Caring for Yourself While Caring about the World

Yesterday, I attended a protest at my state capitol. I stood side by side with strangers in the almost-freezing rain, my hand cramping from the effort of holding out an umbrella to make a dry patch wide enough to share. Two women tucked into the dry space, one of them accidentally brushing against my butt, then apologizing, embarrassed. I assured her that I’m willing to have my butt touched for Gaza, and we shared a laugh between our cries of “cease fire now” and “all eyes on Rafah.”

I didn’t know how much I needed to laugh. I didn’t know how much I needed to scream. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear others’ voices raised in defense of humanity. Sometimes silence is the loudest thing.

I have not been my sunny self of late. I am trying on other hues—the red of rage, the gray of grief, and a pale green wondering, how do we grow from here? I have to remind myself that I am not the paint; I am the canvas, holding color. I don’t need to be afraid of red and gray. I don’t need to be afraid to look at the world with my eyes wide open. Or rather, I don’t need to be as afraid of that as of the alternative—closing my eyes and constricting my humanity.

Since so many of you first found your way to this newsletter because you, like me, are living with long Covid or another chronic illness, I want to add this caveat: no single canvas can hold all the world’s paint. And no two canvases are the same. From late October through early January, I was in another long Covid flare. My canvas shrunk down to a small square. I had few brushstrokes to spare for the wider world. My nervous system was in fight-or-flight, and I had to be careful to tend to my grief and rage without feeding them further. Now I have more space again. I’m learning more about what’s happening in the world, involving myself more, feeling more. This isn’t a sprint, though, it’s an ultra-marathon. And by “this” I don’t just mean the genocide in Gaza. I mean every injustice. I mean every atrocity, every heartache, every calamity, and every stroke of terrible luck. Being human is hard. Being human will always be hard.

Photo by Aline de Nadai on Unsplash

The questions I keep coming back to in this moment, now that my canvas feels big enough to hold a little more paint, are these: How do I care for myself while caring for and about the world? How do I stretch the canvas without overstretching and ending up in tatters? How do I make room for the full spectrum of color? How can I bring those colors into interaction with one another in a way that adds up to something true and beautiful—rather than just a puddle of brown paint? How can I make this world one brushstroke better?

And then there are also these questions: How many others are grappling with this same swirl of emotion? How many others find the relative silence about Gaza (or climate change or transphobia or ableism or any phobia or ism) deafening? How many others are craving spaces for honest, vulnerable, generous, and generative conversations? Where are these conversations happening, and how can I join them? How can I help create and nourish more of these spaces?

After the chanting and praying and protesting was over, I chatted a bit with the other women under my umbrella. We talked about how good it felt to just make noise and hear noise. “Nobody wants to talk about what’s happening,” one of them said, “It feels like being gaslit.” And it does. And maybe we have all felt it before: that ache of caring deeply about a particular problem or injustice and then the added ache of feeling alone in that caring.

You’re not alone, dear stranger. You’re not alone, dear friend.

Maybe the cold rain of the current moment can teach us how to stand side by side. Can teach us how to treasure and share dry patches of ground. Maybe all this water raining down will mix our paints and make new colors. Maybe rain means the heavens are open. Maybe it’s a good time to pray. Maybe it’s a good time to scream. Maybe it’s time to make colorful sounds.

If you are feeling gaslit, or your head is throbbing from all the silence about things that matter and the incessant noise about things that don’t, or you are trying to find a way to show up in the world that feels true to who you are and honors both your strengths and limitations, I’d love to hear more about your experience and how you’re navigating this so far. Please share in the comments.

I’m wishing you beautiful brushstrokes in the days ahead!     

P.S. For my fellow poetry lovers out there, here’s a poem I wrote this week about Gaza and some of the same themes discussed in this post.