Tag: despair

Progress Washed Away During Lockdown

by hkatz, posted in Struggling Striving Healing

Along with the threat of the disease itself, one of the great challenges of the COVID-19 crisis is how it has washed away people’s progress in different areas.

– Savings eroded or gone.
– Businesses run to the ground.
– Carefully planned projects that need to be abandoned, maybe never to be picked up again.
– People who have just started to become healthier in some way, physically or mentally, only to find themselves slipping (or crashing).

One person I know who has social anxiety made efforts in recent months to get out of the house more. She started attending meetings of some local groups that share her hobbies. Since the lockdown, she has been struggling in isolation, and the gains she made regarding her anxiety feel largely illusory, as if they happened to someone else.

(Although there are video tools for connecting with people, and these tools may be better than nothing, they aren’t a substitute for in-person interaction. I’ve found this to be the case myself. Also, video calls can be mentally draining – the Harvard Business Review offers some advice on how to deal with “Zoom fatigue.”)

To the frustration or despair that may result from the COVID-19 crisis – including its social and financial effects – there are obviously no simple answers. It can be stressful enough if your daily schedule has changed or you had to cancel certain plans. But I’m thinking now about people whose hold on the world may have become more fragile because of the crisis. People cut adrift, with relationships severed, major opportunities lost, and progress seemingly reversed.

One thing that may help (at least a little) is to provide yourself with written reminders – in a journal, for example – about who you are, what you have done, what you hope for, and how you promise to give yourself time to get through this day by day. When there’s a massive amount of stress in your life, it’s easy to lose sight of many things, to disregard yourself, and to forget your capabilities and potential. Your current emotions may be so terrible and overwhelming that you can’t think of how they’ll ever end, even though they won’t last forever. You may not be able to see how your current situation could ever improve, but you don’t have all the answers (even though despair may offer you answers that seem definitive).

Reminding yourself of who you are can also help you remember the ways in which you’ve been healing and the ways you have met particular goals in the past. Even if you’re feeling lost now, you aren’t starting from absolutely nothing. You may be struggling with the types of problems that have dragged you down before, but you bring with you more wisdom from your previous experiences and some evidence of how things can improve – if not immediately, then one day. You’ve managed to do it before. Will it be harder the second (or third) time around? What will restarting look like? Are you trapped? Write down your thoughts, and keep your thoughts flexible. The answers may change over time. You don’t know for sure.

If you’re keeping a journal, and you don’t think you can write anything about yourself at the moment, then maybe just write today’s date. Then tomorrow’s date. Maybe a short line with each entry. I’ve done that on days when I didn’t think I could write more, and sometimes that’s how you mark the day and step forward into the next one.

Keeping a journal doesn’t put food on the table. It doesn’t magically restore a lost job or shattered career. But if it helps in any way – helps you fight off bouts of despair or cope with the feeling that your life is horribly unreal – it could be worth a try. In ways you aren’t able to picture clearly or even conceive of at the moment, you may be able to regain at least some of what you’ve lost or discover or create something new.

(It’s also worth mentioning that you can rant on paper if you need to. Some people sit for 10-15 minutes and write down their anxieties, their rage, their grief, and then tear the paper up into tiny bits and throw it away. This exercise could become an outlet for releasing some of what’s in you, removing and destroying it so it possibly has less of a hold on your mind.)

Deliberately Choosing Life, Every Day (A Response to a Hoagland Essay)

by hkatz, posted in Readings, Struggling Striving Healing

Edward Hoagland’s essay, “Heaven and Nature,” deals with a topic people usually don’t want to think about: suicide. His meditation on suicide may apply to anyone, including someone who doesn’t – at least outwardly – appear troubled by anything.

Our faces are not molded as if joy were a preponderant experience. (Nor is a caribou’s or a thrush’s.) Our faces in repose look stoic and battered, and people of the sunniest temperament sometimes die utterly unstrung, doubting everything they have ever believed in or have done.

Hoagland tempers his bleak discussion with a matter-of-fact tone. And in the bleakness of his essay, there are some kernels of light.

