Lengthy Feelings :: A Transformative Dress
/To echo a popular ice-breaker these days: Are you doing okay? Doesn’t seem like a given that you or I would be, honestly, since the 2020 demolition train is very much still on course. It feels like I was only just starting to think of all of the novelties of life during a pandemic - wearing a mask, social distancing, a near-term future without travel - as old hat, when my beloved adopted home state of California caught on flames. We’re nearly a month into fire damage control across the west coast and there are still active fires burning. 2018, which previously held the title of the deadliest wildfire season, tallied at a total of 1.6 million acres burned in CA. 2020, the newest record holder, brags ~3 million CA acres burned as of this past week. And it isn’t even officially wildfire season yet. Swaths of California and Oregon have been displaced, and even those of us lucky to be safely distanced from the fires are dealing with sustained poor air quality. The apocalyptic forces at work seemed to converge upon the Bay Area on Wednesday 9/9 when we woke to a hazy orange sky that progressively darkened through the morning until it was a Mad Max-esque red hellscape outside my window. There I sat at my work desk at 10am, dumbfounded at the scene and unable to focus.
You see, this was a deviation from normalcy SO dire, even in 2020, that my brain was struggling to process it. And oddly, that fact ended up comforting me.
Let me explain.
If life hadn’t already, 2020 has certainly taught us to experience loss. Loss of freedom and community if we’ve been lucky. If not, loss of health, home, a job, loved ones, life itself. For those of us on the west coast, there has been the added loss of clean air, nature and good climate. Coping with these losses to the best of our abilities has become a way of life, so much so that living through multiple crises has taken on a run-of-the-mill flavor. Perhaps I only speak for myself, but six months in, the ticker tape of COVID-19 stats that runs as a sidebar on news shows has become… routine. I’m horrified at the number of infected and dead people, but it’s a familiar horror now. Similarly, having lived in the Bay Area for 3 years now, the annual wildfire smoke-show is… expected tragedy. And that’s been bothering me. It’s struck me as scary in recent moments of clarity that such phrases as ‘familiar horror’ and ‘expected tragedy’ come naturally to me. How have I gotten habituated to all of this?? Consequently, what does it say about me that I can continue to maintain a certain quality of life and mental health while there is so much wrong with the world around me? I’ve come up lacking for an answer.
The textbook answer would be that it’s the endurance of the human spirit. Life has and does certainly go on, even joyfully so, in communities across the world that grieve everyday for reasons unrelated to the pandemic or natural calamities. But even so, it seems unacceptable that I should be able to successfully compartmentalize problems of such massive scale, laughing at tiktoks and getting a good night’s rest soon after watching the headlines with a heavy heart. The thought’s taken root and been feeling to me like an empath’s version of survivor’s guilt. At the same time, I’m awash with gratitude everyday that this dystopic world leaves the bubble that is me and my loved ones untouched. Based on the numbers alone, it‘s a miracle! But what does this good fortune amount to if I’m not spreading it around some? And so I’ve been seesawing between two forms of inertia: guilt and gratefulness.
This brings me to that red-sky Wednesday, when my brain drew a new line and stuck a DANGER sign on it. It was a jolt to the head about how far the normalization had gone. I mean, no matter how often I woke up to a red sky, I hoped that it should and would be insanely abnormal. If it didn’t, I’d have given up.
I’ve been taking incremental steps towards doing something about this inertia following that Wednesday to put my good fortune to use. The proactivity has made me feel so much better! I thought I would share them in the case that it’s of help to anyone that related to what I wrote above.
1. Donating to causes near to my heart. Right now, they are climate change and homelessness.
2. Looking into volunteering for the upcoming General Election, albeit unsuccessfully. Non-citizens are not legally allowed to contribute money or time to political campaigns/causes. Duh.🤦🏽♀️ I still deem the effort of researching it as productive, since I’m better informed now about when and how I can contribute when I’m allowed.
3. Looking into volunteering at organizations near to my heart. COVID has made this hard all year, but I’m hopeful that things are improving soon.
3. Reading amazing writing that has helped provide language for my feelings and reassured me that I wasn’t alone in them. Two favorites that I highly recommend reading are:
Habituation to Horror by Anne Helen Peterson
Your ‘Surge Capacity’ is Depleted- It’s Why You Feel Awful by Tara Haelle
4. Resolving afresh to work towards a less-waste lifestyle. We’re conscious consumers but there’s so much more that we could still do.
5. Making a daily effort to practice gratitude without the guilt! I’m allowing myself to enjoy my good health, the warmth of family, friends and a precious pet, the success of my career, the pleasurable pursuit of hobbies and yes, outfits that feel transformative enough that I can dig myself out of these lengthy feelings. ❤️
If you’ve stayed to the end, thank you for reading.❤️ I’m an overly cautious person by nature and hesitate to display vulnerability on the internet, but times such as these are a good argument to change that. If any of this resonated with you and you’d like to chat more, please feel free to reach out by email or an Instagram DM. 😊
Take care, stay well and have a good week ahead!
XO Sushmitha :)
