Truth Bomb Tuesday: Can we all just stop pretending for a minute?
Overwhelmed? Confused?
That’s ok.
No really. It’s ok. It’s totally normal.
If you told me that you had a complete grip on things – that you had a good working understanding of how the world works – I’d think you were kidding.
At the best you’re just not paying attention.
The world is complex. Insanely complex. Complex like no other point in the 4-billion year old history of the Earth complex.
And people are complex. That’s true even when you’re dealing with the same 20 people in your village for your entire life.
But when you’re interacting with 7-billion people, one Tik-Tok reel at a time, it very quickly becomes more than our poor little brains can handle.
And to top it all off, you, yourself are complex. Your emotions are complex. You can have big complex reactions to things, a hundred times a day.
Not only do you have to learn to live with the world and with society, you also have to live with yourself.
(And that might be the most mind-boggling thing of all!)
So confusion, overwhelm – it’s all perfectly normal. It’s exactly what you’d expect.
The tragedy I see is that people wake up to find themselves sinking and drowning in the complexity of it all, and they blame themselves.
“Oh wow. I’m not really handling being instantly connected to 8-billion people as we go over the brink of social and eco-system collapse… there must be something wrong with me.”
It’s not you babe. It’s just not you.
So please, please, please can we not pathologize overwhelm? Can we not treat it as dysfunction that needs to be circumvented or medicated?
Can we see overwhelm for what it is – the natural expression of a curious and open mind to a crazy and confounding world?
That’s what it is.
Can we please not add feelings of anxiety and inadequacy on top of feelings of overwhelm, like some cherry on top of a misery sundae?
It’s all ok.
And I get it. I get that while acknowledging that overwhelm is natural frees from the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, it doesn’t release you from overwhelm itself.
There’s still that to deal with.
And look. I’ve got no great answers here. It’s a crazy world. So crazy.
I guess the only thing I would say is that change is always possible. There is always something you can do to bring more of your life under control. There is always something you can do to nudge your life in the direction you want it to go in.
Even when it feels like there isn’t.
Most people won’t find that radical shift that makes everything better over night. I’m not sure it even exists.
But if you practice consistency – if you consistently show up and just nudge your life a little each day, eventually you will find yourself in a place where it feels like you’re going to be ok.
Maybe you just have to trust me on that one.
DB.