Tracking Our Future: Storytelling and Survival in the Age of Catastrophe.
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I know it sounds like such a cliché, so easy, too easy really, to blame it all on He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
Surely everything that has gone so very, very wrong in our world, has its roots hundreds, if not ten thousand years ago. Still, The Election was the last blow of the logger’s axe against the trunk of the 1,000-year-old juniper, the last raindrop that broke the dam, the last poof of dust through the prairie home’s window.
The Election hit me like a large brick in the face, leaving me stunned and in denial until the inauguration, which I was so sure would somehow be avoided. Then, after the inauguration, I was so sure it would be undone. Impeachment, resignation, fatal illness, something, anything.
Once I moved past the denial stage of grief, I kicked into high gear, giving talks about how crucial it is that we proceed with our resistance with strategic, nonviolent, action. That we not freak the frack out and do things that would ultimately work against our own, desired, ends.
And that felt good, like I was doing something.
To a point.
Despair regularly grabbed me by both feet and yanked me hard, down into the murky depths like the feared great white shark hungry for a little brown, middle-aged snack. Tender, juicy, and a little too frail to fight back. At these times, I did very little to Resist, to improve our lot, when clamped in the shark’s pearly whites.
Darn! I thought. I had made such progress on healing from old traumas, on learning to put one foot in front of the other, locate the silver lining, and practicing gratitude, gratitude, gratitude!
Yet somehow, this time, I couldn’t quite fully clear the surface, ever. I swam as hard as I could towards the blue-tinged light of day above me, using all the skills, strength, and hard-earned gritty resilience I have acquired over the years. And now, well over a year later, I still found myself thrashing upwards towards the promise of oxygen-rich air that my lungs so ache for. And not making it.
Then my friend Alicia, county commissioner in our slightly populated corner of New Mexico, invited me to dinner. She said, “I think our country is suffering from mass-PTSD.”
And she’s right. I felt such a relief at her ingenious assessment. Her observation felt, true, accurate, helpful.
We’re a mess as a nation, and as a world. The same political, social and environmental challenges we face are echoed everywhere on our one and only home planet.
The specter of climate change is the winner in the Catastrophe Derby, followed by the epidemic of mass shootings here and perpetual war-mongering abroad. Our economy is as fragile as a butterfly newly emerged from its cocoon, since no significant change was made since millions of hard-toiling Americans bailed out the lending companies 10 years ago. We sank while they swam.
So many people I talk to are struggling with depression, anxiety, or chronic anger, even as we are organizing to beat many bands. The World Health Organization reports an 18 percent rise in depression worldwide since 2005.
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health reports that depression has increased in the US “…from 2005 to 2015, from 6.6 percent to 7.3 percent. Notably, the rise was most rapid among those ages 12 to 17, increasing from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 12.7 percent in 2015.”
Despite the Western world’s penchant to regard an individual’s woes as being solely the result of processes internal to that individual, and to disregard that individual’s familial, societal, environmental, national and global context, it’s not that hard to make the connection between larger events and our personal reactions to them.
Action is the antidote to despair, as Joan Baez famously said, and our despair has morphed into a fire under our collective asses, shooting spurts of adrenaline through our systems, activating our fight response, but also, too often, our flight and freeze responses as well.
It makes perfect sense that so many of us feel overwhelmed, alienated and afraid, and all too often either frenetically overreact or sit staring sadly into space.
Perhaps our fear-seared psyches are acting as our psychological immune systems. Maybe the sensation of alarm, the sense that all has gone terribly awry, is not something that we need to resist, deny, or medicate ourselves out of, but something to be embraced wholeheartedly.
Let us carefully hold our dear, damaged selves, and look unflinchingly into our own washed-out, darkly-circled eyes. If we don’t see the full impact of this star-studded horror show, how can we know which shadowed doors to open and which to avoid?
Why? Why would I urge you to look, and look hard and long, when we want so much to look away?
Because we are still wired up neurologically in virtually the same way we were 100,000 years ago, when we lived and traveled in small nomadic groups, hunting game and gathering plants for food and medicine. And though they have morphed a great deal in their particular expression, our survival instincts are still essentially the same.
What was the most crucial skill needed for survival, back in our hunter-gatherer past?
The ability to tell an accurate story based on the available evidence.
If one correctly identified tracks, scat and other signs, one could also precisely predict where and when one might intersect with the maker of those signs, such as a deer, and kill the deer for food, thus enabling the group to survive and procreate. If one correctly remembered where the raspberries ripened and at what time of year, the group could have raspberries. Or walnuts, or yucca blossoms, or mesquite pods…
Why did Alicia’s simple observation that we are experiencing mass-PTSD bring me a feeling of relief instead of more horror? Because it resonated as true. It served as a solid reference point from which to devise a plan of action.
The constant clamoring of complimentary and conflicting story-making in which we are now engaged, is our attempt to make sense of it all. These efforts are far from academic. Our very survival depends on our ability to tell this tale accurately, then use that story to intersect with the means to endure.
Whether the story is about deer, raspberries, Big Oil, or gun control, the best, most correct, storytellers can show us the way forward to the most likely ways for us to survive.
So let’s not medicate ourselves out of these horrible feelings. Let us welcome them, cuddle them, get to know them, and listen to their insights. Let us de-escalate them just enough so they inform us without debilitating us, fire us up without burning us out, inspire visions of how we might proceed without launching us out into airless, hallucinatory heights.
I’m so miserable I want to crawl out of my skin every single day. Living alone, it’s easy for me to think it’s just me, that I am just a broken, pathetic individual, unable to fully rise to the vast need of these wholly unique times.
But then I talk to our Commissioner, Alicia. Or read my friend Susana’s writing on embracing her uncured depression. Or see another friend juggling her climate activism with the care of a little boy whose mother has collapsed into mental illness. And another friend perform stand-up as a means to cope.
How do we choose what to do and how to do it? How do we stay aware enough to know how to track the solution to this crisis or that, yet not become so alarmed that our critical thinking centers shut down and we turn into reactive reptiles? Or freeze in terror? It’s a moving target, and we each need to find the right balance for ourselves in each moment.
We can remember to breathe, rest enough, forgive ourselves our failings, paint, run, sing, dance, cry, take long showers and let the tension pour out of us and down the drain. Whatever works.
At the same time, remember that we are in this together. You are not alone. We can support each other as we stumble through the bracken, searching for signs, calculating a way forward.
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Laura Ramnarace, M.A. is an Indian-American who writes about whatever currently gets her goat, raises her ire, or twists her undies. She is not opposed to Western medicine, but thinks that it could use a little healthy competition from other, much older, health and wellness traditions from around the globe.
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