On 'The Dread'
These words, written in early January 2025, are very personal, unedited, and not intended for wide circulation. I'm sharing them here to help me communicate where I might be at, especially when I'm feeling less able to use words effectively. I might also share them with you if I think you might relate to them and they could bring you some validation or comfort, or would provide any otherwise helpful perspective.
As I write this, I’m existing in a state I’ve come to name ‘The Dread’. It’s a whole-body sensation… I essentially feel overwhelmed by fear. My skin feels like it’s prickling with adrenaline, whilst it also feels like my whole mass is being sucked into a central point somewhere at the bottom of my ribcage. My chest feels tight and my eyes are burning. It’s like an immediate imperative to act, to move, to scream is fighting with an equally strong drive to retreat, freeze, be silent and shut down.
The State of Dread is not unfamiliar, and on this occasion I can - intellectually at least - understand why I’m here at this particular moment. This past week it’s been especially inescapable. As it’s the start of a new year I dutifully update my resources with the facts and figures that serve as our metrics of just how fast Nature and our climate system are collapsing - the escalations terrify me. I don’t even need the data to know it, to feel it… I see it in the fires, floods, death and suffering flashing up uninvitedly on screens in the pub, the gym, the train station, in my home; I see it in the bulbs that sprouted far too early that are now dying in my window box. I know I’m not alone in my fear of what’s to come, of how sudden, how imminent, and how violent the inevitably profound changes in our daily realities and priorities could be, but it does feel lonely when it’s not the norm (nor particularly welcome) to express this Dread; instead we’re meant to continue to engage in grumbling about parking, stressing about chores and arbitrary work deadlines, and saying we’re doing fine. Meanwhile the path is cleared for another man who denies reality and responsibility to take another one of the most powerful ‘leadership’ positions in the world. At the same time, my friends are punished - a growing number imprisoned - for acting with genuine leadership and courage in efforts to push us onto a somewhat-less-horrifying trajectory.
It is rational and reasonable to feel crushed by the sum of what we know about the state of our world and where we are headed. In a sense how could anyone, at any moment, not? But a lot of the time it is possible to move through the day without being overpowered by it. Most days I can - and do - manage to look directly at what scares me and find the motivation to act in response. I pour my heart into making that journey to knowing and then to acting easier and kinder, more inviting, more accessible, more empowering for others. This is not simply altruistic, I know it helps me more than it helps any other individual: being useful, valued and connected fuels and nourishes me and the ‘wins’ along the way allow cautious tendrils of hope not to wither completely. Even on the ‘good days’, background Dread is simmering gently - it’s never totally absent but in the right conditions it doesn’t dominate. Tipping into Full Blown Dread is maybe something analogous to a Harmful Algal Bloom; algae are essential, ever present, and often go unnoticed...but dump shit into their pond and they will wildly proliferate, suffocating everything else. Once there it’s no simple task to recover, and even if a semblance of balance is restored there will be some lasting damage. In the frame of mind I’m in now I know I harm myself and others around me too - it’s not productive nor helpful… but it does at least make sense.
The State of Dread is not unfamiliar, and on this occasion I can - intellectually at least - understand why I’m here at this particular moment. This past week it’s been especially inescapable. As it’s the start of a new year I dutifully update my resources with the facts and figures that serve as our metrics of just how fast Nature and our climate system are collapsing - the escalations terrify me. I don’t even need the data to know it, to feel it… I see it in the fires, floods, death and suffering flashing up uninvitedly on screens in the pub, the gym, the train station, in my home; I see it in the bulbs that sprouted far too early that are now dying in my window box. I know I’m not alone in my fear of what’s to come, of how sudden, how imminent, and how violent the inevitably profound changes in our daily realities and priorities could be, but it does feel lonely when it’s not the norm (nor particularly welcome) to express this Dread; instead we’re meant to continue to engage in grumbling about parking, stressing about chores and arbitrary work deadlines, and saying we’re doing fine. Meanwhile the path is cleared for another man who denies reality and responsibility to take another one of the most powerful ‘leadership’ positions in the world. At the same time, my friends are punished - a growing number imprisoned - for acting with genuine leadership and courage in efforts to push us onto a somewhat-less-horrifying trajectory.
