I have often
sung at funerals for members of my family. When my grief threatened to derail
my singing voice, I soldiered on. I did a lot of acting, singing, and public
speaking over the years, so I learned to set aside any pesky emotions like
stage fright or grief while I was performing. That ability came in handy as
various deaths and disruptions entered my life, but then it became a habit, and
my emotions subsided into vague mysterious rumbles.
Sometimes I
want to understand a vague emotion that has come to my attention. I consider
what has been happening to me or what I have learned recently, and imagine how
I would feel about that. Sometimes I have forgotten (or suppressed?) the
underlying event, but the emotion reminds me that something problematic has
recently come to my attention, and I reluctantly remember the problem.
I have
various coping strategies for dealing with unpleasant emotions. Distracting
myself with absorbing reading is my go-to default. Next up would be eating something
sugary. Occasionally it might occur to me to get out for a walk, preferably in
the sun. Once in a blue moon, I might try to do a little something to address
the probable underlying problem by talking out or writing out how I feel about
the situation.
For the last
month or so, some negative emotions have hung around. They hover just out of my
consciousness but close enough for me to sense them when I turn my attention in
that direction. In short, whenever I attend to my throat, there’s a lump there.
I think it
started when Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race for President. My stunned
sorrow at her departure has been perceptible whenever I attended to it. At the
same time, the novel coronavirus was landing on our shores. As sickness and
death mount, and the less-than-sublime federal response makes thing worse, and
our lives are increasingly circumscribed, and returning to our prior lives
becomes decreasingly likely, that lump in my throat has become basically
permanent. I can feel it whenever I turn my attention that way.
So I try to
slap some labels on the emotions causing my throatlump. I’m afraid that I’ll
catch the virus, suffer, and die. I’m afraid that frightened people will act
violently. I worry about the election in November and the survival of our
democracy. I feel lucky to live where I do, and am very proud of our political
leaders in the Bay Area and California. And I feel guilty about all my good
luck, and challenged to somehow pay it forward.
I suspect
that I’m not entirely alone in being so emotionally discombobulated. I wish whoever
reads this all the clarity you can tolerate and all the comfort you need.
