FEAR OF THE FUTURE

It's so easy to fear the future right now.  Especially if you're a person with empathy and you keep up with the news.  

We fear for women and girls of child-bearing age.  Don't we wish that no person alive ever needed an abortion?  But that has never happened.  

We fear for school children and churchgoers and Black people and anyone simply living their days peaceably until they become the next victim of gun violence.   We fear for Ukrainians still defending their homeland.  We read that fifty migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio today.  What have I missed?  What comes tomorrow?  And if there's sorrow within your own family, how much harder then to cope.  When my mother was dying of cancer, as I shopped for fresh night clothes for her, I couldn't stop crying.  Grief can be brutal.  

What might we do?  Experts say that any act of self-love helps our mental health.  This could be noticing and accepting how we feel.  "I feel sad.  That's OK," we might say to ourself. Or angry.  That's OK too.  Or hopeless.  "Others do too.  I'm not alone in my feelings."  Perhaps I need sleep, or a walk outdoors, or a break from the news.  Or to talk with others or help in some way. There's always a way to help.  Or to give it to God if we can.

This writing I am doing right now is self-care for me. Many say that writing is emotional processing, much like talk-therapy I think. 

It's true that not every storm is followed by a rainbow.  There's debris, downed limbs, flooded homes and clean-up.  But it is also true that after every storm we clean up together.  It's never me against the world.

We can even use our negative emotions as reminders to take care of ourselves.  Something that triggers a PTSD response can help me remember that I haven't been defeated before.  Devastated I'll admit, but not defeated. 

Right now my personal life is good and there's that disconnect, living on two levels: the one that makes the nightly news and the one that makes dinner.  You may be the same, that's the least we can hope for.  So we go forward, trying to avoid overthinking and to accept what we cannot control.  And all the while looking for ways to take care of ourselves, small and large.  A cup of tea, a vacation, play-time, letting love blossom, talking with a friend, spending time or money working for good.  Maybe even looking at history and knowing that the McCarthy Era ended.  So did the Vietnam War.  We've endured 9/11 now, and January 6.  Post-Roe will not be the same as pre-Roe.  There are good people in government too.  

Let's do the next right thing, as the psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) originally said, and our fear of the future will be manageable too.  

In peace, Nina Naomi