What will happen if you go there?
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their effort or attention.
The limits of “climate anxiety” as a notion
Asking yourself: if the thing I’m afraid of happens, what will I do?
Envisioning livable futures—and imagining living with the results of your choices
A few years ago, early climate emotions researcher Sarah Jaquette Ray (check out her new book) published “Climate Anxiety is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon” and Mary Annaise Heglar (check out her new book) published, “Climate Change Isn’t the First Existential Threat.” Both writers called attention to climate anxiety as a kind of boutique feeling, reserved for those whose place in various hierarchies had so far allowed them to escape world-altering disaster. This doesn’t reflect what I’ve heard at the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth and elsewhere, but it was responding to a notable caucasity in climate anxiety reporting at the time, one that Gen Dread, among other venues, has done some work to correct.
But now I’m thinking about the “anxiety” part of climate anxiety in an additional way. A pretty well-known therapy trick for anxiety (which I know because I see a therapist, not because I am one) is to ask yourself: If the thing I’m afraid of happens, what will I do? And what might happen after that? I was asking people this as early as the booth’s first year, both about their climate fears and the other anxieties they brought me: things that had never happened to them yet, and things they didn’t want to have happen again.
I’m thinking about different levels and forms of being afraid, as I try to gather signatures from my colleagues in support of these students and look at my own avoidance, thus far, of frontline action. I’m thinking of Diane Exavier’s point in our recent conversation about how trying any new form of relating to one another demands being messy and full of mistakes, and is not compatible with innocence. I’m even getting called out by a line in the free-box mystery I’m reading: “One can’t wash one’s hands and let others take the risks…including the risk of being wrong.”*
My Writing for Activists students’ first assignment is a vision practice, similar to the one in Chapter 8 of Lessons…: after reading essays by Keguro Macharia, Tourmaline, Donella Meadows and Laura Hersey, they start from a change they’d like to see in a place close to their heart or home, and make their dream of it vivid and continuous. What else would be different for this to be different? Okay, and how do we get there? What else do we need to imagine, to get us there? This reflects Walidah Imarisha’s well-known-at-this-point comment that “Organizing is science fiction”—-you’re imagining a world that has yet to exist, made with at least some pieces of the one that we know now. A world where, say, we can get help for someone in crisis without them being murdered by police, or where a Black woman who had just given birth would not only be confident of stellar medical care but would have ample time to recover, get to know her baby, and be cared for by her loved ones before resuming her intellectual and professional obligations.
But there is another use for this kind of imaginative practice: to help people find their way into the potential consequences of courageous actions, risks, sacrifices, or just messy group efforts toward something better. There’s actually stuff in the book about this—about making provision for support and shelter in Chapter 2, but also about professional risks in Chapter 7, and about direct or militant action in Chapter 8. But my fearful ass has been conveniently forgetting what I wrote, and what the wise people who spoke into my book told me.
QUESTION: What will you do?
I don’t think you can always know; I don’t think you should never care. The “making provision” part is important, and the book deals with this also, as have earlier issues of this newsletter: bail and legal funds, community care and peer support networks, free sessions or services from professionals. Alternatively, there’s professional refusal, as well as waiving fees or bending rules, although these too may have their risks.
PRACTICE: Talk yourself through it: If I do this, and the thing I am afraid of happens, what will I do? And what might happen after that? And then talk through it—-judiciously, carefully, hypothetically**—with someone you trust.
That may be the end of it, for now. Or it might not go as you expect—something that’s also true of rejecting risk and trying to hold on to what you know. But unimaginable times call for imaginable measures.
*Elizabeth Peters, He Shall Thunder in the Sky.
**In person, please, not online or in writing.
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.