Exit of the occupier manifold

or 2021 was shit.

This last year was a total shit show because I spent most of it overwhelmed, anxious and feeling completely betrayed.

“As a mother of young children, I have not gone out for 2 years, we are all double jabbed with boosters and I have had to completely change my career as an event planner to being an at home mom. I don’t socialise ever indoors and my husband works from home or only in the car and we haven’t seen our parents in person for 18 months even though we are all vaccinated because of our 2 unvaccinated under 5 year olds. Our kids don’t mix with other kids and the babysitter that we have for emergencies is vaccinated and up on her boosters. And then last week my 4 year got covid just a month shy of being five and being available for the vaccine. I have been completely betrayed by those arseholes who refuse to get vaccinated, even though we have no contact with them. All I can think of is that we need to all start testing every time anyone comes in and out of the house to make sure no one catches covid. I can’t believe with everyone I know that’s getting covid that we are not in lock down.”

“ This September, after 20 years of being an naturopath, running a successful clinic treating up to 60 patients a week, some of them who had been with me for years, I have been told to stop working. I also teach at a school for alternative therapeutics and my wife, who is a psychiatrist, has a very successful and much needed community practice that we have taken years to build up. Last year I worked my butt off  helping person after person recover from covid and long covid using allopathic and holistic healing modalities. We helped people to deal with the panic and fear with our therapeutic group work. We were much loved in our community for the services and care we provided. However suddenly in September I find myself unable to practice unless I take a vaccination that can cause me medical harm and which somehow I am not qualified to judge for myself whether this is the right medication for me. For a virus that I already have immunity from. I cannot believe that those arseholes in charge deem that after working 100 hour weeks helping people recover from covid, that now I somehow a danger to people with covid and can no longer work and provide for my family.”

It has taken me a couple of attempts to try and sum up 2021 and the two above paragraphs, one a social media thread of a friend and the other a colleague who used to live in Washington state is the best of what I could come up with to show just how angry I am at what’s happening and how I feel completely betrayed. I have to confess I’ve written this essay a couple of times and it’s just been a whiny belligerent fuck you. It is so easy for me to stay in my own little echo chamber, virtue signalling on face book or twitter about how insanely stupid “The Other” is. How “They” are buying into the big lie. How I have the moral high ground. How, actually “wait and see when you drop down dead” right I am. I could bore you stupid with data, peer reviewed and fine picked by statisticians about how the unvaxed are the only ones dying and are responsible for the deaths of those who actually deserve to be in hospitals because they clog them or how the the most vaccinated countries have the worst case loads of covid and people are dying of strokes and blood clots after their booster shots and god forbid if you are a soccer player. Cherry picked to prove my point. I could be part of one of the many broken narratives about who is all behind this and why.

However, like most of you I’m feeling shell shocked with grief and anger and a deep feeling of betrayal. It’s as if after my lifetime of oh we’re going to die of the nuclear bomb, the communists, aids and climate change doom that the great boil of world news has finally burst and we’re oozing blood speckled yellow pus on the daily. 

Like most of you I have found that my choices suddenly belong on one side or the other whether I like it or not. I have had to dumb down my thoughts to avoid conflict. I have been muted. And I have had to navigate through mass psychosis fueled 24/7 from the media, news colleagues and friends on the daily. No matter if we’re right or wrong. Information has become a moral stand. Science has become a dogma.

And like most of you I am exhausted. It's sucked all the motivation out of me, this anger at the system at what’s happening, this fear that’s rife. This civilisation that is spiralling out of control.  I am hopeless while I watch the champions of capitalism make over 360 billion dollars this past year while the lowest paid show up everyday to staff the grocery stores and farm the food and deliver the packages compensated only by the term essential. I am dumbfounded that I have to trust experts who are paid for by a capitalist driven health imperative that spends billions on growing and promoting junk food, polluting water and prescribing addictive substances, but still know what’s best for my health. Numb when next year we will spend 768.2 billion on national defence to keep me “safe”

How much will we spend on goodwill and love?

So it's hard to get excited about creating my art for the sake of beauty. To teach a class inspiring people that they will have more resilience if we just breath and make herbal tea. 

It's hard to keep preventing death. To control the weather. To be afraid of the outside. And most of all it’s hard not to have each other.

If I listen to those who still have threads on vestiges of indigenous knowledge in their lineage I hear that our greatest resource is our kin. Our tribe. Our community. It's how we self police ourselves so that we can be good custodians of the land we live with and life that supports us. 

And yet here I am in a sea of communities that have fallen apart. Have slowly become quiet, stopped questioning, exploring. I am in a sea of communities that exist because of outrage at “the other” and all the fear that comes from that. I am in a sea of communities that has no ground, no territory, no shared resources apart from what’s in our revolving minds, busy tone policing our disassociated and disembodied selves.

Communities that belong to an occupier race built from rape and pillage and genocide. Civilisation that is active in covering up and using convenience to create a complacent life that fuels the endless growth of capitalism - whose game plan to solve whatever problems that halt the growth is with more capitalism. Blah Blah Blah. 

I can’t think inside this box anymore. Even though I am off it. I am done with being a domesticated member of the occupier mindset. I am done working within this manifold, done with dutifully exercising my freedom that is only centred on self. I am done with being greater than. As far as I understand, if you want to be in a relationship, any relationship, you have to be interested in it and this year I have really lost interest. I’m broke up.

What will 2022 bring? I don’t know. But I feel a little hope now that I’m not out to fix anything. A little more focus on how to work through my feelings of betrayal without the need to blame another. A little more inspired. And I write this to reach out to those of you who resonate with this. To those of you who feel this. To those of you who are searching for a way to live with each other, rather than apart.

Happy New Year my loves,

Natasha

Watch this space, stay tuned and I would love to know, how are you doing?