Throatlump

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.