My simple advice on dealing with overwhelm

plus how ScoMo is blocking (!) FF from switching to renewables. Serious.

This week I had several dozen emails, texts and DMs from friends and strangers telling me they’re feeling overwhelmed by what’s going in the world - the war on Ukraine, the horrific floods and the signs all around that the “centre is not holding”. I’m not sure whether they were after advice as such. I think really they just wanted to be heard by someone…I dunno…someone who “does overwhelm” vocally and somewhat publicly. I thought I’d jot down an en masse reply here.

There are few things I’m an expert on. But overwhelm would be one of them, in big part because I bee-line for things that tend to overwhelm. I sit here today at my faulty keyboard (with my S and T sticking to my fingers as I type) only because I have found some sort of passable route through it.

So.

My advice. Or take.

Please get overwhelmed.

Better still, please get angry, bereft, despairing. Please feel it all. Please love. Hard. Like there is no tomorrow from which to couch terms against. Please go to that holy-shit-this-is-big openness that takes over when life goes wild and wide and wrong. Please be confused that you’re feeling all these things at once.

Overwhelm is all emotions at once, seemingly too many emotions. Overwhelm is also normal and appropriate and is the stage before we go over the edge into action. It all builds, we flip, we go over…this shit gotta change!!!

But here’s the problem. We baulk at overwhelm. We resist it. We get outraged that we feel it because (and this is something I see cropping up at all pivotal turns in life at the moment) we live in a culture that does not tolerate discomfort, of any kind. Indeed, 90% of all technology developed in the pat 30 years is geared at eliminating discomfort. We refuse to wait, to be inconvenienced, to not know, to tolerate uncertainty. We demand to speak to the manager rather than suck it up. Which means we’ve lost all resilience to difficult things, including overwhelm.

A pregnant woman carried to safety after a Ukraine maternity hospital is bombed

Overwhelm feels like we’re careering down a violent, flooded river (yep!) and we know the drop over the edge is ahead, but we don’t want to go there. Even if we know deep inside the answer lies over that edge.

We think we can wait for the right vessel in which to go over the edge. The official vehicle with the appropriate cocooning and cushioning. So we hold back, we grip, we won’t let rip, we won’t let go and go to our edge.

A tragedy (like the death of someone very close) will be enough to shove us over that edge. We are vulnerable and open so we give in to the force. I’m sure you’ve felt it before…it comes as a relief. It feels beautiful.

Anger can also take us over. Full throttle righteous anger.

I watched Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian MP, being interviewed on ABC’s 730 the other night and host Leigh Sales asked her what fuels theUkrainian’s incredible courage that is touching us all collectively. Rudik said it was anger and love.

Overwhelm is (righteous) anger and love that we don’t release, that we hold back, even though the tide is pushing, pushing us to its full expression, and to change.

So, to reiterrate: We need to feel overwhelmed. And righteously angry. And to let it all go over the edge.

Another thought: We don’t know who or what to be angry at anymore, such is the bottleneck of our emotions. I listen to flood victims here in Australia rage at the weather forecasters for not giving enough warning (when the meteorologists have warned us for 30 years; they warned us that they will not be able to give accurate forecasts if climate change accelerated).

But we hold back from raging at the real baddies here - fossil fuel companies and our government, specifically the Scott Morrison Liberal National Party here in Australia (see more below). 

If you missed my Instagram posts on this you might like to catch up here.

And one more thought: When you feel a strong emotion toward something, you can no longer support ideas or things that counter that emotion. Our brains don’t allow the cognitive dissonance. I write about it in This One Wild and Precious Life:

Inventor and founding father of America Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography about being trolled by a rival legislator. Rather than retaliate, he reached out with a letter to the rival troll asking if he could borrow a specific and rare book from his library. Flattered, the troll sent it over to Franklin right away. Franklin then returned it a week later with a thank you note. The troll henceforth became a fan, forever ready to do a favor for Franklin.

Various people have written about this phenomenon – why and how it works. Once compelled to do a favor, a hater needs to justify their action to themselves. Once compelled to do a favor, a hater needs to justify their action to themselves. They couldn’t possibly do something kind to someone they hated, so they must switch to becoming a fan to avoid internal dissonance.

