Woke up today, another day of feeling anxiety and working to tame it. It would be easy to say I've succumbed to exactly what "they" — meaning the haters, the authoritarians, the shortsighted — want.
Yesterday I read yet another opinion piece, by a salty male making the same now tired claim that "men can't be women." In a prominent newspaper. That gets read worldwide. They use easy logic, like "you can't just wish yourself to be a cat, so why do you think you can wish yourself to be a woman?"
It is tempting to argue with that, because it is so easy to poke holes in the stupidity of the logic. To demonstrate all the faulty assumptions that go into it. That time isn't now.
Now is time to say: if you hurt because of what's going on in the world, if you grieve for the loss of seeming progress, for the ugly backsliding that seems to be going on, you're not alone.
I've done 14+ years of intensive personal development. It might be tempting to think that would somehow make me immune, almost superhuman or something. I am not. I am the same flawed human as we all are, with worry, anxiety, guilt, anger, and more.
I am grieving. Grieving for the loss of a dream that I had of all this extremely hard work and sacrifice I've put into building a business pay off into an "easy" retirement. I see my elders — parents and friends, traveling around the world in their retirement, enjoying the fruits of their working years — and ask "what hope do I have of experiencing that?"
I knew all along that the hope was thin. Not because of any deficiency on my part, but on the general unsustainability of it all. Yet despite that, I worked hard and stayed optimistic. Now, that specific optimism is dying. I'm grieving for it.
I'm sure that is how every generation of people who faces a changing world, who wakes up to the new collective reality thrust upon them, feels. I now truly know what that's like. And that's where all that work may be paying off. While it doesn't remove the pain, it does allow me to recognize the pain, recognize the cause, and work to release it.
It helps me to accept reality as it is, rather than continuing to fight it, deny it, wish it away. Those were energy draining. It allows me to slowly build a new form of optimism. It's a tiny seedling as of yet. It's a form of optimism that says: this is a time where I can shine. Where others can shine. People who care, people who will strive and even fight if necessary, to build something better.
Not shining due to luxury vacations or fancy cars or any of that stuff that the older generations sold us as the be all and end all of life. Shining because I have something to contribute. Something of value to give, in the hopes that eventually "this too shall pass," that on the other side of it we can build something better.
Because that's the way it always is. As horrendous as many past upheavals in human society have been, once they are done, most have led to eventual improvements in things on the other side. It may take far longer than I want to get there. I may not be there to see it, yet I hope the next generation, my kids, my friends, my team and clients are.
I know it is worth doing. I know that, if I decided to hide, to withdraw, to just cling to the old dream that things will make a magical return to normal — whatever that means — that I would forever feel diminished. A life of getting by, of diminishment, even if longer, is not worth it. It's not real. I played that game far too long already, and it diminished me. I am done with that game.
And maybe that's another payoff of all that hard self work. It is in having the ability to face collective reality on its own terms, without an unnecessary, energy draining fight. By avoiding that fight, it saves my energy for the true fight, which is to envision something better for myself, my kids, this world, in spite of what is happening in the reality around us.
The true fight is to hold that image, of a world more positive, and to act on it whenever or wherever possible, despite cyclonic headwinds pushing back.
I am human. You are human. We are strong, but only when we face reality and decide, deep down and with conviction, to do something to make it better.
