2020 Fatigue is Real
A few weeks ago as I rode my bike home from the office through apocalyptic smoke, wearing a mask as Vancouver reportedly had the worst air quality in the world, repeatedly being hit in the face by moths due to an eerie city wide moth invasion, I had some time to think. What if this is it? What if things only get worse from here? What in the world could be next?
Here we are, nine months into 2020, a year that has thrown so much at us it can be disorienting. Everyday there seems to be more. Demonic hurricanes, massive wildfires, political and social upheaval (to say the least), an overdose crisis, record unemployment, economic uncertainty, an ecological crisis threatening our extinction, and a global pandemic, just to name a few of the bigger issues at hand.
Collective concerns aside, it is as if 2020 has held up a mirror to our personal muck and many of us are having to face shadowy aspects of ourselves and our loved ones as a result. And as if that wasn’t enough, tragedy and big life changes do not pause to let 2020 pass by, they continue. Many are grappling with the loss of loved ones, unfortunate diagnoses, and other personal life upheavals.
I am tired. You probably are tired. It is hard to see where all this is going, and there seems to be no end in sight. 2020 fatigue is real friends, and if you are feeling weary or unmotivated, having trouble focusing, or find yourself losing hope, know that these feelings are all normal and reasonable responses for the times that we are in. Your feelings are valid and OK, and you are not alone in them.
Even if our schedules have slowed down, our psyches have been on overdrive attempting to keep up with, process, and integrate all that is happening in the world. We are conscious of only a miniscule amount of what our psyches pick up on. Consciously, we may be feeding ourselves a steady stream of daily NEWS, however this is just a fraction of what the psyche is processing. Unconsciously it can be as if we are drinking water through a firehose. We are picking up on the subtlest energies that don’t manage to make it to the conscious realm.
Grocery shopping can seem like no big deal, right? Just slap on a mask and get ‘er done. Don’t walk down the aisle the wrong way, don’t linger too long deciding which brand of beans to buy, that person is coughing up a lung don’t go near them. Why is that person glaring at me? I just had to grab a lemon. Do I wait for these people to leave the aisle before I walk down it? Don’t put your bags on the counter at check out, don’t touch the keypad, don’t look at anyone or breathe on anything. We are not only having to manage our own feelings about the situation but also often pick up on those of others. And this is only grocery shopping!
If you find that you are fighting yourself over not being productive enough, know that your psyche has been working REALLY hard. See if you can give yourself permission to rest. Choosing to rest is not passive, it is an active choice and one that is way harder to make than checking off boxes on our to-do lists. And though it may seem like it, feeling hopeless is not passive either. Hopelessness can be a necessary ingredient in transformation and change. Sometimes we need to lose hope for change to happen.
In depth psychology this paradox is seen in the concept of initiation or the “dark night of the soul.” Initiatory experiences plunge us into decent, darkness, hopelessness. We often are meandering along minding our own business when BAM something kicks us off of a cliff and we fall into darkness (enter 2020). Here, if we can endure and be with the discomfort of the darkness, we can learn to see with night vision things that we could not see by the light of day. When we return to the top-side world we are not the same people as we were before, we have grown, changed, and can offer the world what we have gathered in our descent. This is what scholar and professor Joseph Campbell called “bringing back the boon” in his Hero’s Journey. Fatigue and hopelessness are all part of it.
And so, if you find yourself feeling 2020 tired, know that your fatigue has a place in the transformation that is happening within and around us. See if you can give yourself permission to not be as focused or productive as you would like, to feel how you feel. Be gentle and kind to yourselves and know that you are not alone.
