Fear can be paralyzing. Anger is often destabilizing. Anxiety can be a manifestation of both, an imperious force that locks us inside ourselves, smothering our sense of agency and resolve. Fear, anger and anxiety fuel apathy. They fool us into believing there’s something out there that we cannot control and are too powerless to counter, so we give up. We give up and submit to the conditions that others have created and that even if we know they’re wrong (and we know they’re wrong), we let them be, and let them fester, and let them become the reality we live under to the point we believe there is no other choice than to live under it.
But we do have choices. These choices don’t necessarily have to apply to the big bad world out there. Because choosing to change a big bad world is a daunting choice and if fear, anger and anxiety have already taken up space, they’ll very likely conspire to bring in another ally of theirs — another enemy of ours: numbness.
When we’re numb, we cease to care. And we can’t afford not to care.
We must care because living in fear, anger, anxiety and emotional numbness is to succumb to indifference, acquiesce to all that’s hurting us and hurting those we know and even those we don’t know. It is to surrender not in exchange for peace, but in lieu of fighting. It is to accept the unacceptable and embrace the unconscionable as some type of new normal.
What is normal when everything feels out of whack?
Choose to embrace your ability to make tiny choices. I made tiny choices to break the chains of paralysis, instability and stupefying discomfort brought by the fear, anger and anxiety that flooded me when a sudden Death became a defining part of my life, an indelible inflection point. I chose to forgive myself. I chose to focus on the moments of joy I experienced, as fleeting as they might have been: my daughter’s smile when I woke her up in the morning; my cat’s purring against my chest; the sunsets I watched from my kitchen in Phoenix, Arizona, where we lived when everything changed; the amplified serenade of the cactus wren that chirped from the rim of our fireplace’s chimney; the immensity of the ocean before me as I sat on my surfboard, waiting for the next wave.
Tiny choices have a way of building on one another to the point that they don’t feel tiny anymore. Like ripples on water, they reverberate concentrically from within us, one bigger than the next. They stabilize us internally so that we can have more clarity and sobriety to make the best possible choices to stabilize those who are closest to us and to help them see, as we now have started to see, that these tiny choices are the resources we have and may well be the only resources we need to create change.
Every revolution starts small. What tiny choice are you going to make today?
With love and purpose always,
Fernanda.
Ps. Paul von Zielbauer writes this really interesting Substack called Aging with Strength and he had a relatable post this weekend about the mental strength we need to start again. Give it a read!