BTW the Ship Is Sinking, Just FYI, in Case You Care, NBD

Denial or despair? What about neither!

A switch has flipped, it seems. A deluge of news about global warming. Sicily on fire. The ocean on fire. Everything on fire.

I mean, it’s been happening for a while, of course. So it’s maybe less that. Probably more that the dam of denial in my brain broke. Could only hold back so much impending doom, no matter how many years I spent constructing it, no matter how good I got at patching the leaks before they caused catastrophic failure. And, so, the flood is here. Infecting my days. 

In therapy I told him I was done. Like, not done in the sense of being happy. But just…in acceptance of things being bad. I did not want to feel better anymore. I wanted to feel osmosis with the universe—if it was in trouble, then I wanted trouble in me too. I wanted to curl up in a blanket and feel like shit; walk up to the feeling of death surrounding me and confront it, touch it, say hello. At least for a bit.

There is no life without denial. And that’s fine. People learn to feel good in bad situations. That’s nice. That’s necessary. No other way to be. We’d all die without an ability to block out the bad sometimes. But denial takes work; takes energy. And so the more we must deny, the more energy we must expend. So, it makes sense, eventually, these days, with all the bad stuff, to get tired. Worn out. For the denial engine to go kaput; need repair.