You’re right not to feel normal anymore, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, but that doesn’t mean you should curl into a ball and give up

Having been traumatised by the Canberra firestorm of 2003, and then impacted by this summer’s bushfire crisis which culminated for me at Malua Bay on New Year’s Eve, I am left with a feeling of discombobulation. We saved our house by deciding to stay and defend against all warnings to evacuate, yet I am still afraid of further bushfires. I don’t feel normal any more. I feel life has changed into a Mad Max movie that could reappear any moment with loss of power and communications.

Columbia Law School professor Jedediah Purdy wrote a remarkable 2016 essay about getting back to nature as a way of navigating politics, particularly in times of fear and collapse. “I have been hungry for naive responses to nature, as I have been for naive political lucidity,” he wrote. “These days, when I see a flock of birds in synchrony, I feel as if a dimension of awareness has opened that is not occupied territory. I feel this other site of consciousness, this fast-banking incipient intelligence, is a rip in the curtain drawn between the world and me.”

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This past summer cost Australia something as a country. I think part of what happened is that when we paid attention to what was going on in nature we didn’t find something that stood outside the occupied territory of contemporary politics. Instead we saw something that seemed to be a roaring, incandescent expression of it. The sheer senselessness of the damage wrought by a literally mindless force. The feeling of watching a system in combat with itself, individual parts facing catastrophe from a terror somehow produced by the whole.

The need to pantomime normalcy around life-threatening warnings, the cognitive inability to stand in mourning for the parts that have already burned while someone still has to buy milk. It was biblical in its literalness: what we cherish is being incinerated.

You’re right to not feel normal any more. Things aren’t normal. In the audience Q&A of an event I did last year, a therapist raised his hand. “Clients are coming to me asking how to process their climate grief. What can I possibly tell them when their despair is so obviously warranted?” I’ll say to you what I said to him: that when we talk about climate grief we talk as though it’s already dead. It’s not. But it is dying, and you know what to do against the dying of the light. Audre Lorde taught us “everything can be used”. Your despair can be used.

Find an organised and energised group that vigorously defends the causes you care about and pick up the phone with them. Bother legislators. Talk to your friends in agitation; do not let their despair stay inert. Help them turn it into fuel. Ask “who benefits from this?” when you want to curl inwards in a ball with a wet blanket over your head.

I want more than anything to promise you that if you do this, and I do this, we can turn things around. But I can’t make that promise. There will be more fires, they might very well be worse. The sense of doom in politics and the sense of doom in the environment are almost certainly not unrelated phenomena and it may turn out that we simply cannot fight both. But at least if both these spheres collapse you’ll be able to tell your children – and yourself – you fought to stop what matters from burning.

• Question has been edited for clarity

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