All that matters

As my blog has alluded to, I’ve been feeling incredibly overwhelmed lately, by all I am doing and all I am holding. On top of the attachment crisis following K’s move, which doesn’t feel fully over but has definitely settled, I’ve been bombarded on all sides by work and Extinction Rebellion (XR) demands, not to mention parenting and running the house and looking after the pets. Plus I also saw my Mum in town when I was marching through the High Street for Earth Strike on Friday, from a distance and she didn’t see me, but it caused another near-death experience and has brought up a lot around the guilt I feel for wishing I had a different Mum. I don’t want to go into too much detail about what I’ve been doing, because that’s not the point of this post, but I think it is finally beginning to become apparent to me in a very real, practical way that my life is and always will be limited by complex-PTSD and I know I have some difficult decisions about how I spend my time, and what I will and won’t be able to tolerate, to implement over the coming days and weeks.

Going to K’s new house still feels very, very weird and not right at all. It still feels like her and I are not real there, or that the space isn’t real, like we are suspended somewhere we are not supposed to be. It’s getting gradually more familiar though, and the sitting room does look very warm and cosy so we are looking forward to our next film therapy night in a month or two. We are going to start a craft project next week too, probably using glitter glue, because K thinks it would be a good idea to do this and to feel into it being safe enough there to make something together. And we are doing double sessions now and that feels so much safer and makes it so much easier to settle into the space and into K’s presence. The difference it makes is beyond merely an extra 30 minutes of therapy, the longer session has a profound impact on me and the young parts and I feel so grateful that K is offering me a hugely discounted session to enable this, and that – for now at least – I have the means to pay for this.

There is no doubt that the prospect of societal collapse due to climate breakdown is looming large in the space between us. I can’t shake the fear, or help young parts with it, because we know what is ahead and it will mean losing K, or ending our work at least, only we don’t know when or how many years are left, or what it will look like, and it could be that my life is very different by then and it feels more okay than the thought of it does now. These fears and the whole theme of ‘too much’ were both really reflected in the sand tray we made this evening in our session. K said she’d never seen such a full sand tray!

It was basically a tired and sleepy 14 year old me, desperate for rest, buried underneath all the people and demands being thrown at us as people desperately try to stave off climate breakdown. And little me feeling sad trying to get people to stop eating animals, and other people with their heads buried in the sand as species go extinct and ecosystems collapse, and we couldn’t reach K, partly because of the imminent collapse, but also because of all the demands, because they stop us reaching her because our head gets too full, and because they keep us in a future where her and I don’t exist. And because the scary part is that if we achieve the systemic changes needed in the face of what is coming, then it will also mean losing her, because we won’t have privately owned vehicles and life will be more local and there won’t be money for therapy. And if we fail to act and adapt and mitigate, then food and fuel shortages and war and collapse are what we have in store. How things will unfold environmentally and societally are big unknowns in many ways, but climate breakdown is accelerating and the latest temperature prediction models to be released this week show that under the business as usual scenario – which shows no signs of changing at the moment – we are on track for a 6.5 – 7 degree average temperature rise by 2100, so much worse than what was predicted by the IPCC in 2018. 2 degrees is locked in already, and that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible consequences for life on earth, so all this stuff is very real, but I don’t want to live in this terrifying world before I have to. 

After K had taken a picture of the busy sand tray (which she won’t put on the internet, we checked!!) she asked what needed to be changed to represent me having a rest. And we scooped all the things off that were covering us and weighing us down, and shoved everything else away to the other end of the sand tray – all the people eating animals, and all those demanding too much from me as they frantically engage in activism to stave off climate breakdown (and probably to distract themselves from the horrifying reality in many ways), and the barriers that collapse will put up between me and those I love. And then we put very little me with teen me under a tree, because young parts need more time at home doing nice things, and a hedgehog to represent Nina, and K, her donkeys and Mr Raposa, in a circle with us, really far from the pile of other stuff. And someone said ‘really those are the only things that matter – trees, young parts, you, and Nina’ and we put a row of hearts between these things and all the pile of stuff; ‘we can love those things but still look after ourselves’. And K said this is so important, and reminded me that I already do more than most people with being vegan and not flying and cycling to work and not buying unnecessary things.

And she asked how I felt about the transformation and I said ‘better, because those are all the things I will never regret doing with my time’. And she said how powerful the wave of stuff coming down the other end was, and that the barrier in the middle was now filled with hearts instead of rocks, and the whole room feels softer and at ease, and she said ‘I hope you feel also that you’ve got a place to rest, you have to have rest in your life’.

‘Those are all the things I will never regret doing with my time‘ – this is so true and is what I am taking with me on the Autumn Equinox, on the day when there is light and dark in equal measure and we are invited to seek balance in our lives. K always tells me I am enough, but I want to feel that, and I don’t want to lose myself in activism to the point where I lose myself, in part because I think it’s most likely too late to avert catastrophe and collapse now and so the focus needs to be on adaptation, including community building and self-healing, and in part because Mother Earth cannot heal while we continue to live such toxic and demanding lives. And I may look back and wish many things, but I will never regret the time I spend with K, with Nina, in nature, and replenishing and healing myself, whatever happens, whatever comes.