One more time: Be overwhelmed. Be angry. Love the right things. Tumble into better.

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Please keep spreading my election project

and thanks to the 100s of you who subscribed last week

I heard back from many of you that you want a lot of detailed - and also basic - information about the upcoming election. I’m going to dial it up more and more so that my IG and this 'letter are a one-stop for the info you need. So, to make it all really sing, I would just love this: 

Please share this (button below) and any Instagram or Facebook I post, and invite your mates to follow along if they #giveashit about climate, corruption, gender equity and First Nations’ rights.

PS Need help with reposting my posts from Instagram? Comment below…

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Some more ScoMo x Big Coal guff you have to know about

to add to a crook look week for the Prime Minister

The PM’s crooked connects to the fossil fuel industry are brutally obvious now. If you missed this video I shared during the week, it will spell it out a little. 

But I really encourage you to listen to this 7am podcast which shows just how much the Liberal National Party (LNP) interferes to actually block the transition. Like, they even try to stop fossil fuel companies from transitioning to renewables. A few years back AGL, Australia’s largest carbon emitter, was making moves to renewable solutions. The reporter interviewed for the podcast found LNP’s then energy minister Josh Frydenberg “lobbied” AGLs board members to fire the CEO who was pushing for this good change. He succeeded. The CEO was gone in two months.

The upshot is that other fossil fuel companies now see Scott Morrison’s federal LNP’s as the barrier. And are working behind the LNP’s back.

Yep, it’s that bad.

I’m sorry, you need to know this: the latest IPCC report

it’s critical and harrowing but i’ll do it in a few dot points for you

I said I'd continue this series of grim stuff we need to be on top of. Last week the latest IPCC (the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report was released and I interviewed vice chair of the report Mark Howden. 

You can watch it here. And this article by Mark goes into some of the detail. But I promised dot points… 

• We are now in the climate crisis. It’s not a can-kick-down-the-road-thing anymore.

• We used to think mitigation could cut it (avoiding climate change by reducing emissions super fast). But then shit! it got bad, worse than expected, so we (the 40,000 IPCC scientists) switched focus to adaption (trying to moosh things about so that we can survive - building seawalls, sending space shades into the sky, installing more aircons). But with this report, it’s like, sorry guys, the disaster is so big there are not enough resources on the planet to adapt. (The inference is we will now have to do both at warp speed…or that we all options are now exhausted. Me, I choose the former).

• Australia will be the worst hit of all developed nations. Do Note: As we talk of not going above 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, Australia’s temperatures are already 1.44C above (the global average is 1.2C).

• Kids under 12 today will be hit with four times as many natural disasters as we experience now. Which is dire.

• Mass starvation is ahead.

  Sorry.

Australia is, like, the worst on gender issues

here are the links i promised in my post this week

The post is here…I explain why women are rising up against the current government. And why it's a good thing.

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• On gender issues, Australia has fallen to 50th spot overall among 156 nations ranked in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index. We used to be 16th. Now Australia sits between Georgia at number 49, and Suriname at number 51 and well behind South Africa at 18th and Mexico at 34th. For context.

• Indeed, Australia sits at the bottom of the OECD. We have fallen from 12th to 70th in economic participation and opportunity, from 57th to 99th in health and survival, and from 32nd to 54th in political empowerment.

• Scott Morrison’s LNP has only 21.7% representation in the House of Reps, 26.6% across both chambers. The Labor party has 49%; the Greens 60%.

• Research reveals women are more likely to work across party lines to solve complex issues. We need this desperately.

• Plus, countries with more female politicians pass more ambitious climate policies. Huzzah!

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That was all a bit of a heavy read this week. But it’s been a heavy week.

For some respite, I spent two days in the country in Tasmania on a fun little hiking/road trip on the east coast. It was full dag. No irony. A few posts on my IG. How daggy? I ate one of the best meals ever in a bistro at the bottom of this motel.

Love you all,

Sarah x