Back to baseline
Earlier this month I went on holiday with my partner to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, to a beautiful place called Kalkan. It was the first holiday I’d been on since the summer of 2019, and at the risk of sounding obnoxious, I really needed a holiday.
The day before our flight I attended a friend’s lovely wedding in London, then stayed in an airport hotel. By the time we got through the three and half hour flight and were in the otherwise comfortable van ride from the airport, my nervous system was well beyond its limit. I lay down in the huge van for most of the ride, my head clinging to the plush leather seat while I focused intently on grounding my insides until we could stop moving and do nothing for a week.
“What happened to me,” I asked my partner, recalling that time of my life when planes, trains, and automobiles didn’t tousle my organs in such a way, when I used to land from transatlantic flights and go straight to work. “I used to be so tough.”
“Nah,” he said. “You used to just wear more armor.”
Putting aside the fact that yes, I am pregnant (not an in-flight experience I’d recommend, but as I said, I really needed a holiday), I immediately knew what he meant. It’s funny, two years on, how we are still learning who we are as we emerge into this strange new world.
Apparently I am no longer a person that can fly on an airplane with the ease of riding a bus. These days, even going to London for a day—a place I lived for ten years— requires me to make sure that the 36 hours or so afterwards are mostly free of plans. I don’t think it’s that the relentless stimulation of the city affects me more than it used to. It’s that I now spend most of my life operating at or near my baseline of tolerance—something which takes discipline and intention on my part—rather than frantically buzzing above it, trying desperately to keep up.
I realize this all sounds quite self indulgent in the wake of … everything. In fact, I wrote an entire edition of this newsletter last week, one that attempted to encapsulate how bad everything felt at the moment. But then on Friday morning right before it was ready to go, I canned it. I was writing it because I felt obligated to say something in the thrum of the news cycle, which I’ve learned the hard way usually means you should say nothing.
It takes a lot to survive in the world at the moment, and I’ve been thinking about how little we acknowledge the inter-connectedness of everything we find out about via our tormented little screens. These stories and issues are presented as discrete segments—climate, political polarization, gun violence, rising depression and anxiety in youth—each requiring their own set of policy fixes and solutions, if only we could find them. They’re almost never talked about as inter-locking symptoms of something much, much larger.
Take something like long Covid, which I had for most of 2021, and now seems to be landing with a thud in the collective consciousness. The mainstream conversation around this issue is frustratingly lacking in nuance and seems exclusively focused on data and potential treatments, rather that on the more expansive, murky, and even beautiful idea of how human beings actually heal.
I am not a doctor or scientist, but it strikes me that a post-viral illness that is hypothesized to be some kind of haywire overreaction to the “surge of inflammation” caused by the initial infection could bear at least some connection to the other sources of widespread, chronic inflammation in our daily lives—our diets, our totally insane work lives, our neglected emotional health, the repeated stress response of simply going on Twitter or flipping to CNN on Tuesday and seeing yet another school shooting.
It also seems obvious to me that after two years of ongoing hyper-vigilance, isolation, and stress on a mass societal scale, we should perhaps be talking about the demonstrated connection between nervous system dis-regulation and chronic/unexplained illnesses. After all, most people with a smartphone probably don’t even know what it feels like to not be in fight or flight these days, even for five minutes.
But for some reason, these kinds of conversations are often framed as being in opposition to science, vaccines, and peer review—and thus relegated to the self-help and yoga crowd. For the life of me, I don’t understand why we can’t embrace both at the same time.
Furthermore, during the last couple weeks, when the media collectively decided it was time to talk about something as amorphous and all encompassing as “mental health” inside the tidy container of “mental health awareness month,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that that phrase is starting to feel woefully anemic in the face of what we live amidst every day.
I think it’s probably time to consider that perhaps it’s not that we’re not all struggling with mental illness due to uniquely faulty brains. Rather, we’re all trying to adapt to and survive in a profoundly sick society. Sure, we should work on ourselves individually, but we also have to look for more ways to opt out and resist what this broken culture asks of us, what it infects us with day after day. We need to help one another see that the solutions lie in each other, in connection, in rest, in choosing to do less, in remembering that we are part of natural systems and cycles, not the tech-enabled overlords of them.
Perhaps it’s time to take off our armor and see what kind of people we are then.
It seems counter-intuitive, that to survive in a harsh world you have to become less tough. To choose to do less. To aim lower. To have less ambitious and glossy visions of what your future might look like. To give yourself a break, over and over again. It goes against the kind of “fight like hell” resistance narrative that became popular in the Trump era. But I think it’s a pretty solid strategy.
It’s not the same thing as giving up. In fact, it makes room for all kinds of things that work in direct opposition to the forces that plague us: rest, grief, creativity, collectivism, the idea that when you’re doing nothing you’re actually doing quite a lot.
It may not be a policy prescription to fix everything, or any one thing in particular, but I think anything that brings us closer to our baseline—as individuals and as a collective—is as good a place to start as any.
Things I enjoyed reading
Caitlin Flanagan’s journey through all the places Joan Didion lived in California is a balm. It also led me to this essay Didion wrote about my hometown, Malibu, where she lived in the 1970s—somehow I’d never read it! [The Atlantic]
“Stickers are ‘those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.’ They are ‘placed people’ … forever attached to the look of the sky, the smell of native plants, and the vernacular of home.” Wendell Berry on how to live now. [The New Yorker]
This 2010 first-person account from Elon Musk’s first wife tells you everything you need to know about Elon Musk. [Marie Claire]
“Garbes holds her life up as proof that parenting toward a more just world requires … seeking alternative visions of security and opportunity for your children; it requires surrendering advantages, and becoming more dependent on others, not less.” [The New Yorker]
I’m a relatively proficient cook but I only glance at recipes as a starting point and have minimal interest in cookbooks. Apparently this is called “intuitive cooking” now. [The Guardian]
On how the pandemic illuminated a gap between what people wanted from their lives and how they were actually living it. [WSJ]
I’ve been resisting the impulse to pull away some of the weeds growing out of my garden wall, noticing how bees are attracted to them just as much as they are to the things I’ve intentionally planted. I love the idea that weeds are in the eye of the beholder. [The Guardian]
Seriously, stop paying attention to the Depp/Heard trial. [The Atlantic]
Things I enjoyed listening to
A perversely encouraging piece of news: Extreme/catastrophic weather events have gotten so undeniably bad in Australia that the latest election saw a clear and decisive rebuke of ten years of climate-denying, coal-loving conservative politicians. [The Guardian]
There are a lot of attempts to get to the bottom of why people are so drawn to online conspiracy theories these days. This is the most nuanced, convincing, and empathetic one I’ve come across. [Tiffany Dover is Dead]
Dr. Lucy McBride seems like one of those entirely reasonable people that’s somehow been demonized during the pandemic for suggesting that health is more than the mere absence of a virus. I’m enjoying her new podcast which talks to high-profile people about their struggles with health, in the most expansive sense of that term. [Beyond the Prescription].
Word Soup
“It is easy to measure how much money we are making. It’s much harder to notice how much calm we have lost. We don’t keep a close eye on the true price of our noisy lives; we don’t properly add up what the business trip or the conference might have done to our levels of serenity and creativity or to our relationship with those who truly matter to us … We are like early scientists handling uranium without a sense of the dangers. We don’t notice what a shock to our sensitive minds it is to step into a room full of raucous acquaintances and to try to make small talk for a few hours with a frenemy. This is an experience it might take a month of quiet evenings to heal.” —The School of Life
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