Never has the global humanity of these living generations had to live with such vulnerability. We do not know what is going to happen next and anxiety is rampant in all our lives whether we deny it or not. We tend to draw on childhood reactions to things, I have found. We are more sensitive and needy and fearful and simply reacting like vulnerable beings. Anger tends to be the easiest emotion to show and all of us, in our own uniquely personal ways, are reacting. We are sharply aware of negative responses from our outer world and, in many ways, this is showing up in our own lives. Like most fearful things, we flee or fight, we resist or resent, we slump into isolationist’s numbness and sink into a fury of fitfulness.
When this goes on, and on, and on, and we are living in ebb and flow of mandates and regulations like we have never experienced before, we are shut in and tend to start to withdraw to our own “within world| of preoccupation with body emotions, mind emotions, heart emotions, and spiritual emotions. We are caretakers and we have no idea how to do that in such a world we now lie in. It can be so very overwhelming. There is no running away from this. We are in to a long-lasting different way of being.
We, women, have to be feeling disoriented. There is a wide divide within home, family, friends, associates and this gap is filled with whatever was pertinent to you once upon a ‘never ever thought this could happen’. I do not know about you, but I sometimes feel like my brain is numbing in ways that would once be blamed on age, but now, I am sure is this new way of being’s fault. Anxiety peaks in more often. A low level depression in energy levels and procrastination are showing up. We know what solitary confinement does to the human body, mind, heart and soul. We are desperately flailing at hope and wishes and dreams and survival. It is difficult even more so because we do not have any idea how long this all is going to go on. We are conditioned to thinking about the gold at the end of the rainbow. This is a storm with no rainbow.
Women have always been worriers. We have been the doers. We have been the healers and caretakers of the world, let alone our families and now we are having trouble finding ways to be nurtured back. I know that I waft between wanting to walk up to those mask-refusers and covid deniers and knocking them on the forehead and asking what kind of world they think they are doing service to. Suddenly we may be all aware of global care-taking and nurturing that we have never seen the level of before. I think part of our strengths, as women, is that we are able to feel and express vulnerability better than our masculine counterparts.
In all our imaginings, and catastrophising, we could never have dreamt this one up. As we move deeper and longer into this new way of living, perhaps we have time to dream up some new ways of taking up slack time with trying to reconnect tot hoe things that once made up your happy places. As for me, and my paintbrush, we shall go on journeys we ‘one upon a never’ thought to have to go. How do you retrieve your sense of your own ‘Happy’ place, within this Once Upon A Never?
©Carol Desjarlais 29.11.20
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