@casspea I'm pulling this out of replies because I want to give a serious response to it, because this is very important to me. I will start by asking a question that will initially appear unrelated.
Do you know why it is so hard to leave an abusive relationship?
I didn't. I understood, like most people do, that people don't get into abusive relationships because they are stupid or made clearly avoidable stupid decisions, but I didn't *understand*—meaning that I couldn't really imagine myself getting into that situation. I had a strong sense of my own worth and I knew all the signs of an abusive relationship, so I just...innocently figured I would see that sort of thing coming.
[Narrator: She did not see it coming.]
What I didn't know was WHY smart people end up in abusive relationships—really, I was mistaken about the whole nature of wisdom and intelligence and knowledge. I saw those things as stable characteristics of myself or any person, facts, failing to realize that everything, everything, everything takes up energy.
Even knowing takes up energy.
Your body and mind evolved to account for this fact. Your body and mind evolved to allocate your energy based on your needs—in order to keep you alive. Have you ever had a panic attack? I have. That's your body pouring all your energy into preparing for whatever action is necessary to face the threat.
Certain things are necessary for a human to feel safe—to be safe. Steady access to food. Shelter. Privacy. Bodily integrity. Stability. Support from other humans. In terms of energy, it is incredibly costly to not be safe.
Hold onto that, because it's important. It is incredibly costly to not be safe.
You said in an earlier reply that my post sounded like I had never lived in an impoverished region. I find that offensive, and here's why: It is incredibly costly to not be safe. If you are just one accident, one mistake, one sickness, one stroke of bad luck away from losing your house, your health, your stability, your family's supper tomorrow, you are not safe and your body knows. And this is why poverty kills you. Slowly. Every day of your life.
So this is how a smart person gets into an abusive relationship: You live with this person, and it's okay right now. If things can just stay okay for a while...you can make it. You just need things to keep being okay, because you are not safe you're tired, and you need a little time to recharge after the last time you had to talk and set a boundary with them, because you are not safe that conversation was stressful and took a lot of energy.
You set a boundary. And it takes a lot of energy to explain to them what they did to hurt you and why, but you think they get it, finally.
And then they push that boundary. And you have the conversation again. And things are okay.
And then they push.
And the less privacy, the less security, the less you have—the more they encroach upon your basic needs—the costlier it becomes to set and enforce boundaries, because you have less and less energy left to change or interrogate your situation.
And they start raising the cost. Pricing you out of the boundaries you have already set. You can't afford to defend those boundaries anymore, so you back off, ceding more and more of your safety to them. And not being safe is incredibly costly.
You were a smart person. Now you're too tired to think. You don't have the energy to do anything, anything, anything except survive, and you can't even see your situation for what it is, because you are expending all your energy trying to stop it from getting worse.
Now, I guess the idea of people being terrified all the time about climate change and thinking about dying and other people dying and losing everything they value and love and not having a future for themselves or their children (if they were so bold as to have them) is really, fucking, gratifying in the sense that it means they feel the gravity and seriousness of the situation the appropriate amount. I guess. Awesome!
But terrified people are not very good at solving problems because being shitting-your-pants terrified all the time makes you stupid (for reasons that are not your fault)
And terrified people are incredibly resistant to change because adjusting to change takes energy and they don't HAVE energy because literally all their energy is going toward the fucking monumental task of staying fucking alive
And people that have KNOWN their whole goddamn lives, in the marrow of their bones, that they don't have a future, cannot imagine the future.
We have to imagine the future.
We have to.
Have you ever had a panic attack? Like a bad panic attack? Have you ever fully, truly, deeply believed you were going to die? I have. I was 10. Panic attacks are supposed to last 20-30 minutes max but I guess my body wants to live more than most because I have 2-3 hours of it in me. And yet there is a point at which you lie down and wait for it to kill you, because you can't hang on anymore. Because you can't DO anything.
And you can learn to be resilient! I sure fucking did! I learned to shove on through that shit like a zombie, indestructible, completely unable to locate or name my own discomfort screaming through my body like an air raid siren! I pushed through! Except I wasn't moving 'through' anything! I was just Dying Physically!
