I’ve had a lot of hopelessness this month. Blame omicron. Blame the ways I’ve coped with the knowledge that there are more children hospitalized with COVID than ever. Blame isolation and lethargy and neurochemistry. Blame disrupted sleep cycles and all of the ways that doing slightly less when you’re feeling slightly bad compounds upon itself day after day until you’re mostly just laying in bed watching old movies every minute you aren’t obligated to show up for someone else.
Just me? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I’ve got one client who primarily uses his session time to rail against the evils of late stage capitalism. Generally there’s a big emphasis in our therapeutic relationship upon the concept of paying attention to what is in our own power, working on that, and letting go of the rest. It’s all mindfulness and healthy habits and turning off the doom-scrolling news. But I haven’t been following my own best advice lately, and it felt inauthentic to preach a thing I haven’t been practicing, so I told him I felt more aligned with his worldview than I ever had before, and he gleefully exclaimed: “I’ve black-pilled my therapist!” And spent most of the rest of the session talking about how nice it was to know that everyone suffers, that there’s a sort of we’re all in this together quality to a collective trauma, even if none of us know what to do about it.
So, there’s that.
But staying in the muck really doesn’t work, does it? And I’m only talking about it because I’m pushing the damned wagon out of the muck. The wheels are turning again.
Here’s a thing I do a lot that doesn’t seem to be mainstream: when I’m despondent I do quite a lot of praying. I don’t dress it up with rituals and magic. I don’t follow the proscribed dictates of my religion of origin, or sing hymns to the divine. I don’t even do reiki when I’m truly in the doldrums. The truest thing is I stop believing in any of the ways we dress up spirituality, or even in divinity itself.
Instead I talk to a thing I’m not really sure is there, and I phrase it as plainly and as angrily as I feel it to be true.
A couple of months ago a spiritually minded friend asked me what goes through my head when I meditate, and I said to her: “Well, generally I turn on some tibetan singing bowl music, and I sit upright on a cushion on my bed, and I breathe deeply and intentionally, and then I exclaim “WHY GOD, WHY?”
We had a good laugh, but I wasn’t really joking. That is the tenor of much of my prayer during a pandemic. This week it went something like this:
“God, universe, whoever the fuck, whatever the fuck you are, if there’s a you there anymore, if you aren’t some mad watchmaker who set the gears in motion and abandoned us, if you aren’t some cosmic joke, if you aren’t some random collection of accidental atoms dividing and matter colliding, if there’s any there there, if you are any good at all, if you aren’t pure evil—if you’re actually a thing I can bring my prayers to—well, fuck, listen—I don’t believe in your goodness anymore. I don’t. I’m not sure that this whole existence thing is more good than bad. I’ve lost faith that any of this is worth doing. It seems like the cost of living exceeds its merits. And, well, here’s my hope. I figure if you’re worth anything at all, if you track with any of the gospels, you’re supposed to forgive even that. You’re supposed to love me even when I don’t believe in you. You’re supposed to be able to contain my wrath and my disappointment and my bitterness. So, here’s my fucking prayer: love me anyway. Show me goodness anyway. Because I’m done expending effort and getting fuckall in return. I’m going to stop trying. I’m done trying to prove my worth. Show me goodness anyway.”
And then, this week, after I sent out that scorched-earth of a Capricornian missive, I had a whole lot of complicated conversations. A lot of you saw yourselves in what I wrote. A lot of you thought I was writing specifically about you. And that was partially true and partially untrue—I was writing about a societal pattern, and the way it triggers my own neurotic abandonment stuff, and a recognition that with my specific set of complex needs it really doesn’t make sense for me to keep showing up for the kind of relationships that don’t feel good.
And some of you were like “I see myself in this and I want to try to do something different,” and I said a whole lot of “Sure, that’s a great intention, but you’ve got to be on board for the fact that you’ll be swimming upstream because there’s not a lot of trust here right now.” And that was edgy as fuck. I don’t have conversations like that. And it went well anyways. It was fine anyways.
I also had two knock-down drag out fights with two of the most important people in my life. I’m going through something, clearly. Some shifting into increased authenticity.
Here’s what it feels like—I’ve gathered a whole lot of tools that theoretically teach us the right thing to say or the proper way to act. Active listening, authentic relating, "I" statements. We know these things. I have these frameworks in mind, and using them all the time feels like pretzeling myself into some version of a person that’s going to be slightly more lovable and slightly less unruly than the reality that is me. And I bend and I twist and I bend a little more, and it feels tense and uncomfortable and I keep imagining that if I use one more tool or bend just right next time suddenly I’ll get the results I’m after, but instead of getting the results I’m after I’m all twisted up and sideways and annoyed that nobody can see me. But nobody can see me because I’m not really there. I’m pretzel-Hannah. Performative Hannah.
I love the fights I had this week. Is that a horrid thing to say? Maybe. I don’t really care. They were wonderful. I said a thousand things I’ve been suppressing. I said exactly what I meant. I didn’t mince words. When I found responses annoying I was honest about that too. When apologies weren’t good enough I said that too. I haven’t done that in years. Generally speaking I bite my tongue and I listen to other people and then I have this whole damn process around privately transmuting resentments. It creates peace. It creates amiability. But it’s damned lonely. Everything is over-processed, the truth comes out at a totally different time than it’s experienced, and out of sync it never quite lands.
I’m not recommending the method I’ve gone with lately. It was messy as hell.
I treated these people the same way I was talking to God in my faithless prayer. “I don’t believe in this anymore. I’m not sure there’s any goodness here.” And well, they loved me anyway. There was goodness anyway.
And I don’t know that I deserved it. I’m not sure deserving is really a thing in this world. Plenty of the best people never get their due and plenty of the worst of humanity run around with much more than their fair share.
But I feel incredibly lucky, in this moment. Full of faith and hope and love for humanity in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I feel like—well—maybe like a toddler must feel after they throw a tantrum and they’re responded to with love and understanding rather than reciprocal scorn.
I don’t really know why people love me, but they do, some of them.
And so there’s enough here to keep going. There’s enough to carry on.
And I’ll keep getting out of bed and seeing my clients and writing things even when I can’t see the point in them.
I suppose that’s a certain kind of faith.
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