He discusses what it takes to negotiate the cracks and fissures of life. Sometimes it’s a matter of not dwelling on misery. Love and prayer are other answers. However, he doesn’t present them as a quick fix. Meaning to say, if you pray, you need to work out, over time, what prayer means to you, what you believe in, what you think can sustain you. This may not be the same from one year to another, or one decade of your life to another. Similarly, with love – habits of love are key to making love powerful. You need to stay open to “new and sudden insights” or engage in a “long practice” of love. And this applies to love in different forms, not limited to romance.

He also talks about the urge to achieve a unity with something larger, to transcend the self, and for nature itself to be wedded to Heaven. This unity is also something to work towards actively, and you aren’t guaranteed complete freedom from harrowing doubt.

Just to be perfectly clear, this isn’t a self-help essay. It isn’t an easy read either, and Hoagland isn’t doling out solutions (and especially not one-size-fits-all solutions). Reading this essay is a challenge, and it may not be for everyone in every frame of mind.

What helps keep me alive is a belief in the meaning of life and holiness of it. Not to regard people as sentient sacks of meat or bags of water, as organic trash. Seeing the moments of life, day to day, as holy and meaningful requires regular practice and considered choices. It also involves flexibility and adjustments over time. To not let myself dry up spiritually is a matter of consistent effort, and I do fail at it. But, when I fail, I have to remind myself that I haven’t reached my end. Instead, I need to keep walking through that desert, experiencing the desert and finding meaning in it (which isn’t the same thing as finding happiness). And staying open to the possibility that the landscape will change or that I’ll find things in the desert that are possibly good.

I write this as someone who’s religious. Religion itself is a regular practice, a deep wrestling. It isn’t a source of pat answers, though the practice of it may become stale and crumble into clichés. Regardless of what religion you practice – or whether you even consider yourself religious – you need to find what it is that sustains you. And then sustain it through repeated choice, through practices that you may need to change as the years pass. What are your relationships with others, with the world, with what transcends you? If you don’t know, keep thinking about it. Keep searching, and be patient. Keep choosing life.

It’s interesting how an essay that deals with a grim topic can bring out a response that affirms life, but it had that effect on me, even with an awareness of the doubting, the fear, the darkness.

Surprising insights from Neelix’s struggle in Mortal Coil

by hkatz, posted in Struggling Striving Healing

I recently watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called “Mortal Coil,” where one of the characters, Neelix, suffers a loss of faith and becomes suicidal.

During the episode, he dies on a dangerous mission and is resuscitated hours later. Because he remembers nothing from the moment he died to the moment he was restored to conscious life, he starts thinking that his faith in an afterlife has been based on a lie.

NeelixChakotayMortalCoil

Years ago, his family was murdered in a war, and he long believed that he would see them again in this afterlife. The realization that he might not – that there’s nothing there – wounds him deeply to the extent that he questions the meaning of life and the point of living.

There are two things that really stuck with me from this episode:

When Neelix reaches the point of wanting to kill himself, Chakotay, the ship’s First Officer, tries to convince him not to. After Neelix speaks with certainty of what he now knows about his beliefs, Chakotay says,

“You don’t know. You’re not there yet.”

To me, those were the most powerful words in the episode. Chakotay was telling Neelix that he had rushed to a premature judgment about his life and faith. The crisis he was going through wasn’t an end state. It could be the start of something new, including an even stronger faith or a deeper understanding of his life’s purpose.

The second thing that stuck with me was how the episode affirms the need for relationships, community, and a sense of purpose to help make life worth living. Recovery from despair is much more difficult when someone is adrift. Neelix is re-focused at the end on what he does for the ship, the meaning of his work, and his important relationships with others, including his goddaughter.

The ending might be too tidy (and on Star Trek in general, the writers often struggled to understand and portray effects of trauma and the work of psychologists or therapists), but at least there’s an emphasis on an ongoing process over quick solutions. Neelix will continue working through his crisis with Chakotay. His relationship with his beliefs and with other people, both the living ones and the dead, aren’t static. They can change in various ways over time; they can deepen, become stronger, or be perceived with new understanding. Maybe he won’t lose his beliefs permanently. Maybe he will find a new way to understand his life and its meaning and take nourishment from how he lives among people. It’s an ongoing process, this journey full of questions, this struggle with its crises, and this ability to change. He hasn’t reached a definitive end.

(Image credit: Memory Alpha.)