Why So Much Fear?

I've been wondering why this pandemic has created so much fear all over the world. It's natural for our survival instinct to kick in when we are threatened but many of us aren't really being threatened in the here and now. SARS and MERS passed me by - I was serenely ignorant of what was going on in some parts of the world. Maybe it's the idea of the pandemic that is the problem. But isn't it always? The idea of anything?

I've been obsessed with death since I was a teenager. It's pretty normal for teenagers to be obsessed with death but I never grew out of it. I've learnt not to talk about it with most people because they accuse me of being 'negative' or expressing suicidal ideation. And God forbid that we should speak about the darkness, the thing that hangs over us all and which most don't want to acknowledge. Instead we are told we should strive to be happy in every moment and that there is something very wrong with us if we aren't. 

Although it tends to kill the old and the already sick, the general perception is that this virus has no borders and can kill anyone. This is why there is such solidarity in our society right now - we are all in this together (except we aren't because as usual it strikes down the poor more than the rich). But the perception is that we are at war with a virus, which really means we are at war with nature and with ourselves. This is what happens when you see yourself as being separate from nature, from existence. This is the real enemy and the reason we are destroying the world - because we don't think we are a part of it. And this is why so many people are now terrified - the enemy is at their door, an enemy they have created. 

I'll leave you with a quote from my old guru:

'Death is the most misunderstood phenomenon. People have thought of death as the end of life. That is the first, basic misunderstanding.'

Image: 'Waalitja', digital drawing by author.

https://www.osho.com/highlights-of-oshos-world/osho-on-death-quotes

On Being an Empath

Given my need for honesty (at almost any cost), my hypersensitivity to noise and smells, and other eccentricities, I believed I was a high functioning autistic. When I did the online test I was definitely on the spectrum. But one very important element didn’t quite fit that ‘diagnosis’. Although some autistic people have a ‘low threshold for stimulation….a need for alone time [and]…an aversion to large groups’ the one thing autistic people don’t seem to have is an interest in or capacity for certain types of abstract philosophical thought because they tend to interpret things literally. I definitely don’t do that. In fact I hardly ever do that – I’m always looking for deeper explanations and motivations.

People with autism are ‘details-before-concept’ thinkers, while non-autistic people are ‘concept-before-details’ thinkers. An autistic mind uses a bottom-up approach with which to negotiate its environment. Someone who isn’t autistic uses ‘top-down’ thinking, which includes pulling in remembered and learned information.

One psychiatrist identifies 3 different autistic types:

• Visual thinkers who are often poor at algebra
• Verbal specialists - good at talking and writing but lacking visual skills
• Pattern thinkers who excel in maths and music but may have problems with reading or writing composition

I don’t fit into any of these categories. As an artist I have well developed visual skills but I also did so well at maths, including algebra, that I was sent to a special advanced course in maths when I was 13. I also loved literature at high school and as an adult, wrote a 40,000 word thesis – so I don’t think I have trouble with reading or writing composition.

During a discussion one day a close friend said to me: ‘oh, you’re just an empath’. At the time I didn’t take much notice. I continued to attribute my difficulties negotiating the world to mild autism. But every time I watched a documentary on autism I couldn’t quite get myself to fit the model. I’m now thinking my friend was right. I think I am an empath.

You only need to exhibit 3 of these 7 signs to be classified as an empath. I experience them all:

1. You Experience Extreme Emotions In Certain Environments: Yes. 
2. People Seek You Out As A Confidant: Absolutely. I don’t know how many times a total stranger has shared the most intimate details of their life with me – unbidden. It can be a burden. It definitely was when I was a kid.
3. You Need A Lot Of Time Alone: Yes. When I’m not at work I am usually alone – even though I live with my partner. Either he’s at one end of the house and I’m at the other, or I am outside in the garden working alone.
4. You Become Overwhelmed In Intimate Relationships: Yes. I am uncomfortable with physical and emotional intimacy. My mother tells me I was not the sort of child you could cuddle. I would wriggle out of someone’s embrace as soon as I could.
5. You Feel Drained In Large Crowds: Yes. I hate parties and don’t even try going to them any more. In the past I used to look for an excuse to leave as soon as I could. I hate the city when I visit. I hate busy tourist times in my small town.
6. You Have To Sleep Alone: Yes. Someone else’s presence in the bed stops me from sleeping.
7. You Go Out Of Your Way To Help People: Yes. Way too much.

