Emotions Need Motion

Interesting post about the omnipresence of grief here in the age of contagion, over at the Harvard Business Review.

Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, Harvard Business Review

It’s a useful thing to consider as I’m figuring out the impacts of the pandemic. Life has changed, and keeps on changing. Plans are in a state of flux. For the first time in four years, my future feels dangerously uncertain and allows for very little space in which to take risks on the financial or the creative front.

It’s a familiar mindset from mu freelancing days–and gods, it feels like the whole word is coming to grips with the freelancers insecurity around work and finances–but I thought those days were behind me. I celebrated those days being behind me for a stretch, and not needing to make hard choices.

The Pandemic means giving up all sorts of dreams an ideas about what life was going t be like for the next few years, and I grieve them lest I give in to the anger and despair that wait in the wings.