freewrite 4 us 11.04.2022 (Patreon)

Maybe it's just my echo chamber reflecting back at me, but it really seems like there is a mass awakening of consciousness going on. It's not just my +-10 year age group of peers, but my elders, and the kids too, they're all seeming to get it, more rapidly and readily than I've seen in my lifetime.

I've been a disobedient little shit for a long time, writing poetry about revolution and rabblerousing with my friends, so I know the kids have always been alright, and I've always had mentors who saw past the façade, taught me not to trust the 2-party system of American politics, and believed that I was telling the truth when the world felt too hostile and small for my young heart, so I know that the wisdom of time has always been developing and turning over in the souls that preceded and overlapped with mine. ("Don't you know Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer!?" my mother used to say when I wanted to watch Aladdin or Fantasia for the 3rd time in a row) But something about right now feels different.

I've seen people lose their minds. I've lost my own mind on occasion. Sometimes you find it again, sometimes you don't. It's happening en masse.

The world is going crazy.

I've been thinking a lot lately about betrayal trauma, and the truly shattering effects it can have on our fragile psyches. We've all experienced it on some scale, a conspiracy of lies. Whether it was our families, friends, lovers, role models, communities, or leaders who painstakingly constructed a narrative for us to feel protected by. Malicious or not, at some point we understood that narrative was propped up by nothing but the tension of it's own system of interlocking agreements, that dissolved into the fabric of a more holistic existence once we learned to scrutinize and breach the protective shell. The stepwise construction of absolutes, slotting into form, atop the structure of things-we-already-know.

I've said before that the truth only hurts when it reveals a lie, and the more complex the system of lies, the longer it was nurtured and allowed to grow, the more painful it is to integrate an incongruent truth. The more we build on top of a false foundation, the more destruction it causes when that foundation shifts.

So, what do we do with all of these people who always believed that they came from a legacy of heroes? The people who believed that value is ordained? The people who never thought about how money is only as powerful as they agree that it is, who aren't so sure they agree with anyone about anything anymore? The people who believed that they were good, because they always did what they were told? Who believed in the benevolence of power? The people who Earned It? The people who made a mistake? A lot of mistakes? A lot of terribly entrenched mistakes? What do we do when the illusions are dispelled as the system of interlocking agreements we've always agreed to is dissipating rapidly all around us?

People need time to grieve their illusions. Processing the trauma of a fundamental breach of trust takes time. It takes kindness, and care, and a whole community of support. People are confused. Upended. People don't know what team they're on anymore, and they're not sure the teams ever mattered, except they must have, right? A lifetime of sunk costs. The vulnerability of admitting you were wrong. In the stages of grief, acceptance comes only after a harrowing journey through shock, denial, guilt, bargaining, anger, and depression. Throngs of people are crowded and stuck on every step. You gotta keep moving, bud.

Is this the karmic backlash of entitlement? I've heard that, but it feels too nihilistic for my tastes. I want the world to be ok. I want you to be ok. I want your sister and your coworker and your uncle's friend to be ok. We are all in this together, damn it. Humanity exists inside every one of us, even the people who hurt us. Even people who have done terrible things can decide at any moment to never do something terrible ever again. To apologize and atone and try and connect with others. To work to build trust with their community. We used to send people for a long walk, alone, away from society, with nothing but their own mind and the knowledge of what they'd done to keep them company. No one to protect them. Time-out in exile. It's hard to send somebody on exile in 2022. It's hard to imagine a world where somebody wouldn't try to sell you something to get rid of that feeling of vulnerability.

Frankly, I'm less concerned with what becomes of the people who do truly terrible things in 2022. Like, the premeditated destruction of wellness and goodness on an unfathomable scale. I don't know how to deal with them, other than encourage people to say no and resist their own oppression, however they see fit at whatever cost. What I'm more concerned with is the people who are doing their best. The people who are processing oscillating realities, losing a sense of stability and normalcy, facing loss and grief for their perceptual framework in a society that has actively and passively discouraged community care for generations.

How to we soften the fall? Truly?

How do we hold all of this, together?

We are all so desperately human. Nobody can do it alone, yet we all must be willing to. Wrest turns to rest turns to wrest turns to rest.

The world is going crazy, but you gotta keep moving, bud.