Dear Kimberly: How Can We Cope With Despair?

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Kimberly McGlonn is back with gentle wisdom to help you navigate life’s tough situations. Have a Q for Kimberly? Fill out the form here and we’ll do our best to feature it in an upcoming column.

Dear Kimberly: We are living at a time when there’s so much visible loss and destruction. There are climate catastrophes, plus political chaos everywhere. It feels like it’s all gloom and doom. How do I get up, go to work, and rally in a world I don’t even like right now? — Seeking Hope

Dear Seeking Hope,

The question you’re processing is perhaps one of the most important ones we can be asking ourselves and each other right now. This is perhaps best understood, I’m learning, as a sense of collective despair.

As someone who has spent the last 20 years paying close attention to the world — to what’s happening globally, in terms of political suffering — I’ve been walking around and carrying that for quite some time. At times, particularly as a Black woman, it’s been harder for me to manage at times. Whether it was the first time I went to see the slave castles in Cape Coast, Ghana, or the first time I set foot on the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I’ve been seesawing with managing what can be moments of profound sadness.

I continue to find myself, on many days, grieving the world. That might express itself in coffee shops, or in my car when I’m alone. Sometimes I open my phone and don’t get to control what I’m going to see and, so, I can’t easily control or predict my reactions to it.

What I’ve allowed myself to do is to feel it. If I’m sitting in a coffee shop and am moved to tears? I’ve granted myself permission to grieve. Sometimes that grief is really at odds with the moment: If it’s a sunny day and it should feel like everything is fine, but in my spirit everything is wrong, I don’t swallow it. I think that to feel grief welling up in my throat and to deny myself the freedom to acknowledge it is a form of harm against myself.

As we’re collectively moving through this moment in time, here’s what I’m learning that can be really helpful: When we feel sad, we should give ourselves permission to lean into that sadness. When we see other people suffering and it triggers our own sense of helplessness, then we are entitled to show our solidarity with them through the acceptance of that grief — even when there’s nothing else we can do.

Another thing that has helped me during these overwhelming times we’re living in is to curate my calendar differently. I’ve been pruning nonessentials. In years past, I might have said, “I can talk to everybody!” Now, I’m a bit more discerning about who I can talk to and what I want to let into my days. This is one way I show kindness to myself.

Another thing that has been helpful is to remind myself that in the scope of human history, what we’re experiencing all the time through social media has always been happening in various degrees. So in that way, violent change is not new — it’s just that we’re bearing witness to it in a way that can feel like a 24/7 barrage. We have to, for this reason, try to monitor our inputs, or the things that we’re consuming, and with what frequency.

I also try to remind myself that, no matter how big I try to make my one precious life, my life is actually very short and very small. That perspective helps to relieve some of the pressure I’ve imposed on myself in earlier seasons, for feeling accountable and responsible for fixing it all and helping it all and doing it all. And in that smallness, I don’t feel defeated; I feel empowered to be tactical.

Here’s the greatest tactical move I want to encourage you and all of us to do: Remember that there is so much power in protecting our optimism. As we get signals that all is lost — that the climate is in despair, that our notions of basic freedoms may be under collapse — one of the things that we can do to counter that is to protect ourselves from what can be a very cancerous apathy. That comes in remembering that we have agency and that we have both individual and collective power. And sometimes the simplest thing we can do with our power is hold space for optimism; instead of feeling guilty for uncovering positivity at a time when so many are suffering, try to be a source of light for other people, and try to live a more positive, disciplined life. Find that seed of optimism and nurture it. You’re allowed to seek joy and find meaningful connection and whatever helps you get through these times.

And, yes, we have to figure out how to take meaningful action — and how to toggle between high activity and low activity. Your low activity might look like setting aside 20 minutes to read outside, or drink a hot cup of tea in the morning, or do absolutely nothing. Your high activity can be about volunteerism, about collective action, like showing up to board meetings or council meetings, or planning a block cleanup. There has to be some sense of contributing to a solution. We can’t spend all of our energy on complaining.

As we’re discovering new reasons to be outraged, may our outrage and our encounters with mounting despair not end in inaction. May we choose to find comfort in all the beauty that remains.

With courage and care,
Kimberly