We all need to process some of the anxiety, grief, and depression that come with this entirely threatening situation, and learn how to fold them into our lives.
Charlie had always loved camphor trees, and on that day’s reflective wander, a remarkably large and friendly-looking one, rooted at a corner on Edenhurst Avenue, beckoned him over to it. He walked under its arms as they rustled in the breeze, and the shade the tree cast over him conjured a sudden intuition that made his blood run cold. “I just had this instantaneous feeling like, oh, the rest of my life is going to be this series of increasingly dire crises,” he told me.
Charlie’s turning away from the band right as they were finding success was an inexplicable move to everyone who knew him. It was cause for real concern. His personality seemed to have changed overnight, and although his bandmates were very angry with him for pulling the plug on their project, they were equally worried about his mental health.
Pretty soon, things started opening up. He could easily get himself out of bed, was having fewer breakdowns about the climate, and was able to better manage his emotions. For instance, when he and Evelyn took a trip to visit his sister in Chicago who’d just had a baby, he was able to button up the “Doomsday Charlie” side of himself, to not existentially stress his sister out about the fate of her newborn. This was great progress, but he was still struggling despite his growing resilience.
This is what Hickman calls, and it is just as important as external activism—the more conventional kind. The trick is not to get lost in the dark places that internal activism brings us to—to keep moving—and to welcome the idea that we’ll cycle through the trenches again, because the climate and biodiversity crisis isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.arguing that activism wasn’t always the answer to eco-anxiety and eco-grief. Afterward, Charlie reached out to me by email.
Activism, he had realized, was just one way of accessing other people who “get it,” which his climate-aware therapist rightly urged him to do. When he started reaching out to various writers online who were thinking about these topics and having meaningful conversations with them, he quickly cultivated connections that could contain his deepest fears and frustrations.
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