Accepting Our Limitations

Feels Like An Exhale

Hello ♡,

I think, as I write to you today, that surely I have written to you on this very topic. And truthfully? If I have said something similar it needs to be repeated. This is a topic that is not only of personal concern, it is one I think is really important to discuss for mental health in general. I don’t know how to discuss this properly, and so I am asking for grace as I stumble forward in an open conversation. And I welcome your feedback and thoughts.

I was thinking and praying for the people, families, and children suffering in Gaza as I was attempting to fall asleep recently. And I felt something I think many of us feel - I should be doing more. If I did more maybe I could help stop this, said the thoughts. I felt not only a sense of grief, I felt a sense of guilt, as I tried to fall asleep in my comfortable safe bed across the world. And then another thought hit me, one I am not as sure how to talk about, and it sounded more like this, “you don’t have the power alone to save them.” And I felt the great grief of that. I also felt the smallness of my own life. Not in a disempowered way, but in a way that felt more like an alignment with reality.

We confuse access with power.

Now I know many of you may have a lot of thoughts on this that could sound like: “You could do more! Why aren’t you doing more! DO MORE! Post on social media! Write your representatives! Attend a protest!” And let me be clear, I am not disagreeing with you. Not in the least.

However, with our constant access to atrocities across the globe, and the call (rightfully so) for us to help our neighbors near and far, there seems to be no end to the combination of deep distressing grief with a sense of moral responsibility that inflates our sense of power.

It creates a sense of all or nothing, a false dichotomy.

As if me watching a show with my family is abandoning children in Gaza. Or if I burned myself out, abandoning my roles for this cause, I could definitely effect change - I am just choosing (selfishly) not to.

I am not saying I couldn’t effect change. And I am not disagreeing that it is those brave souls who have put their lives on the line that have in fact changed the world. What I am saying is that our constant access to every crisis, NEAR and FAR, can be conflated with a false sense of power to stop all suffering. This can leave us spinning, swirling, and ironically quite unhelpful.

I wonder if our compassion and concern is spread so thin that it becomes fragile, brittle even, until it cracks…and then we shut down emotionally.

Photo by Mario Caruso on Unsplash

I heard a Harvard-trained researcher and author say that he, and the researchers he knows, will not watch the news unless it is local and they can affect change on it. His point was that the combination of empowerment with knowledge for your neighbor’s needs is most effective. And that the opposite? Constant knowledge with very limited power is not effective or good for your mental health.

It seems as though we conflate access to knowledge with personal responsibility to solve it. This can create not only an inflated sense of power, but a deflated sense of hope when we are, for example, not able to stop a war in Gaza by going to a protest and posting on social media. And we don’t just confuse ourselves, we attack others. I see activists tearing each other down for not talking about another injustice more.

I don’t know the solution. But I do know this is not working psychologically, emotionally, or even spiritually. I am not prescribing a head in the sand lifestyle. That is a gross enactment of privilege I don’t want to live by.

But what can we do?

How then shall we live when our constant access has not caught up to our coping?

I think one key is to accept our limitations.

I cannot, by posting on social media, stop ICE raids. I can accept my smallness. I can instead choose one thing to help which could be donating what I can to a group helping impacted families. I can go to a local protest. And then? I need to accept my smallness again. I need to feel the grief, the anger even in that.

If I understand my limitations I feel less inflated power with the constant access. And this ironically leaves my heart less fatigued and brittle for more meaningful engagement.

Our smallness is a key to the understanding of our roles. Maybe all the problems of the world are in fact too big for you. But maybe one local community you are close to is where you focus your efforts. Maybe small is indeed not only aligned, but most effective. But this is countercultural in a world that often only praises big and expansive.

Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash

So, here is to accepting our limitations. In a world that tells us big and bold is the only good for a life, a cause, or a career. Here is to accepting our limitations and holding the grief we feel for others rather than a false sense of being able to save the entire world at once. Don’t let the constant access spread you so thin that you crack. Here is to accepting our limitations, and in that smallness looking at the concentric circles that surround our life and the work waiting there for us to do.

With you,

Monica