I thought I should write how things are going. Posterity and all that.
I want to quit and go live on a farm in Hawaii away from everyone.
I want to fly to Texas and work with my friends in hospitals that will be overrun in a week.
I found I can't read or write or meditate when I'm this anxious.
I found that my eyes absolutely hate computers and my phone.
Talking in person is less taxing because of non-verbal communication. On the phone I have to use more voice, more tone, more words, to convey empathy or compassion or humor or fierceness. By the end of a week of patient-care-by-phone (plus high anxiety) I'm more exhausted than OMT ever made me.
This is what medicine must have felt like hundreds of years ago. No tools, no protection, unclear who is sick and if they'll give it to you or even how, no effective treatment, no vaccine. Friends dying. Friends leading. Friends supporting each other. Strangers too.
This world is one. Borders are fictions. Healthcare, food, shelter, sanitation... all are things that we should help each other get. Billionaires are immoral. Millionaires are too, when there are children without food and homes and healthcare.
If we can stop, declare an emergency for human health, we can do the same for the environment- because it is our health too.

unity consciousness is pretty rough right about now

Today I continue to be broken. It's been a while.
Interestingly, I started to cry while I was washing my hands in front of my bathroom mirror, and somehow stepped outside myself and saw what maybe one of my friends would see. My rosacea was calmer than usual, my eyes were bright green like they are when I'm emotional, and my hair was gently purple grey amidst the brown, straighter than usual because it was slept on for too long. My eyes filled with tears and I thought, huh, poor baby, you're so sad still.
And the feeling I had a few years ago, that bit of compassion deeply felt for someone I care about but can't help, for someone that doesn't 'deserve' to be sad, who is just as special and not-special as everyone else, and who really worked hard and failed, arose.
I put my (now clean and dry) hands on my face and sort of hugged myself. While the tears spilled out and my face got ugly. But I could see still, underneath, as well as superficially, a person who learned how to love deeply quite recently, and was cast aside. A person who watched her mother die sad and lonely and grasping for love from outside reality. A person who's lost all her parental figures so far, to dementia, cancer, a religious cult, and misplaced blame. A person who's had every male parental figure and partner in her life she tried to love decide she wasn't worth their time. No one ever wanted to claim her as part of their family, their life.
A person who is therefore free, very privileged, with a job that might allow her to help a few people sometimes.
My best friend asked me yesterday (yes, there are three women who continue to be my reasons for living) what I'm going to do about this feeling of darkness I can't seem to shake. And I don't think there's anything I can do to change it. I'm seeing reality and it isn't good, and no medication or mushroom will stop wars, famines, environmental destruction, or even just people being selfish jerks to each other. I feel every day how we are all one. It just lets me see how everything is logarithmically building to a chaotic end.
Maybe all I can do is learn to be more skillful at seeing and functioning better in the dark.