Maybe Holding It Barely Together Is OK

 It's interesting how there is a message not to panic and break down in grief or terror or rage upon witnessing the galloping collapse of the climate system and its terrestrial effects of floods, heat waves, drought, wildfires and superstorms. This message to "hold it together" comes from deep within ourselves, where the instinct toward survival resides, and from the greater society, which operates on the unthinking imperative to maintain its current trajectory. Personally, I'm going to endeavor not to pressure myself to squelch grief or terror or rage at what is occurring, unless it threatens me with total dysfunction. The stifling of extreme emotion upon witnessing horrors and idiocies is part of what landed us in the soup in the first place.

As the imperial and global capitalist projects ramped up and spread across the world, predicated as they were, upon "ethnic cleansing," genocide, slavery, ecological decimation, the grimmest of extraction enterprises and the severing of the sacred from the natural, settler colonial people so often chose to or felt forced to choke down their revulsion or stupefaction or sadness over what they were witnessing or indeed, what they were engaged in. Western society provides us with a nearly endless variety of ways to cut ourselves of from our felt emotional truths, of ways to numb out: drugs, alcohol, shitty food, fanatical religiosity, tv, internet - not coincidentally, all of these non-coping mechanisms are also highly lucrative businesses. Another not great method is to become overly philosophical and cerebral (as I am hopefully not in danger of doing with this brief essay). And many settler colonial people, when confronted with the frightening reality of their own emotions, go several steps further and embrace the violence of the culture that initially provoked the terror. People become fascists, mercenaries or amoral businessman and politicians.

And so, at this unprecedented moment in human history, as much as I want to avoid suffering and do not want others to suffer, it is crucial to distinguish between natural emotions and notions of "wellness" based in absurd expectations about what terrestrials like us should feel at the prospect of our own species' extirpation and the unthinkable ecocide manifesting in events of mass death, such as the estimated one billion sea creatures who died in the recent Northwestern heatwave. Rage, terror, disbelief, frustration, ultra-heartbreak, and wailing, howling sadness are fine. If, through a variety of methods, including art/music/community/ritual/talking/isolation or through no special method, we can experience these feelings and not fall into total dysfunction, I say: let it rip.