I want to offer that for me, the anxiety of this time only hooks me and holds me tightly in its grip when I am trying to gold onto an idea of what things should be. When structures are allowed to define me and what I mean in this world. When the energy of others - my child, my friend, my mother, a stranger speaking to me at the checkout - overwhelms my capacity to feel myself in the center of it all, I start to feel lost. When I feel beholden to the survival of others; when I feel like I have to earn love; when I slide into the white skin suit that is built of imaginations and expectations and fear - I am not me. I am just afraid. I can play act having it together, and things can mostly be fine. But when I have lost hold of the center, when I lost my north star, the true falsity of that world crashes down.
When you are a highly sensitive person, and if you are tuned in to others, it's easy to let the boundaries disappear and to get emotionally and energetically enmeshed, even with someone you know only casually. The anxiety that creeps through and takes over comes because you have obliterated the self; you have not nurtured your own spark because you are tending to the needs and feelings of others. That spark needs to be held and nurtured as an essential part of being in the world. Though it's easiest to say no to yourself, saying no to others and demanding the slice of space in which you can feel and nurture your own fire is a gift you can bestow upon the world and upon all whom gather to you for the warmth your healthy fire brings them.
Put down the news. The world will turn without you. It's a cold reality, but it is reality. You need not hold more than your world. Your immediate world. Your children. Your home. That's it. That's what is in this moment, where your fire burns.
Trust that those you love will hold themselves in safety and care, and know that you have no control. Family too far away to touch is connected to you by the threads of destiny, but you cannot control their lives as if those threads were reigns. Your mind and heart can send tendrils of thought and emotion out into the world to energetically connect them to you; let those vibes be golden arcs of healing light, not fear or blame or wishes to control fate.
Center down. Commit yourself to your life. Imagine what you want to be, on a daily basis, and do it. Here is time. Let go of expectations. Yours and others'. Survival is enough.
In these moments, days, weeks, months ahead, fully feel the hidden gifts of time and perspective that this outbreak has brought. Treat the days as holy. Be in the moment and be with your people. Things will come back, and they might be incredibly different, and that might be really wonderful. This thing we are experiencing doesn't care even a whit about who you are. In any sense. It is a new living creature with a deep and ancient heart. We have the great advantage of understanding what a virus is, what it does, how it spreads; we have no power over this tiny beast right now except to enforce our boundaries, and try to refuse to be its host. We collectively hold our lives in our hands. But each person can only do exactly what they can. We have no control of others, whether it is in reactions, desires, or even life and death.
It's a huge moment. It feels heavy and ripe and makes me curious about how things will go moving forward. My anxiety is manageable mostly though, because I know I am not crazy. I know that things are profoundly not OK. But I know that my obsessions and spiraling, in its best case scenario, just prolongs the anxiety I feel about things that are probably coming, or lets me worry about what is real and ten thousand other cuts that may come along the way.
I have given up social media. I have given up traditional news. I am aware of the world, and feel profoundly of the world, but am most comfortable in my disconnect right now. Unless it is in my control, I am putting it down. Anxiety and grief and rage and fear are all absolutely appropriate responses to what is an incredibly scary, unprecedented, and terrifying time. Feel them, let them out. But remember that they are also poison, and holding them will eat you from the inside.
Things are terrifying and unknown right now, and it feels like there is a crack in everything. But remember, that's how the light gets in.
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