a pacing tiger
knowing your own truth, adrenaline and continuing to feel
The best thing my brain injury did for me was give me an out of something that I had long struggled with: screens/social media/ tech. I was constantly grappling with the need to stay connected with social circles/ stay visible online for work and the damage I knew it was having on my body, mind, hormones, sleep, presence and spiritual clarity. Instead of making that decision for myself, the universe made it for me. In the time away, all the excess dopamine left my brain and I was able to see just how addictive and pervasive it has all become. I can’t unknow this, and it has completely changed how I engage—it feels like I got the ick many get in romantic relationships but toward obsessive scrolling.
I now periodically go on social media to check a few accounts for news, information, learning, and comedy clips (it of course is not all bad!).
When I log on, I am met with a flood of posts that are relevant to me: the rage and sorrow and pleads for the end of genocide, getting super pacs and special interest money out of government, climate crisis, community, queer joy, trauma, comedy, healing, and liberation. If I’m on my other account, it’s just sewing and crafting. It is like this not because the algorithm cares about what I care about, or the truth, but because it wants me to stay on it for as long as possible. It wants me hooked and beholden to it. If I’m given what I want and getting hits of validation, I’ll be more likely to engage and consume.
I think about how it looks to someone who clicks very differently than I do, what pops up when they impulsively and constantly open these apps..no choice or purpose behind it, just addiction and increased inability to just exist. I think about how it can and does shape a worldview before someone has any sense of their own. How young minds can be grabbed so easily by an overreaching tech industry that is playing on their worst impulses. I think about my mom, alone in her room, watching Fox News on a loop and scrolling on facebook and right wing websites, becoming more and more isolated, more and more angry. The longing for connection turned inside out.
What I came up with as I ventured back into the world after brain injury was that I would use the tech, I wouldn’t let the tech use me. I can acknowledge its function and usefulness, that I’ve connected to, laughed and learned a whole lot from people I would not have access to otherwise. I can hold the contradiction of being grateful for that access and that it’s not going to look out for me..I have to look out for me.
When I decide to use it, it is a decision. I pause and get curious around why I am going to open any given app. I ask some internal questions
What is my intention for going on here?
What am I looking for?
Am I trying to self soothe? Will it really provide soothing/ regulation or pull me further away?
Is this a reaction to not wanting to feel something?
Am I unwilling to be a bit bored (where the magic happens)
How long do I want to spend on there?
What am I potentially missing in my actual, real life and body? (spoiler, it’s way more than you think)
I become aware of what’s happening in my body, my impulses and visceral responses to what I am taking in. I notice what gets shut down during a scroll, what I no longer have access to. I understand how we can dehumanize each other through a screen because it’s really easy to stop feeling altogether. That’s the point, I suppose. You think you’re getting a break from feeling, like it’s a relief when you scan your face for the hundredth time that day— into your phone, out of your life. But that relief is short lived. The tolerance for being human lowers, so you need more time scrolling, and on it goes. The true, lasting relief you seek is not in the numbing, it’s in having the tools and competencies to be with more of what you’re running from. And that includes taking breaks, maybe includes scrolling online, but with choice. And accompanied by many other moves, not just the one where you repeatedly grab and open your phone like an adult lovie. Okay, moving on.
When I see a picture of a starving child and a bereft mother, my impulse is to go to them. To wrap them up, to rub their backs, to feed them. Then the realization comes in that I have no ability to do what feels so natural and simple. I rage at the fact that we have complicated something as basic as innate human dignity. Impenetrable red tape wrapped around who has access to what, who matters, who starves. Red tape that is created, not inevitable. Created and controlled by those who have chosen greed over feeling. Because if one were to truly feel the overwhelming generosity and abundance of Spirit..what is there to covet? What is there to hoard? Who is there to dominate when everyone is you? The bottomless, destructive search for validation or enoughness would cease.
Our deepest knowing tell us everything about interconnectivity and belonging. This wisdom of one human race and borderless hearts is alive in our bodies. It’s why the systems of oppression are hell bent on villainizing, shaming, demeaning and controlling yours. In staying embodied, I have to feel in a world that makes it really hard. I have to figure out what to do with the sorrow of not being able to respond to what I see in a photo of a person halfway around the world. I have to realize the rage at the systems often has nowhere to go. And this is where many of us shut down. We have all these impulses followed by hopelessness. It gets frozen or repressed or it comes out sideways.
When this happens in my system, it feels like a pacing tiger locked in a cage. I have all these things that want to come through but cannot go in the direction they want to. The globalization and access to information means I know about the suffering of others at an exponential rate. I have access to a level of information my body is not built to take in, and it produces the adrenaline to respond.
So how do we do this? How do we stay engaged, stay feeling, and not shut down? I’ll share what helps me.. not in the hopes you’ll do it like me, but maybe that you’ll consider your own path forward.
My current process starts by being more responsive to my own needs the needs of those I can respond to in real time. I can be responsive to the suffering in my family, community, my students and clients, and those I make contact with. I take in media when I’m resourced, not when I am just going to collapse. I resource myself by not skipping over joy. I make room for it, I practice toward it. I make time for body to body, intentional community. If I feel there is excess adrenaline or a feeling that needs to express from something I take in online, I make sure I tend to it with direct action: calling a rep, writing a letter, donating or moving it through my body with somatic and/or compassion practices. A somatic practice is one that’s based in the wisdom of the body, acknowledging that how I am responding and processing is in the tissues. Compassion practice differs from empathy in that compassion is a state of being, it’s the embodiment of our oneness. When I am practicing compassion, I am not feeling bad for another, there is no other. It’s expanded and endless.
Here’s to the radical choice to feel, to being sustainable and resourced in how we engage, and coming back to the simplest truth: we belong to each other.
i love you (and love hearing from you, please reach out with how you’re doing and how you’re navigating this moment in time)
ram ram
Brenna