Empaths are usually introverts. They experience such ‘fierce’ emotions that they often retreat from relationships altogether. For me this has been a survival strategy – empaths don’t know how to set emotional boundaries between their own feelings and the feelings of others. I’ve often been labelled too emotional or too sensitive. If someone near me is upset, I’m upset. My partner calls me the ‘psychic sponge’.

I am drained by crowds – I feel overstimulated emotionally. It’s like I am a radio antennae tuning in to all the emotion going on around me. It’s exhausting. My nerves are jarred by noise – particularly bass sounds – smells and excessive conversation. I can smell peoples' deodorant and hair conditioner – even out in the surf!! If several people are wearing different deodorants in the same room, or worse, in a lift - it drives me crazy. I experience a physical, bodily response to these stresses – my nervous system feels as though it is vibrating. It is jarring and unnerving. I have to distance myself from the stimulus.

Being an empath is more intense than being highly sensitive. According to self-declared empath and psychiatrist Judith Orloff, ‘empaths can sense subtle energy (called Shakti or Prana in Eastern traditions)’, even absorb it from other people and environments into their own bodies, which highly sensitive people don’t tend to do.

‘This capacity allows us to experience the energy around us, including emotions and physical sensations, in extremely deep ways. And so we energetically internalise the feelings and pain of others - and often have trouble distinguishing someone else’s discomfort from our own. Also, some empaths have profound spiritual and intuitive experiences - with animals, nature - which aren’t usually associated with highly sensitive people’.

This is true. I’ve had lots of incidents like this. I remember patting a friend’s dog one day and as I ran my hands over it I sensed an injury on the right side. I said to my friend: ‘has your dog been hurt on this side of its body? Something has happened here’. She confirmed that the dog had been hit by a car on that side of its body. I’ve had prophetic dreams occasionally too. And a dream in which I swear I was awake and moving outside in the bush – more like an out of body experience. I saw all the trees and plants as coloured bands of rainbow light. It was extraordinary. I remember thinking in the dream: ‘this is what things really look like’. It felt as though I was actually seeing the energy fields of the physical environment – no bark, browns or greens – just shimmering pure coloured light. This dream forever changed the way I saw the world.

There are also times in nature that I feel as though I am walking into energy fields. It is palpable and can make me light headed and lose my sense of direction. It’s like I’ve slipped into another dimension. On one occasion I was taken to a recognised Aboriginal site – a stream at the bottom of a cliff right in the heart of the city. We sat there while my guide played the didgeridoo and I felt I had slipped into another time. The highway was very close but I couldn’t hear the cars - I only heard the didge. When he stopped playing I could once again hear the traffic. It was as though time had stood still for a while, or that I had been transported back in time.

I don’t know whether I believe in ‘poltergeists’ or not, but I have definitely experienced malevolent ‘energy’ in a couple of different places. One was in a friend’s flat, and another during a night shift in the psychiatric hospital I was working in at the time.

I’ve often thought I was crazy and wished like hell I wasn’t the way I am. But I’m also very grateful for the insights and experiences I have had. I wonder how the hell someone like me ended up working in a prison – a place of so much darkness and misery. It definitely takes an emotional toll on me, but there’s something right about being there too. I don’t expect sympathy, or to be thought of as ‘special’. Everyone is special. It simply is what it is.

Image: Author. Digital drawing.

