carrie anne arts co

Middleness

1/31/2022

Sheltering in space
In July last year, while living in a women’s shelter, I had thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency hacked and stolen by way of a Facebook connection. The events leading up to that devastating moment don’t need air time except to say that I was broken enough to make hasty decisions. I don’t need to point out that when a woman finds herself in a shelter it’s nearing the last stop of options and the journey prior is one of trauma. I had to stop looking at the socials and isolate myself, to dial down.
There were forest fires and a pandemic of fear raging. What I’ve come to understand is that the human brain has a mechanism that shuts down creative function to prioritize survival. I was most definitely in survival and made a catastrophic decision that resulted in me losing a large sum of money at a time when I needed every penny.
It’s taken me until now to be able to pull the experiences out of my shame bucket, I’m in a safer place physically and metaphorically. I pulled away from social media for some months because I realized how toxic it can be when your faculties aren’t firing coherently. I’ve enjoyed social media over the last 12 years or so, but like the frog in the pot, things have boiled over and my nerves aren’t built for the intensity of it.

*I hate it that s.m. hijacked the term friends!
The definition of Friend is quite different from what’s being demonstrated.

The Middle Way
Over the last few days I nervously dipped my toes back into posting my thoughts about current events. My intention is to walk the middle way. I suppose my FB posts were an experiment with staying firmly planted in the middle while a war of extremes rages on. I was amazed at how much my so-called *friends tried to shove propaganda into the space on my wall.
I had left leaning folks inch toward calling me a nazi and right wingers spewing incoherent narcissism.

There was one comment that has kept me up at night, it went like this:
Me: I think there’s an unraveling because our collective mental health is being ignored.
Friend: there has never been more attention to our mental health before.

My mind reeled toward the legion of marginalized folks with addictions and hopelessness not getting their needs met; The battered spouses, the alcoholics drinking in isolation, the fentanyl addicts playing with death. Statistically speaking, the fruit of our focus on mental health issues is that they have radically and steeply risen to a fever pitch. It's easier to dismiss and stigmatize a mental health crisis when the public perception is that "we" are throwing lots of money at it. While it's undeniable that there is progress with mental health awareness, it's being built within the walls of a broken and archaic socio-economic system.
If the general belief is that mental health is a fiscal priority then perhaps the invisibles are in deeper doodoo than ever before?

Speaking of 💩
How did the collective get to a place where it’s ok to 💩 in each other’s spaces?
There were reports that people were defecating and urinating all over central Ottawa during the rally and the vitriolic extremes all over FB last week smelled $hi77y as well.

The middle… the eye of the storm.
I think it means dropping contempt before investigation.
Listening without biases.
In the middle we might find peace, presence, oneness, connection, and defencelessness- an absence of war.

The middle way requires concentration-meditation inward and upward. It’s a bit like two people keeping a teeter totter suspended in the air. Maybe if we do it together we can stabilize?

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