How to Melt an Emotional Ice Age

and a pretty good mantra to go with it

Over the last eight years, I have noticed myself in an unintentional retraction - have you? Mine is a drawing inward that started for one important reason, and took root for several others. What began as an exercise in finding myself after having lost myself to the dark underbelly of infertility and the distraction of someone else’s addiction was amplified by deplorable leaders and their hideous legacy. Your details are likely different, but I’m curious if you’ve also noticed a distinct slant? Like a tilt away from the sun in winter. Over the past many years I retreated to the lifeboat of the couch - the salve of familiar shows the balm of books and ultimately more education. But in the last eight weeks, a spell within me has broken - thawed as fast as frost in the first beam of dawn sunlight - as though it never existed. My fear-based, ego-inspired sheltered life has cracked open and I have awoken to a mindset that existed before. It is familiar and settled in a way the feels much like riding a bike that was stuck between gears that has finally decided. Pedaling is not easier, but smoother and no longer grating.

Whether or not you share this feeling, I see the cultural trend in the survivalist hobbies of friends and Facebook fellows, which is echoed in the shift in popular television from Friends and Seinfeld and The West Wing to The Walking Dead, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Last of Us*. We’ve shifted from jovial interpersonal drama and idealistic public servants to routine beheadings and cultish factions of post-apocalyptic reproductive control. Yikes. No wonder I’ve gone a bit more selfish and survivalish. Unsurprising I’ve retracted into an emotional ice age.

What shifted?

I have seen and been reminded that people who seek to do good and serve the public good exist. I watched the Olympics and felt the essence of the games when underdogs won. For me, it’s not particularly thrilling to see the person who has trainers and science and special diets, sponsorships and generational wealth and privilege win. It’s cool - it’s remarkable and impressive - but not thrilling. Possibility is what lights me up, and had me glued to the javelin and shotput and decathlon as literal magic unfolded and perseverance changed lives.

And then? The speeches.

I have watched The West Wing twice this year - both times in January. The Bartlett presidency pulled me through surgical convalescence and kept me from digging my days into a social media black hole, where I have been known to behave somewhat badly, particularly in Facebook groups dedicated to yoga teaching professionals. In hard moments of my personal life, I listen to graduation speeches - Anne Lamont and Jim Carrey. When the state of the world makes me shrink, I listen to Barack Obama’s 2008 speech, sometimes only in the privacy of my own mind, repeating these words over and over, rocking and soothing the jaded icicle of my sweet heart:

”In the unlikely story of America - there has never been anything false about hope.”