I’m exhausted. If only I could get my empathy under control! I’m sure you don’t expect such personal stuff in a blog, but here goes anyway, I get to sleep a nice solid three hours (two REM cycles worth) before waking up. Then it starts. The students who thought they were exercising a free world right when they became involved in protests — now captured, removed to remote sites, separated from families and friends and their graduate programs. Tortured body positions of Venezuelans transported to El Salvadoran prisons, books banned, colleges and universities yielding to political pressures, history rewritten or simply blacked out.
Putting it all together, the purpose of my life and career seems to have become a target. Appreciation for knowledge, science, the value of all human life, the health of our earth and all the people in it, a world of peace for children/people of all colors, the value of the individual …
Oh, for goodness sake, Mona! Be real. Those are just goals – fictional finalisms to use Adler’s term. Of course you know the world isn’t like that! Yes, I do. But in the middle of the night I realize that not only are efforts to support them fading, there are truly pressures being applied to denigrate them. And there are personal examples aplenty to keep my emotional and intellectual intelligence on edge.
So, what do I do about it? First of all, I know that sanity requires finding areas where one has control. And lying in bed with negative brain worms crawling around my brain doesn’t help, so my go-to aid is getting out of bed, preparing a comforting cup of warm sugar-free chocolate almond milk and a handful of raw cashews. I’d say that works about 60% of the time. There are other options too that sometimes work: Tylenol PM, Melatonin, acetaminophen. But bottom line is choosing to focus on that over which I have some control.
And that takes me to my prediction for future entries here: my manuscript, tentatively titled How Could These Lovely People Have Let it Happen?: a Psychologist’s Intimate Journal. I’ll be letting you know what I need from you …
And now I have to walk for half an hour before dinner and get ready for a writers group that meets tomorrow.
Thanks for listening/reading
monagustafsonaffinito 