Making the Unknown Known

The fears and tears of our times.

Photo by Mayank Dhanawade on Unsplash

How have you gotten through the first full week under the new regime? How have I as a sensitive, progressive psychologist done it? At every turn, I find myself focused on this question: how are we the dissenters surviving in the current era?

Personally, I’ve made some intentional choices to prioritize my health and wellbeing: cutting back on the amount I worked; sticking to a routine that centered on nurturing, comfortable activities; staying in close contact with kindred spirits; drastically curtailing my news consumption; giving myself permission to cry, rage, tremble, cry, make snarky comments, cry.

There have been so, so many tears.

What has become abundantly clear to me is that I’m grieving. I’m crying for all that is being stripped away moment to moment, as well as all that we have already lost.

This kind of grieving feels like a slow-motion avalanche, bearing me down the side of a mountain. I don’t know where or how it will stop. Or how many more avalanches will be triggered. I only know that I am crying as I fall.

I’m not a policy wonk, although I hang out with some. For the sake of my mental stability, I can’t be a journalist who is required to stay abreast of the play-by-play of current affairs. I’m not leading the charge as the head of a nonprofit activist group.

I’m just a psychologist and a writer. This phase that we’re living through? It’s so far beyond the scope of my expertise.

You see, my professional world is internally oriented. As a psychologist, I’ll adeptly probe the inner workings of an individual being: thoughts, feelings, sensations, spirituality. I’m capable of exploring how a person’s internal landscape manifests in their external behaviors, in their relationship patterns. My eye, however, remains turned toward a person’s inner workings.

Nothing in my training prepared me to comprehend what’s happening around us.

Partly, that’s my fault. My doctorate is in counseling psychology, oriented toward wellness and positive psychology. Psychopathology and sociopathy have never evoked my morbid curiosity, so I’ve never developed the skills to probe the psyches of the individuals in the spotlight today.

I certainly don’t believe for a moment that I’m capable of changing any hearts and minds, least of all those that seem impervious to logic, compassion, or interconnectedness. And I don’t care to try.

Instead, I’m interested in how decent, kind, good-hearted people are living in this miasma. How do people like us continue to get out of bed and perform some approximation of our usual daily routines?

I’m journaling a lot about my observations of people like us (I know, such a nerd!). At best, these notes might be the raw material for a future essay or book. Perhaps my scribblings will become a memoir. Maybe they will go no further than to my now barely-teen son, something to read later with adult eyes as he looks back on the history of his family and his country.

I have a proclivity for chronicling. During the early weeks of the pandemic lockdown, I kept a running log of themes that I observed in my friends, clients, myself. “The kids are not alright.” “The parents are not alright.” “The introverts feel guilty for how much we’re enjoying the permission to not leave our houses.” Dark humor to help me deal with my terror of losing more people than I already had. Story starters, aimed at keeping the powerlessness at bay.

The fear of the unknown hung over me.

I resorted to psychology, to observation. Psychology offered the promise of cutting through the unknown and making sense of mysteries. Its illusions of human predictability filled a gap that organized religion’s stories couldn’t reach. Theories of personality, systems of cognitive assessment, methods to measure and modify behavior: these were merely tools to carve certainty from the mysteries of the universe.

Writing has long served a similarly comforting function in my life. Like psychology, writing can be practiced, learned, taught. Our creative potential rests in making something out of the blank page of the unknown. From the limitless possibilities of vocabulary, a syntax emerges to carry meaning from writer to reader.

I am trying to piece together a story of these times, to make the unknown known.

Many psychologists assert that the fear of the unknown lies beneath our fear of death, our resistance to change, our willingness to accept surface explanations of what might otherwise be painful, shameful, disruptive. They propose that the fear of the unknown serves a protective purpose, moving us away from potential (unknown) threats.

But what of the fear of the known?

Because that is what we have today: known threats. Known dysfunction. Known power abusers. Known systems of oppression, reasserting their dominance. Known bystanders looking away.

I fear the known.

Once upon a time, I was a scholar of 20^th century German language and history. No, I can’t seem to stick to one career, and yet they orbit around each other, stories and internal experiences and questions of what is known.

As an instructor, I introduced each class to Hannah Arendt, to the banality of evil. Horrors happened there because ordinary people were there. But people who commit evil, who empower evil, who uphold evil? They are everywhere. This, alas, we know.

My tears fall for what I know, about people, about history, about how stories can bring us together or tear us apart. I fear what I know.

Likewise, my tears fall for what I don’t know. Who will lose their job next? Who will be deported next? Who will disappear? What irreparable damage will be done to institutions, systems, the environment? The fear of the unknown is no less virulent now than five years ago.

Perhaps my next journal entry will read: there is a universe of tears to cry for what is known and unknown. No story, no history, no psychology can assuage our fear.

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Get to know more about Lori here:

What is Singularly Sensitive and Why Should You Join Us?

Special thanks to you, Lori for being part of this work with me.

Xoxo - Mesa

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