It’s been three years since the world ended

I’m having flashbacks to: lines snaking around the grocery store, SIX FUCKING FEET(!!!), curfews, fear of breathing on each other, chapped hands, the abrasive chemical stink of cleaning products, the great toilet paper shortage, bread making, one of the biggest uprisings in American history, the corporatization and subsequent defanging of said uprising, conspiracy theories galore (many peddled by my colleagues in wellness), smoky orange fire skies, elections and other political fuckery, polarization polarization and more polarization about every issue you could possibly think of.

That’s just 2020.

And just in time for the celebration of our third COVID-19 anniversary, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last weekend. What a spectacle that was.

I won’t go into great detail about the years in between. Y’all were there too. Enough happened to fill another 4:47 minutes of an updated version of We Didn’t Start the Fire. Certainly too much to go into in this newsletter.

The new normal we are living in now is, to say the least, anything but.

Change is a death of sorts, and we have all been through a staggering amount of change in a relatively short time. We have experienced many figurative deaths.

Literal ones, too — a great number of them. And no death is just a number.

Our brains like safety. They like stability. They go into overdrive to protect us when we are out of either state and for too long. Brains stuck in overdrive means bodies stuck in overdrive, which is how the stress manifests for most, as I’ve seen in my decade-plus experience working with bodies in the stressland that is the San Francisco Bay Area. We fight, we flee, we dissociate, we collapse. We go on, like crippled cockroaches.

The gamut of hyper-individualistic hacks we have around this - therapy, pharmaceuticals, etc, etc - weren’t nearly enough to help us hold it all, even back in “normal” pre-pandemic times. If, more and more, life has been feeling like too much, it's not that you're weak. It is just too much.

Burnout is real. At the end of the day, we end up paying for the anxiety and chronic fatigue that we treat as normal and par for the course in ambitious professions and impossibly demanding work environments. Then put a global pandemic on top of it. I can tell you from experience that it is hard to bounce back like nothing happened after you’ve hit that wall one too many times.

As a movement and wellness professional, I need to make abundantly clear that no amount of self-care in the form of yoga, meditation, getting pumped at the gym, or exploding your brain with psychedelics can completely stop your brain from burning in tandem with the world.

As someone who had their legs cut from under them during the pandemic and has yet to restabilize, as someone who has spoken to many of you in the same boat, I want to acknowledge that it is hard to think straight after having been stuck in survival mode for so long. It's hard to sleep. It’s hard to breathe.

Even if you got through these last few years unscathed, knowing that it could all fall apart at a moment’s notice

Is

Scary.

Though it flies in the face of toxic American positivity and bootstrapping ideology, I would like to say that there is wisdom in sitting with failure, with loss, with death, with the difficulty of change. Like, really really sitting with these things and letting them vibrate your every cell. It takes time. It will feel like a death, especially if you pride yourself in being beastly strong and unbreakable like I used to, but you won’t actually die.

There is wisdom in saying I still don’t know. I still don’t have the answers. Maybe there is no answer.

Out of this, different answers from the ones we’re used to hearing and repeating come. Facing reality without numbing out, maybe we can finally start to see with clear eyes even in darkness. It's a practice, and best done in small doses to start.

I don’t have a message full of hope and rainbows for you. No pretty bow to tie our collective experience of these years together.

I simply write you today to honor everything that we’ve been through in the last three years.

I write you to honor the fact that we’re Still. Fucking. Here.