Focusing exclusively on death can disconnect us from life, so make sure to check out Happiness, Community, and Utopia when you’re done here.
Death
Death is all around us: from climate change, to COVID 19, to the threat of fascism, to unaffordable housing and healthcare. I could go on. There are so many threats to life and as a result many people and animals are dying.
If you’re despairing or seeking meaning, you’re not alone. In the wake of so much death, many of us are trying to make sense of it. Once we’re able to start making sense of death, we can use our understandings to act.
If death is on your mind expect us to discuss grief, narrative, philosophy, and what it means to be present.
Suicide
If you’re suicidal, you probably already know how the mental health system treats you. Overwhelmingly, the mental health system is organized to revoke suicidal people’s capacity to act – rather than listening to why they feel suicidal.
This approach seems entirely backwards to me. Why, if people are feeling disempowered and unheard, should our response be to further disempower them?
So I don’t believe in forcing treatment.
What I do believe in is: listening to you share without judgement, discussing how we got to this point, connecting with and building your support system, considering alternative perspectives and centering your decision making capacity throughout this process.
Dystopia
If you feel like you’re living in a dystopia, you’re not alone. A number of things that are happening in the world are extraordinarily bad! It would be weird if we didn’t acknowledge this.
What is one to do? That’s where we can get caught up. Because it’s one thing to acknowledge that it feels like we’re living in a dystopia, but it’s an entirely different thing to do anything about that.
Giving up or running away can seem like the only options. But they’re not.
If you are feeling this way, you probably have a pretty good grasp of the things going wrong and how they could get worse.
I’m not going to tell you to stop feeling this way. I will remind you that the future is fundamentally uncertain, even though we can make educated guesses.
What is far harder than acknowledging that it feels like we’re living in dystopia, is acknowledging that our actions have the capacity to make the world a little bit better. Because the future is uncertain, our actions matter. We shape the future.
Expect us to work on being present, community building, and taking meaningful actions in your community. Your feelings of living in dystopia are unlikely to go away, but they don’t need to control you.