animals
Tattoos, and the possibility of always getting another one
The moment you're actually in, which is almost always okay, really
Breathing
Your beautiful friends
Mary Oliver poems about grief, for example:
Ocean
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousand of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.
-Mary Oliver, from Red Bird
The Ocean itself, big and unfathomable and yes, it is very sick, and that makes you feel in a horribly literal way like you are sick, but it is also consistently surprising and you do not know, maybe things will get better, the future isn't actually written yet even though it feels like it is
Water of all kinds
The work you've done
The work you haven't done yet--the sentences you're going to string together and fall in love with
The next TV show, movie, song, restaurant that will surprise and delight you
Cats, all of them, literally every single cat
Most dogs
5. Remember that even though you feel sick and sad, you sat down and you made this. On a different day, the next time you're sick, maybe you can make something else, like cookies, or a terrible drawing! The important thing is that even in the thick of it, you can do things to remind yourself that you are not living in the terrifying future. You're living right now, in a moment that is almost always pretty much okay, really. Take a breath.