I’ve been writing this post on and off for days. I’m still not sure it’s coherent. I feel heavy with grief and weight of the world right now and finding articulate words is hard. Please forgive where I fall short.
Sometimes I wake up and look at my social media feed and I feel sick. Sick that the world is such a messed up place. Sick that I feel powerless to do anything about it.
As an Ennegram 1 (with a 2 wing no less), I want to make the world better. I want to make everything better. I’ve come to realize that my internal goal, whether I always realize it or not, is to make everything I touch be better than it was before. This may mean more beautiful or more efficient, your definition of better may vary.
That two wing means that I don’t just feel an obligation to make the world better, but to care for the people in it. This means I feel all the obligations to all the needs in all the world. That is a heavy burden to carry and it often and quickly saps my spirit to the point where I retreat just to make all the desperate needing stop.
I didn’t work out today, even though that’s been a regular part of my routine the last few weeks. Morning workout then afternoon walk with the kids or as a whole family. Mostly because #thecovid19 but also because of it’s positive effect on my mental health. Today I didn’t, and I felt it. I couldn’t stop spinning my wheels. This happens every so often, I have certain hot button issues that do this to me. (Hubby has his own, fortunately, they are different). I just couldn’t focus. I couldn’t decide if I cared too much or if I didn’t want to care about anything ever again. Call it compassion fatigue, call it emotional burnout, but it was more than I could handle.
I’m not saying we should avoid the hard conversations or run from tragedy, but we need to be mentally healthy enough to do these things.
Here are some of my go-to tools when I feel overwhelmed by the world’s brokenness.
Shut Out the Voices
Sometimes social media is a blessing, other times it’s just a chorus of shouting voices and feigned urgency. While I do find it to be a useful tool, especially right now, I also find it can be a huge time waster and creates more problems than it prevents.
When I’m dealing with the overwhelm of the world and its darkness, social media and the internet, in general, is the first thing I know I need to shut off.
Tell Someone You Appreciate Them
I have a few friends who are doing the big work. They are working with the refuge population, or providing jobs through amazing ethical businesses. In short, they make the kind of hands-on, real-life difference that I wish I could. I support them however I can, but I often feel as though my efforts will never accomplish what they do. At moments like this, I check in with one of them to say how much I appreciate them. It may not make a difference in the crisis of the day but it brings joy and relief to someone else.
Find One or Two Practical Things to Do
When I first read about slavery in the chocolate industry I couldn’t quite take it in. It dragged me into a world I wasn’t quite ready to enter, I think it’s a world most Americans and Europeans have been unwilling to see. (I felt similarly when I started my forays into the ethical clothing world).
It was easy to want to unsee it, or to ignore it. I certainly couldn't fix it singlehandedly. But I needed to do something. Click To TweetI started by buying fair-trade chocolate. When I starting drinking coffee, I bought fair-trade coffee. I began a whole long and beautiful journey into fair trade fashion that as directly impacted how I see the world and changed my perspective on consumption and even charity.
Maybe it means adding new kinds of voices to your social media feed so you can get a better diversity of perspectives on the issues on the day. Or maybe it means having some important one on one conversations. You don’t have to do everything at once, but do find a couple of places to start.
Turn to Prayer and Scripture
If you aren’t a person of faith, or you are in a different place in your faith journey than I am, this will look different for you. For me it means talking right to God about how I’m feeling, admitting my fear, and feelings of powerlessness. It means asking for direction and clarity about when and how I should act. It means digging into scripture and seeing what it has to say about my current situation. I don’t always get answers immediately but the process is as important as the outcome.
I like the encouragement to take one or two steps. The flood of problems in our world feels overwhelming and along with that is the overwhelming burden to want to do something. One or two steps is doable! Take heart because as Jesus said, “Take heart, I have overcome the world.”
Thanks for reading, Amy, and thanks for the reminder of that important scripture.