It is rational and reasonable to feel crushed by the sum of what we know about the state of our world and where we are headed. In a sense how could anyone, at any moment, not? But a lot of the time it is possible to move through the day without being overpowered by it. Most days I can - and do - manage to look directly at what scares me and find the motivation to act in response. I pour my heart into making that journey to knowing and then to acting easier and kinder, more inviting, more accessible, more empowering for others. This is not simply altruistic, I know it helps me more than it helps any other individual: being useful, valued and connected fuels and nourishes me and the ‘wins’ along the way allow cautious tendrils of hope not to wither completely. Even on the ‘good days’, background Dread is simmering gently - it’s never totally absent but in the right conditions it doesn’t dominate. Tipping into Full Blown Dread is maybe something analogous to a Harmful Algal Bloom; algae are essential, ever present, and often go unnoticed...but dump shit into their pond and they will wildly proliferate, suffocating everything else. Once there it’s no simple task to recover, and even if a semblance of balance is restored there will be some lasting damage. In the frame of mind I’m in now I know I harm myself and others around me too - it’s not productive nor helpful… but it does at least make sense.
Understanding the ‘why’ goes some way to dealing with the consequences. It makes it easier to cut myself some slack, to feel less ‘mad’. It makes me more receptive to engaging with things that experience tells me do help move through the pit of The Dread: going outside, cultivating a friendship with a local animal (today’s was an elegant though unusually rotund blackbird), speaking with a human who has been here or someplace similar. But it doesn’t make things OK. With every day that passes things are less OK than they were before. We’ve had to adapt from fighting for a world where we prevent collapse to one where we delay, temper and manage it in whatever ways we still have left to minimise the overall loss, pain and the injustice of it all. Yet the work needed to achieve that often demands putting on something of a mask; being outwardly positive (but not dishonest) to bring others along in building this genuinely better scenario, whilst being constantly aware that it’s a huge job, that it involves countering huge inertia and powerful, insidious resistance, that we may not succeed and that nobody really knows what ‘success’ looks like. I struggle to gauge how much responsibility to personally bear. The stakes are too high not to do everything I can. The privileges of my own circumstances and education enhance the duty I have to sacrifice my own comfort in the process. But what are the limits? Purely strategically, logistically I can’t do everything, nor as much as I want to be able to. I have to prioritise what I can do well enough to be actually useful. I have to strike a balance that means I remain physically and mentally capable to keep showing up.
The only way we secure the best-possible-remaining-version of the future for life on Earth, is by building a mass movement of people who are able to allow themselves to acknowledge and experience something of The Dread, and to support one another not to be consumed by it. Our emotions are there for good reason - they alert us to threats and motivate us to avoid or defuse them. So whilst I hate feeling like I do right now I know that the component parts of what I’m experiencing are - like the algae in a hypothetical pond - intrinsic to a functioning, balanced system, intrinsic to survival. A tension I feel acutely in my work is that - if I do my job(s) well - I am intentionally opening other people up to the same sort of pain that I regularly experience, pain that’s pushed me into dark and difficult places. This weighs heavily but I do trust that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do nonetheless; the sooner we know, the sooner we feel, the sooner we can act and the better our choices and our chances become. And if enough of us do this work it becomes easier for each to process our grief, our rage, our despair, our fear, because we won't as readily jump to feeling alone, deficient or insane in doing so.
In less intense moments of Dread, I do feel able to identify some (maybe slightly perverse) freedoms it brings. It is quite liberating to not feel compelled to care about ‘stuff’ that’s really not important: I used to be infuriated by a few minute’s delay on a commute; I’d agonise over how I’d come across to anyone and everyone; I’d compare my personal statistics with others, relentlessly… and find mine lacking. I now take joy in the moments of connection with the world that feel so much more precious: I’ll delay my own journey without question if there’s an interesting creature on my route; I’ll take the risk of smiling at a serious-looking suit wearer, I’ll readily collaborate with a mischievous child, I’m much less afraid to ask the difficult but important question; I’m less concerned with measuring my own life… and more concerned with living it, and making it count.