Research Shows Three Distinct Thought Styles In People With Autism
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/05/research-shows-three-distinct-thought-styles-in-people-with-autism/#69f0957a221e
Who Can Empaths Fall in Love With?
https://backpackerverse.com/who-can-empaths-fall-in-love-with/
The Differences Between Highly Sensitive People and Empaths
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-empaths-survival-guide/201706/the-differences-between-highly-sensitive-people-and-empaths

The Antidote?

Image: Author, collage with pen and colour pencil

It's Not Always About You

This is really a reminder for myself, but also good advice to others. It's too easy to make up stories about why someone has behaved in a certain way towards you - why you think they glared at you or were dismissive. I did an online autism quiz and I'm definitely on the spectrum, albeit at the high functioning end. I am aware I don't always read the signs correctly. I am oversensitive and pick up on the moods of others quickly, but I have learnt to accept that I can't really know what it is about.

When I was younger I would always assume someone's reaction was about something I had or hadn't done. It's been a huge relief to get older and not take responsibility for everyone else's mood. 

But it's also not good to ignore someone else's response to you if there actually is something that needs resolving. As a mature adult I have developed a simple strategy. I just ask, without accusation, in a neutral way: 'is there something we need to talk about? Have I done or said something that you have been upset by?' (Note I don't say 'have I done something to upset you?' - there is a difference). 

99% of the time the other person will say it has nothing to do with me, that they are just stressed about.......or distracted by........If it is something we can talk about it is usually resolved pretty quickly. Mostly it's a misinterpretation of ideas shared or the way something was received. 

I serendipitously came across the above illustration by Hazel Mead. In the current COVID climate it is a timely reminder that we should all practise kindness because we are all vulnerable. 

Image: Screenshot from illustrator Hazel Mead's Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/hazel.mead/

The Quiet Apocalypse

I am so loving the quiet and the space. My small town has few cars in the main drag and not many shoppers. I feel as though I can finally breathe and my overstimulated senses can relax. The sheer weight of humanity has been suffocating me for decades. And all the while I feel guilty in my pleasure because so many people are suffering terribly.

I cheer and do fist pumps when the stock market takes another dive. No need for guilt if you don't believe in superannuation and that only the rich have expendable incomes with which to buy stocks anyway. 

I regularly quote my favourite line from the epic British series Years & Years: 'Tear the world down'. A lot of people would hate me if they knew this about me but I'm taking a big picture view. Something really, really had to give. I've known it would all my life but I didn't see it playing out like this. The smallest organism is bringing the entire corrupt free trade economy to its knees.

Who knew an apocalypse could be so quiet? It's fucking spectacular.

Photo: Route 66, Daniel Chrisp

COVID Couture

Apart from going to work at the prison 2 days a week I've only ventured outside the boundaries of our block to go to the beach where I can isolate myself. I've been emailing one of my closest friends daily but on Friday we both needed to chat with a real like-minded person (other than our partners and pets of course). We decided to meet up at a beach halfway between our 2 properties - about 40km apart.

My friend suggested in the email that we should wear the fine cotton masks she had crocheted for us and dress ridiculously. I reckon I dress like that most of the time (except when I'm at work) but it gave me the opportunity to wear this brilliant hat I found at the local Tip Shop (which I had washed of course).

We walked a long way up the beach together but maintained the required 1.5 metre distance. The sound of the ocean made it difficult to hear at times but we managed OK. The local ranger did a drive by so we were glad we were adhering to the rules. She waved and smiled, maybe because of the way we were dressed, or maybe because it was a bit absurd that we were sticking to social distancing rules on a deserted beach. No matter - these are strange times and there is still a lot to laugh about.

I'm a loner and mostly happy with my own company, but it was great to have a proper, long conversation with someone. There is a lot to process. 

I'm struggling with the order to continue working in my 10 hour a week, 5-week rolling contract teaching job. I don't want to have to deal with the nightmare of Centrelink and I'm not sure they wouldn't refuse to give me the allowance anyway if I technically still have a job. Dealing with the projected implications of this virus in the prison system is huge enough without everything else that is going on outside of it. COVID-19 has presented all of us with many conflicting dilemmas. I really can't see things returning to 'normal' once it's over, and I hope it doesn't. Apart from the physical ones, I think there will be many psychological casualties as we are all forced to re-evalute our priorities, our belief systems and the way we live on the planet. 

