Untethered

When I was a child – same as most of us in the so-called Western world, I guess – I grew up trusting institutions. Not just ‘institutions’ in the most direct sense but in the broader sense, too. I grew up *knowing* that they’d have my back.

When some years ago our garage got broken into and my partner’s quad got stolen and the appropriate institutions did nothing other but send – by a text message – a crime number for insurance purposes, I wrote it off to the lack of resources. No doubt it was a big factor. My trust didn’t waver.

Later, when, working as an interpreter for the justice system, I started observing (mainly) women asking for help, for some measures of protection from domestic violence after already numerous incidents the evidence for which was deemed not sufficient to prosecute, and saw the system shrug its shoulders accompanied by ‘There’s nothing we can do until the crime is committed’, my mind boggled, but I wrote it off as, albeit systemic, an incidental poor phrasing of a particular law or regulation, a lack of thorough thinking through. It can be fixed, I thought. But it takes time, I accepted; it’s a long path to walk through all those bureaucratic corridors. My trust didn’t waver.

When I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and put on meds ‘for life’, without looking at how it came about and what, if anything, could be done to arrive at the root cause, I questioned the approach. My own research revealed so much more than what I was told during the investigations and the subsequent prescribing of the treatment (or, management, rather), and so trust wavered but, still, I wrote it off as slowness of the humongous system. After all, the evidence is there for anyone to access, and it’s only a matter of time until the system ‘catches up’.

*

Then, I started paying more attention to what was happening around me. At first, not through choice, but through incidental exposure. There seems to be a limit to how much exposure we can continue to be blind to until our attention is grabbed. Until we can ignore things no longer. Until we start learning intentionally, too.

The trouble is, with learning comes unlearning. Unlearning of everything we *knew* to be the foundation on which we lean. The stability of the foundation on which we build our lives is no longer there. And it can be a shattering realisation.

*

When we are children, those privileged of us, know that, if we fall and graze our knees when running around, we can run to our parent, teacher or another adult we trust to comfort us and fix it.

When we enter adulthood, we trust the system to have our backs.

Until we have no choice but to learn that we are, more often than not, a secondary consideration.

*

At first, it can come with feelings of confusion, of dumbfoundedness, of disbelief.

When acceptance finally comes, we may feel untethered.

Exhausted not only from having had to hold ourselves upright for so long already, but also from the realisation that there isn’t, in fact, anything to lean against. That there isn’t a prospect where we can give ourselves permission to slump down in safety and security.

That the world – and adulting in it – isn’t what we *knew* it to be.

*

When I first reached the stage of acceptance, I found no comfort in it. It is probably inaccurate to say ‘when I first reached’; it felt more like the acceptance landed upon and enveloped me, with me still fighting against it, from underneath its cover. I didn’t want to accept that there isn’t a foundation against which I could rest when the going gets too hard. There isn’t a temporary refuge.

There’s only me.

And I’m already exhausted.

*

‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance’, said Aldous Huxley to Mike Wallace during their conversation in 1958.

*

It took me by surprise. Not the words themselves, as I had already resigned to that truth, however unwillingly.

It was the feeling of validation that, unexpectedly, gifted me a ladder out of the pit of despair and resignation.

It lit a new fire in me. A fire of ‘I can do this.’

It will never be the same again.

The safety and security outside of myself will never return. And whilst I still mourn it sometimes, it helped me rediscover the might inside me. It’s strange, it’s unfamiliar, but it’s undoubtedly there. It’s always been there.

I can do this.

We can do this.

We really can.

It’s inside of us.