the big ball of dread
An endless parade of images and words march through my head when I try to sleep. Sometimes they’re personal; real worries about things in my life, unfounded worries that my anxiety disorder facilitates for me. Monsters, real and imagined, dance before me as I try to get some sleep.
Lately those monsters have taken the shape of dread. Dread is an ambiguous shape, a pliable, dark mass which hovers around you, ever changing, always ominous. You can’t define it, you can’t pin down what it looks or feels like. It lays down with you at night and follows you around during the day, stalking your every waking minute and entering your dreams.
My dread is made up of many things. Years ago I used to play a game called Katamari Damacy. In this game, you controlled a sticky ball of undetermined origin that you rolled around, collecting all the stuff that stuck to it. Little things, big things, living things, you just rolled around and your ball grew and grew with all the things you collected sticking out if haphazardly. This is what I think of when I try to picture my ever growing sense of dread. But here, the things I pick up are not innocuous like crabs or cows or clouds, instead they are dangerous and foreboding. They are mass shootings, recession, migrants being held in deplorable conditions, climate change, racism, xenophobia, and a president who doesn’t give a shit about any of those things and, in fact, enables them. They all gather on my big Katamari ball of dread as I roll through my days. It follows me around. It has become part of me.
I don’t know what to do with this dread. I can donate to causes and call my representatives and protest and vote, but that dread is still ever present, growing larger all the time, becoming unwieldy. It keeps me from sleeping. It keeps me from writing. It keeps me from enjoying life because there’s always this feeling that something is coming, that we’re right at the periphery of disaster, that life as we knew it years ago will never be the same. We’re living in new times with old dilemmas and our culture has become one that lets those old dilemmas breathe and take on new life until they become something else; monsters born of hatred, death, destruction, war within. Threats are growing, the dread grows with it, soon I can’t breathe, I wake up gasping for air, I’m suffocating.
What do I do with this? What do we do with our now unmanageable dread as it hovers and stalks? Maybe we can try not to collect items to stick to it anymore, stop watching television, stop reading the newspaper, stop scrolling twitter. But is a head in the sand any better? It’s still the same amount of suffocating. And the problems will persist, with or without your eyes. They are always there, looming, growing bigger by the day.
You can practice all the self care you want: go to therapy, take long baths, listen to your favorite music, eat ice cream for dinner, go to the gym and work off some of that frustration you’re feeling. But it doesn’t make the issues go away. We still have children in makeshift prisons. We still have a gun problem. The rainforest is still on fire. He’s still in the White House. Do you learn to just live with the dread, to lay down with it, walk with it, treat it like a companion? Do we just go on collecting objects to add to our Katamari ball, rolling along through life comparing our resulting depression and anxiety?
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to combat any of this. I only know that this is going to get worse before — if — it gets any better. I’d love to add some hope to this conversation, to talk about us all joining our hands across America, our voices forming a chorus of resistance, but I’m here to tell you the resistance as we are witnessing it now is futile and impotent. You can scream about impeachment, you can keep a picture of Mueller in a locket around your neck, but it’s all so much of nothing.
Instead, we’ll all just roll our own big balls of dread around, bumping into each other, inadvertently collecting each other’s detritus. Our dread is collective and I just wonder if we are helpless to stop it.
