The Proverbial Ants
I’m in my hammock, and somehow the ants got in. Despite my best efforts, they are heading up my trouser legs and I think to myself yeah, this is just about typical right now.
It’s been a difficult time, of that there’s no doubt. If you’ve had an easy time, you’re one of the lucky or privileged ones, I’m relieved for you. But for a great many people, twenty twenty is a year of eyes forced wide open to see the fragility of globalised, modern life. Common to this time are the thousand tiny losses, frustrations, obstacles, and annoyances that seem to appear every time you find solid ground. Even as our moods, stabilise we can be assured that maybe even a few moments later we will be in turbulence again. The proverbial ants.
But this is my business. It’s all of our business. Witnessing, listening, sorting through, making sense, assisting with the emotional toll. Helping the reparative work get underway internally. It’s hard and fantastic work.
There is much to be observed in the human process at this time. A lot that could be remarked upon, and in time there will be books, many books. But what is fascinating for me at the moment – what roots me to my hopeful disposition – is what happens when we are cracked open and find we are full of much more than we imagined.
This time has revealed an emotional depth and breadth that is hard to comprehend. Where we might usually pass through an average day in our lives with recognition of one or maybe two feelings, we are all now knowing what it means to be Whitman’s multitudes. The ‘rollercoaster’ is no longer exceptional, but the norm, and we are bewildered at our own volatility and changeability. We have discovered how to move from fine to catastrophic in the space of minutes, but thankfully, mercifully, how to go back again.
We, moderns, in twenty twenty are expanded emotional things. We are stretched. We are wrung out. Paradoxically, we are also mind-bendingly out of the mainframe. We are attuned. We are depthful. We are finding new fragilities, new vulnerabilities, new reserves. We are caring in new ways, we are engaging with the rest of nature as if for the first time, innovating at a mind-blowing pace and doing it all whilst the very real shards of trauma are sharpening their edges.
There is definitely trauma. If you are wondering, then yes. Trauma that will fragment and embed itself through our national and personal psyches for a long time. Fragments that will emerge as life improves and the healing begins. The trauma of having seen and experienced too much for the mind and body to deal with. The trauma that needed support it didn’t get. Some tragedies will be too much for some people and they won’t be around to tell of their despair. There is much trauma and healing work. But then there has always been. This is nothing new.
As a practitioner, I hold the coming trauma in one hand. In the other I hold the possibility of things that might emerge from our increased emotional vocabulary; from the realisation that we too are capable of intensity we’ve been lucky enough not to know in ourselves before. Never have so many people spoken so openly about their feelings. Never have so many advocated for mental health awareness. Never have so many people decided there is something for them outside, beyond consumerism, and relentless work. Never have so many hard people softened.
I see new emergences in this strange, expanded emotional landscape of our shared experience. People emerging from within themselves. People who know how to do anxiety are showing their method. Some are finding themselves equipped for this and are emboldened. Some people who have been suffering and alienated by their suffering may find themselves with a new home in the world – as other people get an insight into their worries and fears and the lives they have been living, the gap of alienation is closing. People are connecting emotionally, and they are speaking to eachother at a distance but also up close. They are also speaking with themselves.
There is new humility in the air. Somehow, we have found ourselves capable of more, and maybe there is a new anxiety of what to do with all this new knowing and experiencing of ourselves. Perhaps we now have the long-task of asking again who am I now? This itself will be fruitful, creative, shattering, exhilarating.
There is no way to square the losses and gains of this time but then not everything need to be made square and complete. Perhaps with our new found emotional quotient’s we can tolerate this level of untidiness. Instead, we’re invited to just hold the different truths in both hands and let it all be true. There are reasons to be despairing and there are reasons to be cheerful. Full stop.
When you are living the trauma, it’s not possible to see that there can be good things, and growthfulness beyond. Not everyone will make it there. Some things are so bad, so wounding, and the inequalities so deep that pain is just pain and it’s too hard to escape. We must allow grief and pain over that. We must fight even harder for those who don’t have hope. We must be active in asking the right questions that motivate change and justice. We must do this for ourselves, each other and the planet. Everything is connected. This can’t be the end of the story or a reason to give up.
I’m no positive psychologist – far from it - but as Christiana Figueres calls us to be in climate-call-to-action The Future We Choose, I am a stubborn optimist. I am well aware of the world we live in – the problems, the pain and the trauma – but I am not giving up. I am trying to water the seeds I wish to grow inside of me, and outside. As a therapist I get just enough abstraction to see that if the person in front of me can weather this storm and work through the pain, stay in touch with it, active with it, stay ‘not lost’ in it, return to nature for some necessary healing, then there is hope that they will emerge with new capacity, new sensitivity to the world. This is the place where reciprocal care for people and planet springs from. Sensitivity can leave us raw, but it also attunes us to purpose and meaning and opens us into the great bleeding but beating heart of the world.
I hold fast to this. Together we will gather up the fragments of lost lives, lost confidence, lost certainty and make something ambiguous, cautious but shimmering.
Dr Ruth Allen
Outdoor and Online counsellor/psychotherapist, writer, adventurer.
Instagram @whitepeak_ruth