Photo: Jillian Green.

Team Australia?

So all of a sudden our neo-liberalist right-wing government has found 300+ billion dollars. All of a sudden the much talked about and essential budget surplus is not only 'surplus to needs', or vital to the success of our economy - it has been chucked completely out the window.

Over the past 2 decades, during which time they held power for 14 of those 20 years, the LNP has deliberately engineered the downfall of what we were once proud of as a nation - our publicly owned social services. And they've done it all for the love of an unrealistic and unsustainable political ideology by: 

• privatising what used to be, and still should be, government run utilities (electricity and water) - result: households really struggling to pay essential bills
• drastically reducing funding for public education and supporting its privatisation - result: massive rorts by private RTOs, the almost complete annihilation of TAFE, Australia slipping way down the performance scale internationally
• increasing prison numbers via mandatory sentencing without increasing funding - result: many on remand waiting to get to court, overcrowded prisons, little money for rehabilitation or programs to keep people out of prison, further oppression of our first nation's people
• slashing funding to health - result: overcrowded, understaffed emergency wards, long waiting lists for 'elective surgery', which includes hip replacements
• slashing funding to family courts and womens' shelters - result: more domestic violence, more deaths of women - currently running at 1.5 per week, too many kids needing out of home care and not enough foster carers
• withdrawing huge amounts of money from environmental programs and organisations - result: more clearing, degradation of the environment and a complete fuck up of the Murray-Darling river system causing mass fish kills, including 100 year old cod
• forcing fledgling alternative energy businesses to move overseas because of a lack of government support, which includes a spectacular failure to deliver a carbon reduction policy 

And don't even talk about the overall denial and lack of vision on climate change on a warming, fire prone and increasingly parched continent. Or what's happened to arts funding......phhhtt! That's a luxury (though football, cricket and rugby don't seem to be).

I couldn't have imagined a more thorough failure of the current government to look after its people - all of them, not just the wealthy ones - or provide responsible leadership.

Yet suddenly, after decades of keeping the unemployed severely oppressed well below the poverty line with catch phrases like: we want to give Australians a 'hand up, not a hand out' and 'the best form of welfare is a job' (really? what job?), fudging the unemployment figures by categorising the under-employed, casualised workforce as 'employed' - SUDDENLY.......there are millions for generous 'job-seeker' and 'job-keeper' payments. Child care is now free, landlords aren't allowed to evict tenants and banks can't foreclose on home mortgage or small business loans. After decades of lecturing the nation as though we were naughty toddlers, justifying their meanness ad nauseum as 'responsible economic management' they have cast fiscal caution to the wind and completely nuked 2 decades worth of neo-liberal propaganda. WTF!

Left-wing commentators and organisations are actually smiling on the TV - they have hope in their eyes for the first time in years (if you forget how much they were smiling about the predicted landslide Labor election victory in 2019 before they got smashed). 

Even me, one usually so skeptical and mistrustful, was starting to believe the LNP had FINALLY started to develop a social conscience. The reality hit me around 2.00 am this morning - what the hell was I thinking? I nearly bought it myself.

The LNP patriarchy are shitting themselves. Everything they are doing right now, is being done to save their beloved Capitalism.

If you think they have really changed, that they are going to be more socially minded, even kind, from now on - I'll make a prediction. We are already being warned these drastic measures are temporary. Just wait until we get to the other side of this virus - when the country is 300+ billion futher in debt - because then you will see even more draconian budgetary measures, and they will have even more justification for screwing us into the ground.

Figure & speech: Author, Ronald MacDonald figure

Background image: https://www.netclipart.com/isee/iRJRhiJ_sydney-harbour-bridge-cartoon/