Plans: Canceled!
If you are in the NorthEast, you know about the Canadian forest fires. They have wreaked havoc on our skies and our air for the past week. I was the last to know, as usual, as I try to avoid news and doomsday stuff as much as I can. I heard about it from someone I had a meeting with on Tuesday afternoon. I thought, ok, forest fire? That will be over soon.
Wrong.
I went through the usual motions that I do when hearing upsetting news; denial, fear, bargaining, anger/frustration, and finally…..acceptance. I am a therapist, not a super human, so I go through things just like everyone else. I allowed myself to go through all of the stages, which is the 47yo Drew and not the 24yo one.
Denial: this will be over soon. It’s ok. This would never happen to us on a regular basis, this is a fluke. It’s no big deal and this CERTAINLY is not because the world is coming to an end. This is just a few days. I can still go outside, no biggie.
Fear: This is the end of the world. I just moved out of NYC to AVOID this shit, now here we are in a new outdoorsy place that we moved to in order to be able to go outside, and look at this! We will never be able to go outside again. My lungs are going to shut down. My life is over. And what about the animals? They are all going to die!
Bargaining: Maybe if I start being more environmentally conscious things like this will not happen. I know I do the regular things and even extra things, but we should all really treat the world better than this. This is the result of people not caring about the earth and this is the price we now have to pay.
Anger/Frustration: Canada needs to get their shit together (watches Tiktok video of planes going over Canandian forests dropping fire to start fires, caption: “this is how the ‘fires’ started'“). Where’s the oversight of this!!!! Who is going to be held responsible for this? Why must we be impacted by stupid stuff other people do?
Acceptance: Ok. I’m sure things will clear up when the air current shifts. It’s only a couple of days of inconvenience. Dad says it’s nature’s way of “cleaning out the forests” so new trees can grow (clearly that’s HIS bargaining, lol). The animals are ok because they have good instincts and can get out quickly. I can use this time to stay inside to rest.
You see that ebb and flow, right? I’ve noticed that the order of the stages might change, but typically it’s fury first and organizing and acting later. If you’ve never read Glennon Doyle’s book “Untamed” go out and buy it immediately. It’s THAT GOOD. She talks about things that make her angry, like the way the US government (the orange guy mostly) separated immigrating kids from their parents. She got angry and didn’t know what to do. She went to bed and the next morning woke up and launched a campaign to help at the border. It was huge and helped a lot of separated families. She talked about how every launch into action for her happens in this way. Same for me. I am hopeful that this experience will wake people up. Especially our politicians (wishful thinking, I know) but we need to appreciate the earth and what it does for us. The more we take it for granted, the more we will have incidents like the one that is happening in Canada right now. It’s on all of us to do something.
So that’s what’s on my mind this week. It’s similar to how I move through other things. The fact that I am a therapist helps me see that it is for others as well. Some get stuck in certain parts of the process and it’s my job to get them unstuck.
Good thing I’ve learned how to do it for myself.
