On being highly sensitive: why I no longer watch the news

I’m going to confess something that no respectable journalist should ever own up to. Here goes... I don’t watch the news.

Nope, never.

I don’t watch news broadcasts on TV, I don’t read the newspapers and I don’t visit news sites (which, to be fair, are dominated by celebrity updates anyway).

It’s because, as a sensitive person, the news makes me feel deeply despondent about the world and about the future. And given the horrors we’ve already witnessed this year – Orlando, Istanbul airport and Brussels, to name a few – my head-in-the-sand stance is more and more important.

As a qualified journalist, avoiding current affairs is somewhat reckless. It’s been drummed into me from my training how important a role the news media play in society – keeping politicians honest, setting the political agenda and keeping the public informed. In short, the media are powerful agents of change. With that in mind, I should absolutely be keeping up with the play about what’s happening in the world (and especially since newspaper circulations are falling – I should be supporting my fellow journos). Except...

I can’t.  

Because watching, for example, reports of shootings, terror attacks, racist diatribes from Trump and any accounts of crime deeply upset me. I’m not talking about just feeling sad or sorry for someone who is suffering, I’m talking about a core emotional response.

That’s kinda the deal when you’re sensitive. You pick up on the energies of others around you, and it’s difficult not to take that on. It’s the same with the media. I feel a smidgen of the victims’ distress and I crumble. I feel distraught and fearful. I feel distrustful of my fellow man/woman. I have a crushing sense of hopelessness. Which is no good to anyone. So I simply don’t watch it. 

I know this means I am uninformed, and I’m fine with it. But I really don’t think there’s any value in me knowing the details of the Orlando gunman’s MO or the Paris terror attack locations, for example.

I’m sure media commentators would condemn me for sticking my head in the sand, and I’m fine with that too. 

Because for me, the toll of reading, watching or discussing these events is too great. 

Sure, it’s important to know that these tragedies have happened, and I get that knowledge from social media and interactions with my peeps. But I don’t delve into those stories, and I’m not afraid to walk away from conversations that linger on them.

Here’s the thing – I do not need to bear witness to people’s suffering to know that these actions are deplorable. I do not honour the victims in any way by raking over the nuances of their pain. I do not value my own life, or my family’s lives, any more fiercely simply by knowing the extent that others have been subjected to unimaginable pain. So I don’t imagine it, at all.

Here’s how I honour people who’ve lost their lives or suffered emotional or physical pain as a result of a big-news tragedy. It’s the same way I make sure that the world is not –  in spite of how news coverage tends to make me feel – hopeless or bleak, and the human race is not intrinsically evil. 

I keep giving love. I keep volunteering my time. I keep sending out messages of positivity and hope on social media. I keep smiling at and acknowledging the people who are overlooked (lonely elderly people on park benches, miserable bus drivers, exhausted cashiers, etc). I keep showing up for my loved ones who need me. (I am not saying I nail this stuff every time, BTW.) Most importantly, I keep focusing on the beauty, the joy and the magic in every day.  

Liz Gilbert says that when confronted with horrifying news stories, instead of upsetting herself by reflecting on the nefarious forces that led to such a tragedy, she looks for the helpers. The people who respond from the most basic level of humanity – that compulsion to love and support each other, which we are all hardwired to do – by assisting those who are affected by a devastating event. The people who queued all day in the Florida heat to donate blood after Orlando. The people who offered to ride public transport with Muslims after the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney. The people who took around glasses of orange juice after the Boston Marathon bombing. My heart swells just thinking about them. 

I am not suggesting everyone should avoid the news, and I’m certainly not advocating ignoring horrific events completely. It’s true that these tragedies are an opportunity for us to make change in the world – lobbying for gun reform, for example, or rethinking our social attitudes to alcohol. So, yes, there is value in learning more about these tragedies and in starting conversations that may inspire change at a community and even a global level. 

But often, in my experience, what actually happens is we stand around muttering comments like ‘it’s so sad’ and ‘it breaks my heart’ then we go back to talking about Pokemon Go. That’s not a criticism, by the way – if gathering to discuss tragedies, even for a short time, makes you feel better and gives you an emotional outlet, that’s great. For me, it doesn’t – it simply leaves me with a sense of futility and powerlessness. So instead I’ll allow community leaders, reporters and those who feel called to agitate for change to delve into negative news and use that as their fuel for action. I’ll support them where I can, but only from a distance.   

There is nothing I can do to stop these sorts of tragedies from occurring. What I can do, however, is make sure they do not define the human experience for me and for those around me. I don’t need to listen to the news to do that – I just need to listen to my heart. 

