Voices and Choices

“Who will we be in the face of this crisis” is probably a question you’ve heard recently. Or some version of it. It’s a question that dives deep into the core of humanity. It’s a question that is being asked by tons of different voices out there. Who will we be socially, nationally, financially, spiritually, emotionally, politically, geographically and ethically. 

Yeah. I gotta be honest. The simple intensity of that question is scaring the shit out of me. It’s raw and strikes at a very tender part of my soul. “Who will we be?” Not your run of the mill small talk topic.

Some of you know about the personal journey I’ve been on the last couple of years…typical mid-life-peri-menopausal-order-disorder-reorder-transformation type stuff. There are a few crossroads in life where a major shift must happen and that bothersome question arises: “who am I now?” Remember that time, two years ago when I got a head full of dreadlocks? Ya think I mighta been “going through something?”

So there I was, with my spiritual director and my therapist and my husband and my dear friends, working on my sense of self, my childhood trauma, my attachment wounds, my shadow and my freaking enneagram and along comes a very inconvenient global pandemic throwing the whole universe into chaos. Not that I’m being narcissistic or anything…I’m just saying, I was already working on a bunch of personal existential stuff! Now I gotta deal with this collective catastrophe?!

You may have guessed I’m a control freak. And maybe I am and maybe I’m not. I’m merely putting it out there, that I was beginning to have a very good handle on my personal New World situation, but I wasn’t interested in an ACTUAL New World. 

So, to answer the question “who will WE be in the face of this crisis,” perhaps we should start with “who will *I* be in the face of this crisis.” That question alone is frightening enough if you really start to think about it. It’s super scary, primarily because in order to truly consider it, you need to accept a very uncertain reality. And in order to accept a very uncertain reality, you need to admit a few unsavory things. It’s incredibly humbling to realize I’ve lived 47 years on this planet and have been sort of numb to the reality of the world, including the reality that I do not control anything here, except myself. I seriously thought I was running the show. 

Ouch you guys. 

Last week in “On Containers,” I wrote about being Gentle. This week my focus is on being Humble. Another extremely unsettling word. I’m not so hot at humility. I think I’m pretty great. I think my family is pretty great. I think my house is pretty great. I think my life is pretty great. But here we are. And I’m actually not so great. I’m angry. I’m scared. I’m sad. I haven’t worn anything with a zipper since March 4, I’m 800 pounds heavier and my hair looks like shit.  

Remember in “On Writing,” I mentioned that I read a book about the Holocaust? You know, to try to make me feel better because it can always be worse, right? Which is sort of a backwards way to lighten the mood. Anyway, the author crystallized the human response to adversity by separating “victimization” from “being a victim.” 

In life, every single one of us will be victimized in some way: accidents, death, abuse, war, illness, tragedy, poverty, failure, hurricanes, divorce, violence, or any other type of external event. It’s the human condition, no one is immune. And in that way, we are all victimized, no matter what. However, in the face of certain victimization, it is our choice on whether or not we become a victim in our identity. That choice is our own internal choice. Clearly, the author survived the Holocaust and she credits it to this advice from her mother, “we don’t know what’s going to happen, just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.” That simple internal shift to choosing what was in her mind every single day, saved her life.

So here we are in a global lockdown and it is a type of victimization. We are in a world of a new mysterious virus, severe sickness, death, financial disaster, social isolation, lack of resources and supplies, fear and some amount of evil is out there too. None of this is anyone’s fault. And none of us can fix it. It’s a New World. And I need to look at ME to see how I’M going to respond. What choice will I make given all the voices and choices in this mess. And in order to know what choice I’m going to make, I really need to look deeper inside of me. 

At the moment, I don’t like what I see. No, I’m not depressed. No, I’m not self-loathing or giving myself a hard time. I’m really being brutally honest about what I see when I look at me and how I am handling this victimization.

Here are some options in front of me:

1. Become a Super-Christian and keep saying over and over and over and over that God is in control. Which isn’t gonna work seeing as I’m a control freak. (You were right.)
2. Channel my cynicism, throw up my arms, say “fuck it!” with my super cute sneer and let hope and optimism die.
3. Panic.
4. Numb.
5. Move to Mars.

None of those are going to work for me for a variety of reasons. Here’s my current front-running option: to Humbly Accept and Surrender to Reality. Some of my most-hated words on earth. So I’m confident that therein lies my path. 

What actions are associated with Humbly Accept and Surrender to Reality? (I need an acronym for this to really take social media by storm…HASR? Sounds like “hazard” which is appropriate!) Anyway, what to do, what to do…

I need to accept that there are a trillion voices out there in the world right now and somewhere in the midst of the static, a middle truth, a middle ground will eventually emerge. Stay up-to-date for sure, but I gotta be careful, because the reality is that no one really knows exactly what’s going on. And that is a super scary thing to admit…hence the surrender. It just is. It just IS scary right now. 

I need to humbly accept that something terrible could happen to me and to the people I love. Serious sickness. Job loss. Death. Bankruptcy. Mental illness. It could happen to ME. Ughhhhh I don’t like those words you guys! We’ve already lost so much in the last weeks, to have to stare down an unknown amount of months of an unknown amount of losses is agonizing. 

It literally hurts. It is really hard to endure this type of wait-and-see.

Here’s what makes it a tiny bit more tolerable for me. Choosing good and simple things. Petting my dog. FaceTime dates. New recipes. White wine. TexasHold’Em. Books. Slowly chopping vegetables. Meditating. Star Wars movies. Red wine. Long walks. Watching the hosta come up out of the dirt. Taking time to comfort and care for my family. 

And I’m working on some good and not-so-simple but very internal things, like self-awareness, self-compassion, self-forgiveness and self-trust.

It helps to remind myself that I do have a choice here. Even though all this shit is really horrifying and the voices are all sounding absolutely insane and I’m sick of the words “aerosols” and “herd immunity,” sadly, this isn’t just a bad dream that we’ll wake up from, all disoriented, like “what the hell was that?!” And even though this New World is not what we saw coming…we have a lot of choices. It’s just not what we had in mind in our ever-so-brilliant brains. 

Authenticity is hard. And coming out of this crisis better than we were going into it involves pain. Two movie quotes immediately come to mind. One is the obvious “life is pain, Princess,” from The Princess Bride and the other is from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Remember how that obnoxious Eustace Scrubb gets turned into a dragon and then laments his selfishness and desperately wants the dragon skin off his body? The process of peeling the scales away is very dramatic and involves true suffering:

“The very first tear [Aslan] made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”  (Lewis)

Growth, little by little, is called evolution, and that’s what we want, right? So I’ll cook my little meals and write my little essays and torment my little family and tend my little garden. I’ll be my little me and you be your little you. And may we all find a little power in becoming a little humble.