This is to say that the gut-wrenching certainty of facing a future ruled by unspeakable horrors is quite familiar to me thankyouverymuch, and it wasn't exactly fertile ground for developing a "solutions" mindset.
The idea that not being in despair about the earth means you must not love it? Well, that just about boils my blood.
Because I did love the Earth when I was a little kid, but all throughout my whole teenage years I never thought of doing any kind of volunteer work or getting involved in my local community or even LEARNING about it that much. Why?
Because I thought we were all fucked anyway, so why bother. Because I was already dealing with my own shit and I couldn't bear taking that grief upon my own shoulders. I HATED my hometown, hated it, never had the tiniest bit of love for it in my heart, and honestly in my mind it was worthless, because the old growth had been cut down and the wolves and bison were gone and housing developments were built, and I was convinced i would live to see it get worse, and worse, and worse, see more woods get destroyed and my beloved creek be bulldozed and polluted, and I couldn't just go out and pour my heart into something I knew was doomed to be fucking obliterated anyway. I was trying to fucking survive.
And that's what I saw everyone else doing. Mourning. Bemoaning how we were going to watch tigers go extinct and the forests burn. Nervously joking about the unlikely possibility that we would make it to 50.
I fucking grew up in the Bible Belt, surrounded by people who thought the Earth was nothing more than a piece of tissue to be crumpled up and thrown away! My parents grew up having nightmares about nuclear bombs raining down on their hometown and so did I! The only stories about the future I can think of have zombies, fascism and/or child death tournaments! We are not exactly encouraged to give ourselves gentle things in our dreams of what tomorrow may bring.
So i was a creative writing major for a while and as a result read a lot of literary poetry, and if you don't know what literary poetry is, it's poems by someone who has a MFA or PhD in poetry and are published in very fancy self-important journals.
Anyway once upon a time I read this poem
And I wasn't exactly shining rays of sunshine out the crack of my ass in those days but this shitty poem snapped me out of my pessimism. Oh God, I thought, I may write edgy and depressing shit sometimes but I'll never put a cold wet snot rag like this into the world.
Ants? Ants are going to go extinct? Fucking ants? I want to punt this writer out of the solar system for the hubris of that alone.
It's so...self centered, this mindset the poem shows. So self-pitying. Poor little me! Humans are the virus and I'm so sad that we're such a disease upon the earth! Boohoo!
And it seriously got me thinking: Do these projections and predictions actually motivate anyone to take action? Do they do anything except satisfy some self-indulgent urge to wallow in depression and misanthropy?
This poem doesn't emerge from love; that's what struck me at the time. The author doesn't love the Earth if she lacks the basic curiosity to learn what algae even is (photosynthetic! Not found in caves!) nor to learn of the wonders of the world of ants (definitely not going to go extinct). Her projected future is bizarre—why would humans live in caves? Why are cockroaches the only animal expected to survive? Is she confusing climate change with a nuclear war?
But it's the air of admonishment that gets me. The bold insinuation that people are "doing nothing" while the Earth dies non-specifically.
Lady, trees fucking died for the paper this sludge was printed upon.
People think instilling dread is doing something. It's not. People think cultivating despair is doing something. It's not. People think that fear, fear of a thousand horrible futures shown to us by every imagination on every screen and page, will be a goad to jab people toward some unclear but presumed-accessible "action," but this ongoing fear and grief and despair over our world DOES NOTHING except deplete what meager reserves of energy people have left after being alive in the world these days.
My generation is constantly desperate for numbness, rest, and escapism because living gets more and more untenable all the time. Have you noticed Fascism? What about the economy? Have you seen the people around you just constantly shutting themselves down to avoid thinking about a future that feels hopeless?
What is the expectation? That people feel terrified forever? Terror isn't fuel, it's the act of burning up all your fuel at once. After your energy runs out, something arrives to replace terror. For most people today, that something is apathy and despair, because it's easiest.