RELATED POST: One for the sensitive types - how your weakness can be your strength

Money, money, money. How faith helps pay the bills (kinda)

Dire Straits got it for nothing, Sam Smith had it on his mind and Destiny’s Child used it to pay their automo’ bills. It’s money, and it – well, lack of it, to be precise – has brought my life to a screeching halt in recent weeks.

In a spiritual sense, money is regarded as an energy, rather than an entity in itself. In other words, it’s a means to an end, not an end point. It flows when we are in flow. So because it’s not flowing for me right now, I’ve had to ask myself how I might be contributing to that.

When you don’t know when you’ll get paid, or when your next job will appear, you are existing in a state of faith. Which is similar to a state of grace, I guess, but far less serene – more sweary, more weepy. You are relying on the Universe to supply you with what you need, when you need it. You are fumbling around in dark rooms, clawing under beds to find the proof that everything will be OK. There is no proof, there is only faith. In the past month, that faith has been tested to the max.

Having been self-employed for six years, I’m used to my income fluctuating, and this is always a slow time of year for work. However circumstances have conspired to put me in a rather precarious situation that’s left me very unstable – particularly since I don’t know how long this rough patch will last.

At the height of this crisis, I had a teary, hiccup-y convo with Archangel Michael, pleading for financial assistance. The message I got back was: “Trust me.” (Which is the case for almost every problem I present to the angels, actually.) On the way to the gym the next morning, I found a $2 coin on the pavement. This is not a great deal of money, obviously, but its discovery was symbolic rather than practical. It was a sign that I was going to be taken care of. I felt a weight lift off my shoulders, and gave the coin to a homeless man outside the train station as I knew I did not need it.

A few days later I went to the Rozelle Markets and did a market stall, something in which I typically make a loss, but which is valuable to me as a means of introducing people in the community to my services. The market management runs a lucky draw where stallholders can win back the cost of their stall. I got a very clear message from the angels that I would win. I am not, historically, very lucky at such things so I was sceptical. Well, I won. And abundance has continued to flow my way ever since, with more work opportunities opening up to me. Which is largely to do with me being able to hold onto faith (in a very ungraceful manner).

When we ask for money, we need to be open to how it will appear. We tend to think of financial support only in terms of our salary, but the Universe regards ‘abundance’ in a larger sense. You might win a free holiday. You might receive a tax refund you didn’t expect. You might be given a petrol card by your boss. Our requests for more money will always be answered, but the answer might not turn up the way we expect.

The best thing we can do in these situations is to keep focusing on the knowledge that the Universe will always provide for us, rather than focusing on what we are lacking – that’s what creates an energetic block that makes it harder for us to receive what we need. This is a bit shit, if you think about it – basically, when we’re on our knees, completely deplete of faith, we need it more than ever before. We are asked to have the belief that what’s in front of us right now will not be our future.

Still, when you think about it, faith is all we have. Learning to hold onto that is one of the best tools we have for navigating adversity. As they say, you can’t change the direction of the wind but you can adjust your sails.

Maybe I should offer my landlord faith in lieu of rent money. I’ll let you know how that works out for me.  

There are a thousand reasons to be cynical. Don't. Just believe

Sometimes I feel like a bit of a hypocrite when I’m doing angel card readings. So often I relay angel messages to clients about having faith that everything will work out, and trusting in the Universe’s plan. Then I finish the reading, go home or log out of Skype, and fall to pieces because cashflow is slow or a guy I like hasn’t texted me back. Really, I could do with taking on the guidance I’m dispensing myself – there are often messages in there for me too. As a very wise friend once told me, we are here to teach what we need to learn.

Keeping the faith is a recurring theme in my readings and, consequently, in this blog. In fact it was the subject of the very first post I wrote on this blog, in November 2014. It’s an ongoing struggle. 

Every day we are asked to believe in things which we cannot see or that are not guaranteed – weather predictions, job security, recovery from debilitating illness and relationship longevity, to name a few. Sometimes we do this easily, other times our desire for control and our obsession with timeframes get in the way. 

My love life is where this shows up most for me. I have been told again and again and again in my own readings that I will not be single forever. I have been sent signs, been delivered messages in dreams and even had a message from a deceased relative (via a spirit medium) all reassuring me that I will meet someone wonderful, and I will know him when I meet him. This should be all the reassurance I need. But I lose faith all the time. I look at all the beautiful, outgoing women in Sydney and I think, well, since I can’t compete with that, what else can I offer that would be attractive to men? And with no answers springing to mind, my descent in a negative thought spiral begins.

