How Do You Feel?

I remember this poster from my high school guidance counselor's office.  I liked it because I enjoyed going through the faces one by one, doing a mental checklist... "Is this how I feel today?  How about this?"

But if you asked me to do that today, I wouldn't be able to.  These days, it's rare that I feel any one thing for a protracted period of time... in fact, there are swaths of time when I'm honestly not sure that I'm feeling anything at all.  In the Calm app that I use to track my daily emotions, I find the lack of an icon for "mixed" or "neutral" distressing.  There are times when I really need something more than the nine emotions allotted to me for choices.  Luckily, when I'm settled enough to track my emotions, I'm usually in a place removed from anything distressing or stressful - so I've got a lovely streak of "calm" and "relaxed" and "content" icons in my calendar.   But I feel that's not an accurate assessment of my days... rather, it's a log of how I felt at a particular moment in my day.

I long to know how I feel.  I truly want to be able to answer the question, "How are you feeling?" with a single, specific adjective.  I want it for me, for my own peace of mind... so that I know for sure how I feel, and can defend it with evidence:  Yes, right now I am feeling happy, because I feel a lightness inside of me and I'm smiling and I want this feeling to go on and on.  Or, At this moment, I'm feeling frustrated.  I want to write something, but my mind is drawing a blank and I've never trained myself to write when the words aren't coming.  None of this Well, honestly, I don't feel particularly sad or particularly happy - but I'm not angry or lonely or anxious, either; is the absence of negative emotions "happiness?"  But I don't feel anything particularly positive, either, so what does that say?

I may have nobody but myself to blame.  When I was having frequent panic attacks, I used to long for nothingness... absence of all emotion, I thought, would be infinitely better than having fear and anxiety all the time.  Maybe I learned to do just that - to shut off my emotions, so that I no longer have any strong feelings to cope with.  No joy, no grief, no fear, no exultation.  No... anything.  

I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The Unknown

Xenophobia is the irrational sensation of fear experienced about a person or a group of persons as well as situations that are perceived as strange or foreign. It is the fear of anything that is beyond one’s comfort zone. 

- Jacob Olesen, www.fearof.net

The world is a crazy place right now.  People are angry, people are frightened... between the ongoing pandemic and racial unrest, it almost feels like the world as we've known it is falling apart.  My own anxiety is at a steady mid-to-high level, regardless of what I try to think about... work, home, family, society. 

"This is the new normal," some people say. "We've got to adjust, understand that nothing is going to be the way it was."

And that's the problem, I think.

When we say "nothing is going to be the way it was" or "things have to change" - regardless of whether they're changing for a good reason, or changing for the better - we forget that for most people, change is SCARY.  Change is the Unknown.  And the Unknown is something nobody that I personally know handles well.

We, as humans, are creatures that thrive in our comfort zones.  So long as we feel that we know what to expect, know where the limits or boundaries lie, know who we're dealing with, we can manage pretty much anything.  Push us beyond those limits, and... well, we don't manage quite so much.

The unknown can be moving into a future where we honestly don't know what the world is going to look like, physically.  Face masks?  Social distancing?  For how long, we want to know.  We want things to go back to the world we have always known, have always been comfortable with.  We don't WANT to change.  Change means effort, and effort is not something humans - who are happiest when facing minimal obstacles - embrace.

The unknown can mean forcing ourselves to think about people who don't usually cross our minds.  When it comes to racial inequality and social injustice, the problem isn't necessarily the minority of people who are committed racists.  The problem is that we've allowed horrible things to happen, awful patterns and cycles to develop, because we just don't notice them.  Not that we willfully ignore them, no, but we don't choose to open our eyes to see things that would make us uncomfortable.  We don't LIKE being uncomfortable; it's easier and less stressful to just focus on our own circle of existence.

And the unknown can mean accepting that in this moment, we cannot know all things, cannot have the answer to all things.  There are precious few quick fixes in the universe, and those that exist may not always be the best fixes for the long term.  And the answers to all questions can never be known in the now.  This means that we need to be able to accept living with a certain degree of uncertainty... and that does not sit easily with most of us. 

Speaking for myself, I'd love to know what is going to happen to my career come fall... the only certainty, I've been told, is that teaching will NOT look like the teaching I've been doing.  But what exactly it WILL look like is anyone's guess.  I'd love to know for certain what is going to happen, if only so that I could get a head start on finding a different job, if it turns out to be something I can't manage.  But I'm not going to get that wish.... and so I fret, and my muscles work themselves into knots, and my blood pressure rises.  I am NOT good at the Unknown.  But what good is my worrying and mentally gnawing on the question until it's a frayed and ragged thing?  It doesn't bring the answer any closer.  It doesn't bring me any peace.  The only choice I really have is to try to learn to deal with the fact that I am not going to get any answers any time soon.

There isn't a chance, of course, that humanity will rise up, all together, and embrace the Unknown.  No, it's much more likely that as a species we'll continue to fight it, wrestle it, run from it.  But embracing the Unknown, fighting the Unknown, that's not even the first step.  The first step has to be recognizing the Unknown.  Knowing that it's out there.  Knowing that nothing that we do will ever change that.  Only once we can look into the future and reconcile ourselves with the fact that there will always be a certain Unknown in front of us can we start to act on it.