Heal Yourself First
Where was I? I was talking about sleeping. Yes, sleep. Before that, you might consider rest. Ask The Nap Ministry I love them. They are the badest and best anti-capitalists in town remember: Rest is resistance. Fuck the system. Yes, all of it.
I wrote this before The Great Pause and now we have been forced to rest. So much so that lethargy and timelessness is setting in and leaving us little lost. Many of us have been here for years. Living on the edge working through the choices that make our live and our world a better place. So much of what we have accepted as acceptable has been bullshit. We now literally have time for change and part of that is choosing to heal ourselves first.
You see climate emergency is not for sissies and you got to literally know some shit to do it well. It’s not going anywhere or indeed gone anywhere. It’s a very tangible metaphor for the internal war we humans go through most days. Even if its just the daily commute or navigating education for out children. We are at odds for with the world. We have been feeling so wrong for so wrong that we have internalised the failings of the system for the failings of the human soul. We have internalised the broken system for our brokeness and it’s time to claim back our humanity.
We need to be emotionally resourceful and resilient. What you going to do if they take away the self-care bubble bath. Yup, my friend you be fucked with your zen bliss vibes. Anyways because of the magnitude of the problem and the limited chances of survival I suggest you dive in deep into why your life is so important to you and why it might be that you are ready to burst on to the scene as a Enviro-mentalist and Humanitarian given that we the humans are clearly the problem. That running round fixing things like the sewerage problem may have stopped typhoid, however, it rapidly increased water consumption and meant human effluent ended up an oceanic issue. You see how fucked it actually is? We don’t solve problems we transfer them until of course a lone sailor come across The Garbage Patch. We were only trying to help. It seems to be the battle cry of most hapless causes.
It’s time to stabilise, it’s time to balance and if your life is looking like a string of boozy night out fueled by the pain of ecocide followed by an unrelenting anger at what the system always does (which is fuck us). How are you helping really? Time to take a long hard look at yourself. The good thing is that most of us agree climate change is real, fossil fuels are bad (Covid 19 is in similar states of collective acceptance and denial) . Stay at home for a bit, if you really need to get somewhere walk. If where you live is shit I suggest you start there. Tidy your room. Talk to your family. Speak to your neighbour cause when climate disaster strikes that’s who you’re going to be seeing in the end days with. Aye that. Heal yourself first. Things are fucked up for a reason. We the human are fucked up. Out of sync with our environments, doing everything we can to get out hands on our own little pieces of paradise. A scrap of land a stretch of water, discarding everything that doesn’t agree with us. Whole tracks of land. Swathes of society all in avoidance of our own pain. the pain of who? what and where we are. There is now running the only way out is through. (don’t worry you can swear while you’re doing it. Heal yourself first.
Honestly, I wrote this before The Great Pause. You see, in the end ultimately healing is the only option.
I am the only one of me in the world. However there is a chance my soul is shared. View all posts by kimberleen
Originally published at https://thelifedoula.com on April 17, 2020.