On Saturday night when I was leaving the Taylor Swift concert, I was feeling miserable because I’d seen a selfie in which I looked really old and haggard, and I felt that no-one would ever want to date me at this late age and stage. For the past few months I had been feeling, for the first time in recent years, really fine with being single and quite relaxed to let things play out as they are supposed to. This storm of doubt had come out of nowhere. Then I got a ridiculously obvious sign that I needed to snap out of it: I was jabbed in the shoulder with some angel wings. Literally, not metaphorically. As I was walking among the bustling crowd heading to the train station, a girl in an angel costume (dressing up is not unusual at a Swifty concert) bumped into me, the sharp corner of her wing pressing into my shoulder. It would be difficult to overlook the symbolism. In fact I would have laughed out loud if I hadn’t been feeling so sorry for myself. I probably should have laughed out loud. The Universe has a sense of humour, after all, and I definitely deserved a prod for being so self-pitying. And I could certainly do with lightening the fuck up.

What the Universe was saying to me was exactly what the band Journey expressed lyrically in the 80s: don’t stop believin’ (hold on to that feelin’…). We live in a cynical world, and of course we have no proof of anything much, so it’s only natural that our faith will falter from time to time. The challenge is to keep rising back to that place where you believe in your dreams and in your luminous, tantalising future again. Nothing is a given – that’s why they call it faith instead of certainty. But believe we must. Without faith, without hope, the world is a very bleak place. 

I know that my present situation is not my future. I have no evidence of this but I believe it anyway. I know I will doubt it again and again, but I also believe I have the resilience to return to all the things I believe in: transformation and beauty and human kindness and miracles. And now I know that if I don’t, the Universe will find a way to jab me in the shoulder and remind me.

PS I thought I should expand this story by adding what happened the next day. I was prompted to draw a card for myself from the Romance With The Angels deck. This is what I got:

See what I mean about that sense of humour?

What hope looks like. My experience of depression

Warning: this post contains possible triggers for anyone with a history of depression or mental illness.

Last week's R U OK Day campaign to raise awareness of suicide prevention has prompted me to write a blog post about my experience with depression. It concerns me that despite ongoing awareness campaigns, depression is still perceived as a weakness of the spirit, and something that prompts us to collectively back away instead of holding each other closer. I don't imagine my story will do much to change this outrageously flawed and counter-intuitive approach but I think that the more of us who share our stories, the less potent the notion that depression is self-indulgent and trivial becomes. I hope. 

I have devoted my working life to writing about matters that range from the sparkly to the gritty, yet I struggle to assemble words that can even come close to accurately describing this incredibly bleak period of my life. It was 2000. I was 20, and in my final year of a communications degree at university. I was looking forward to a long-reaching, successful career as a journalist and had no reason to believe that would not pan out as I dreamed. I believed that good things happened to good people, crime happened only in TV shows and that New Zealand was the safest place in the world. I was wrong about all of these things.

I was working at a magazine part time while I studied (I've talked about that experience before). One bitterly cold evening in June, a much-loved and respected colleague was walking home from the bus stop when she was raped, repeatedly stabbed and left to die in a suburban park by a man out on parole after serving time for a sexual assault. Her body was found later that evening. We were called into a meeting the following day where volunteers from Victim Support (a truly wonderful organisation) were on hand as our boss, in absolute pieces, explained the horror that had unfolded overnight. 

When you receive news like this, your blood runs cold. You go into shock and you watch the room start to spin and you wait to be told the police have made a mistake and actually she's fine oh here she is of course she's OK what is this some sort of movie this is absolutely not happening. But they hadn't and she wasn't. 

My colleague and I were mates – she was sort of a mentor to me – although we were not close. But more than the loss of her it was the brutal manner of her death that catapulted me into depression, a fog so immense and terrifying it makes my hands shake to detail it here. This tragedy caused a violent rupture in my foundations. I ceased to function.

Although my memories of this time are fairly hazy (self-preservation, I guess), I do remember that I didn't eat for days at a time. I did not leave my bed for about three weeks – I couldn't find a reason to. I occasionally slept but was tortured by nightmares in which I was chased across town by sinister figures. I couldn't make decisions. I spoke to no one. I forgot to go to classes; I forgot what day it was. Time meant nothing. I had fallen off the edge of the world and I did not care where I landed. 

I was diagnosed with depression and told to take anti-depressants which, because I was so broken, was a practical task I couldn't deal with. I was encouraged to attend counselling but I had nothing to say, about anything. The world was dark and hostile and could never be anything else. There was no point to anything. This, friends, is why depression is so gravely destructive – if you don't care about anything, you stop participating in life. And that can lead you down a path of no return. Vastly more destructive than any physical injury I've ever had, depression crippled my emotional nerve centre, rendering me unable to feel – and for a long time it felt like no person, activity or human experience could shift that.

I knew I needed help but I didn't want it. I wanted to stay in my vacuum where I would never feel pain again. I didn't want to participate in a world that could be so unspeakably cruel.  

