Unbury Your Rage And Joy

Sorrow and hope are welcome too

With Mor Keshet leading a Climate Emotions Mandala art therapy workshop at Climate Week NYC 2024

Hello friends.

Wow. So it’s October 2024. We just passed the Jewish New Year, a joyful marker on my personal / communal calendar, and we’re in what’s called The Days of Awe, where life hangs in the balance. We had a horrible, unanticipated, in certain ways unprecedented climate disaster, Hurricane Helene, cut through the southeast, particularly bad in North Carolina, my mother’s home state. War is spreading through the Middle East. We are a month out from a stressful election. And last week was Climate Week, where I was grateful to show up in the worlds of climate/mental health/education in a few different ways.

It’s a lot, and I’m feeling it. In the past several days I’ve been torn up and grateful and scared and relieved. I’ve been anxious and amused and enraged and bored and shocked and dislocated, inspired and exhausted and sad and empty and empathetic and expectant and ashamed, resentful and loving and hopeful and calm and despairing.

Watercolor version of the Climate Emotions Wheel by nicolekelner.com

I’ve also been hearing a lot of conversations both inside and outside the climate movement lately where people have feelings about feelings.

That is: people beating each other and/or themselves up for not expressing or not having the right emotion at the right time.

For example:

Against Anger

The New York Times held a high-profile Climate Week event where they, astonishingly, invited an oil company CEO to be on the same stage with Jane Goodall. Activists from Climate Defiance popped up and said, no, this is not okay with us, this person is actively causing harm and should be publicly denounced, not politely applauded.

The Times did a lot of tone-policing of Climate Defiance in their version of events : Climate Defiance is “personally targeting” and “yelling” at people.

“They have also shouted expletives at executives with links to the oil and gas industry.”

Expletives! (clutches pearls) Is it wrong to express anger directly and personally at powerful executives like Hollub, who earned $18 million last year, who is touting her company’s spending of a small fraction of their revenue on the greenwashing, unproven technology of carbon capture, who is of a generation that will not live to see the worst effects of climate change, who told a New York Times reporter that she wants to burn every last drop of oil and gas left in the ground? Then I don’t want to be right.

Shouting expletives? I don’t know, seems pretty fucking appropriate.

Against Negativity

Amy Westervelt

, an amazing climate journalist who is allergic to bullshit, wrote about how alienated she was by “toxic positivity” at Climate Week and in similar spaces:

Even the more legit climate events left me with the same feeling I've been having at most climate conferences in the past year or two, an unsettling disconnect between people noshing on passed hors d'oeuvres and sipping craft cocktails while talking about the need to "stay positive!" "tell the positive stories!" "give people hope!" and the reality crashing in all around us, which this week included Hurricane Helene, a deadly storm and landslides in Nepal, a climate activist being sentenced to 2 years in prison in the UK for throwing soup on a (glass cover of a) painting, and, as always, more news of expanding fossil fuel development.

Against Hope

Anna Jane Joyner has been expressing similar feelings. She’s the founder of Good Energy, the climate storytelling organization. And she counts Western North Carolina as her home region, one of the areas hit hardest by Helene.

“I feel so numb. Intellectually, I feel rage—at the fossil fuel companies, and at many in the climate movement. This obsession with only telling inauthentic stories about rainbows and solar panels that condescend with narratives like “We can solve this! There’s hope!”…

“We—I—desperately need honest stories that help us figure out how to be human in this world. To face this monumental, unprecedented crisis. We need stories to help us navigate the terror, anxiety, grief, despair, & rage in a way that makes us feel seen and emotionally prepare.”

Ok, so what’s going on here? Why do direct expressions of anger come in for finger-wagging? Why are some people insisting other people stay hopeful and positive in the face of disaster, and why do some of the people expressing optimism, attract rage ?

Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus

Part of it is what my friends, the scholars danah boyd and Alice Marwick, coined as context collapse—when we’re living on social media, it’s like one giant crowded hospital ward. In one corner people are dying in agony, in another corner miraculous babies are being born.

Or as Auden wrote, in reference to the painting above, which shows little tiny Icarus legs crashing in the ocean:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Someone is at a party sipping craft cocktails and debating climate communications strategies, while someone is clinging to a tree for hours until they finally let go and fall into the floodwater, and this is irreconcilably offensive.

And it also is just true. And that must mean there is no inappropriate emotion.

It’s just as wrong to imply that we have to always keep things hopeful, or cool and calm, as it is to allege you’re not being truly honest if you’re not howling with dread.

If there’s anything to really pay attention to for myself, I have learned, it’s the range of emotions. Am I able to feel and move through a lot of different feelings, or am I getting stuck in one take, unable to express it, unable to move on? Do I feel pressure to play up or play down, to pretend to feel something I don’t or to not feel something I do? That way lies the numbness, the deadness, the inauthenticity and alienation.

In a beautiful, searing essay that ran this week in The Guardian, (h/t Genevieve Guenther) Tim Winton, an apocalyptic novelist, wrote about what roils beneath a seeming lack of affect, particularly in the young:

“The lassitude that distinguishes our moment is born of sorrow and buried rage.”

…“Trauma specialist Thomas Hübl calls it “collective numbness”, an affect that masks the underworld of stultifying compulsions, addictions and evasions we prefer not to discuss…

“This is a form of communal anguish. If it seems more evident in young people it may be because they have fewer layers of insulation and camouflage. The corrosive burn of their distress is not as easily dampened by the comforts and diversions that blind their elders.”

Personally, I am drawn to the expression of dark and uncomfortable feelings, unearthing them from beneath our diversions. This hidden matter feels closer to the truth of what is happening in many ways.

Plus, some of the people pushing hope, solutions and optimism are lying through their teeth. They’re doing it because they want you to forget about what’s going on and click away.

But I also experience that when you start digging deep, green shoots sometimes turn up. Gratitude can come with something as simple as a new breath. Joy is necessary.

It just can’t be that we all require of each other a constant exposure to the absolute worst things that are happening everywhere in the world all the time. Or that we force each other to paste smiles on our faces and push “hopium” and solutions solvent while bombs fall and roads collapse.

I want to be part of a movement where people can be heard in all of their feelings and accepted in all of their feelings.

Come to think of it, I want to be part of a family like that too. I try to listen to my kids and validate their feelings even if I’m also setting a boundary that is uncomfortable for them.

Now, we have to face the same facts. You can’t get up on a stage and lie to my face. Don’t tell me you care about something that you are actively making worse.

You can’t have your own facts. But you can have your own feelings, and I want you to have them all. I want to be whole, and I want us all to be whole.

Links

I donated to Beloved Asheville mutual aid. Manna Food Bank is in the area. World Central Kitchen teams are currently in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mexico, Gaza, Lebanon, Israel and Ukraine .

I wrote about new attempts to define “climate literacy” , and talked to a college freshman who told me: “Being taught about issues in a way that emphasizes solutions is telling our youth that they can be part of progress and that the world isn’t doomed.”