We need solutions to the climate crisis. We need community building. We need ideas, we need WORK, steady unsexy boring slow work, we need commitment to the work and to our communities, commitment that is only driven by love and genuine investment, and fear will not create these things.
Without hope, we have NOTHING.
I have hope because I believe there is hope, and I have hope because I fucking have to. I came to the place where I could no longer sustain being terrified, and I had to choose.
I can't exist in a world this scary, I thought. I can't do it. It's impossible. To accept this world as it is exceeds the tensile strength of the human soul.
And the answer was, Then don't exist, but I didn't like that answer, so the answer was, Then you must change it.
Once upon a time I could not imagine the future. All I saw was death. Fire. Extinction. I saw no hope for me or my planet. I only wished to experience some happiness before it all collapsed.
And then I rescued a tree.
Well. A lot of trees. It took me a while to learn to care for them. But I rescued a tiny sycamore tree from the edge of a parking lot and I took care of that tree and it grew and flourished under my care, and I marveled at my own power to make a difference to this one tiny tree...
...and I thought, this tree will grow taller than me. This tree will be big enough for birds to nest in its branches someday. Someday...
and I looked ahead, at that horizon many years in the future that had always been filled with nothing but ash and dust, and I saw something new.
I saw a tree.
I returned to Nature—to my Nature, the pavement and gravel and scrubby woods—and, just, holy fuck, I started to see. I observed the weeds—the dandelions, the amaranth, the tough little bastards that grow in pavement and concrete, and something clicked. They adapt. They survive. They are tough as nails, growing in places nothing else can grow in spite of all our attempts to eradicate them. And they help everything else survive and grow. They are healers.
I thought, can we learn from them? Can we ally with them?
Nature is our ally. Not as a princess in a tower waiting to be saved. Nature adapts, moves, changes. Nature is constantly, relentlessly fighting back.
I think Nature has a lot to teach us about adaptation, about collaborating and helping one another. About survival. I learned much more—I learned to see the symbiosis that connects all things, and saw how we fit into that symbiosis, when we are willing to participate in it.
This is what the dandelions showed me: When you heal, when you thrive, when you are happy and flourishing, you make the world more habitable for others. Dandelions pry open compacted soil with their taproots, provide pollen and nectar for survival of insects, keep the ground moist and encourage organic matter to collect. Dandelions are food and medicine, and they can sprout and grow at any temperature. This is how an ecosystem works: when one hardy weed takes hold and thrives, the others, more delicate, can then begin to arrive.
You are not separate from every other thing. You are part of humankind, part of a social community, part of your family and friends. This means that hope is powerful.
The more joy and love you cultivate in your relationship with the planet, the more she will replenish you, restore your hope. The more you share this joy, the more powerful the force for change becomes.
I have seen this in my own life, when I have healed and improved my own life, I have been able to give back so much more to the world than ever before. I try to enact this—as people flee my impoverished, deep red state for their safety, as Fascism tightens its grip, I dig my roots in deeper. I am relief in this wasteland. I will stand my ground. I will be visible, opinionated, uncompromising, because the more vulnerable cannot be.
Despair is poison. It will kill us dead. It will kill our planet. We need hope. And there is hope, both in us and the ecosystems around us.
I believe we, humans, hold the potential to be a weed species. Not only surviving, but facilitating, creating a path for the healing of Earth. We are caretakers. This role has been well recognized by indigenous peoples for thousands of years.
In this wasteland, the beautiful flowers struggle to grow and the little trees do not dare reach for the sky. So I'm a fucking dandelion. Kudzu kicking ass on a lifeless abandoned copper mine. I'm Amaranth utterly refusing to die. I'm a sycamore tree patiently inching roots under asphalt. I'm a scrappy cedar grabbing hold amid the rocks. I'm crabgrass and spotted spurge and all the weeds that make the guys on r/lawncare weep and wail.
I got sprayed with despair and survived, and now I'm resistant. My seeds and pollen are everywhere now. Hehehehehehe.