I'm very fortunate that my depression was circumstantial – it was prompted by a specific traumatic, grievous event, rather than the depression that fells so many people throughout their lives for no reason at all, without reprieve. When I started actually taking anti-depressants on a regular basis, they changed the chemistry in my brain enough that I could start to face up to what had happened (a process that took years) and slowly fumble my way through a powerful tide of emotions (and yes, I did eventually go to counselling). There were searing rage, a stomach-twisting injustice and an overriding bitterness, and there were agonising questions that will never be satisfactorily answered. 

I want to make it very clear that as immense as my despair was, I did not get to the point of wanting to take my own life. I cannot imagine the depths of hopelessness that brings people to that point, and I feel enormous sorrow for people in that situation, not to mention their families. What happened for me was that an unwillingness to cause pain to my sister, the person I love most in this world, slowly started to ignite a desire to fight back against the darkness.  my suffering was causing pain to the people I loved –but when you're depressed, your capacity to care about other people is disabled. Some people never get that prod – but that is not a failure on their part, it's just a reflection of the extent that this disease has them in its clutches. 

It took months but I eventually reached a point where I could imagine the possibility of maybe experiencing joy again, even though it would be always feel tarnished in some way. A smashed vase can be glued back together but the cracks will always be faintly visible.

While my struggle with depression is behind me now, it still casts a shadow over my life. No matter where I am or what I am doing, in the background there lurks the threat that I will one day fall into that deep pit again – and that this time, I will not be able to claw my way out. And since I'm being truly honest here, this fear is a major contributor to my decision not to have children. I cannot run the high risk of post-natal depression. (That said, if I desperately wanted children I would probably be willing to take that risk.)

This chapter of my life is why I want us, collectively, to keep talking about depression. It is real and it is ferocious – but we have each other and that is where we find hope. 

This is why 'hope' is my favourite word in the English language. It is why, two years later, I got a phoenix tattooed on my back (something I regret, but that's another story!). It is why I believe, in the words of Holocaust survivor Connie Ten Boom, that there is no hole so deep that God's love is not deeper still. It does not matter what God looks like to you – it only matters that you can find something more powerful than the darkness. Hold on to that. That is what hope looks like. 

If you need to talk to someone anonymously, at any time, call 13 11 14 (Australia), 800-442-HOPE (USA), 08457 90 90 90 (UK) or 0800 543 354 (New Zealand).

I'm very sorry for your loss. How can I help?

In February I wrote a letter to a Canadian woman I had never met. I had seen an appeal on social media by the woman’s daughter asking people around the world to send letters of hope and well wishes to her mother who was nearing the end of her struggle with pancreatic cancer. Because I do volunteer work at rest homes I have seen how much a simple handwritten letter means to people who are suffering and feeling alone, so I put pen to paper.

Sadly, a fortnight ago I found a message in my ‘other’ inbox on Facebook (which I seldom check) from this lovely woman’s daughter, letting me know her mother had passed away the day before my letter arrived. She attached a photo of a wall (see below) covered with letters from around the world, and said that it had brought her some comfort to know that so many people cared so much.

Once I got over my annoyance that it had taken me three days to post my letter (!) I realised that a beautiful thing had happened in this Ontario town. In a time of immense pain, this lady was able to derive a small measure of peace from small but powerful acts of kindness by complete strangers. It was a heartwarming thing to bear witness to, as well as to have participated in, in a very tiny way. Of course, no wall of letters can protect her from the unrelenting ferocity of grief but perhaps this visible reminder of the power of hope can provide fleeting moments of shelter.

This got me thinking about the ways we can help people as they grieve. I’m not talking about strangers here, I’m talking about the people we care about. It’s heart-wrenching watching someone dear to you in absolute agony over the loss of someone dear to them. What do you say? It’s hard not to fall into well-meaning but ultimately useless clichés: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do”; “Call me if you ever want to talk”; or the woefully inadequate: “time heals all wounds…” It’s so difficult to know what you can do that will actually help.

There are Cheryl Strayed quotes for these situations, as there are for every emotional quandary. A man wrote to Cheryl (aka ‘Dear Sugar’) asking for advice on how to support his partner as she grieved the death of her mother. Nothing he did seemed to help, he wrote, and it was tearing him to pieces seeing her in so much pain. Cheryl’s response explained that we have a tendency to want to rush in and offer advice or practical solutions when someone we care about is suffering. But what counts, she says, is not *how* we show up for that person, it’s simply that we *do* show up for them, again and again and again. We keep in contact. We let them cry. We listen. What comes from our heart is more important than what comes from our mouth. Anyway, that’s what I took from Cheryl’s response. Here’s what she actually wrote: “It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true. But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.”

Yes, it is. Thanks, Cheryl.

 

The 'letter wall'.

PS: On a lighter note, I got chocolate smeared all over my keyboard in the process of writing this post. Totally worth it. Happy Easter, everyone.