If you can't beat it, feel it

Getting cozy with doom

12 January 2024.

About three years ago, while searching for “pleasure” on iTunes, I found Kara Loewentheil’s podcast, Unfuck Your Brain—and started questioning the thoughts, the micro-stories, the myths masquerading as facts that I’d unwittingly been using to cause myself pain.

Ever since, I’ve been mostly in good spirits, most of the time. I’ve turned to face, and embrace, the inevitable waves of grief, rage, panic, shame. I’ve let them enliven me, as I’ve fed them into the next story, and the next one.

Yesterday, out walking, I noticed a feeling I wanted only to destroy.

It was heavy. And dense. It clogged my throat and squeezed my breath. Filled me with a monstrous, deadening emptiness.

It reminded me of what I call “the doom feeling”—the fog of wrongness, of this shouldn’t be, that gripped me for the first year-plus after I left Zendik. The fourteen months it took me, after removing my body from captivity, to free my heart, mind, and soul.

Maybe four miles into my six-mile walk, I decided to try fighting the feeling with bagpipes: I uncoiled my earpiece, and flooded my brain with the cleansing blare of “Scotland the Brave.” Which did perk me up, and quicken my step. But the doom feeling didn’t disappear. It deepened. I realized I wasn’t going to chase it away.

I paused the music and re-coiled my earpiece.

I addressed the interloper: “Hello, doom feeling. Welcome to the party. What do you want me to know?”

Here’s how it replied:

“You’re in the space between stories, Helen. It’s a sacred place. Don’t rush through it. Let your passage take the time it takes.

“You feel empty. Hollowed out. Walking these streets, you see no shimmering edges. No glimmers of possibility. Of course not. Your body’s here, but your heart’s gone. You’ve already left. Withdrawn your faith from this city. From the future you imagined you’d build in your home with your husband.

“When you left Zendik, you didn’t let yourself grieve. You didn’t know how. Yes, your fog of wrongness stemmed from a false and harmful myth. But your grief did not. You truly had lost something—the nest of humans you’d loved and relied on, for the past five years.

“Now you do know how to grieve. You’ve learned. You’ve practiced. You get to hold a thousand sorrowful mysteries. You get to cry. You get to treasure the past fifteen years with your tears.

“And you get to do as Mary Oliver said, in her poem ‘Blackwater Woods’: ‘Love what is mortal…Hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it…and, when the time comes to let it go…let it go.”

For the rest of my walk, I let the doom feeling move through me. By the time I got home, it was gone.