Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

I feel caught between a rock and a hard place for many reasons right now. One of them is the desire not to engage in doomerism or catastrophising in a way that makes things worse for everyone else. At the same time, I feel guilt for not actively saying something or doing something more. A lot of people are afraid, hurt, angry, in need of support and my silence can be read as indifference and acceptance.

But it is not that. It is taking a lot of energy to contain my negative thinking, and sometimes it leaks out and I say something tremendously crazy and uncomfortable.

I also feel incredibly stupid and gullible and vulnerable right now and don't trust my judgement. I know I am being ruled by extreme emotions that are being manipulated by algorithms on social media. I should just stay off social media entirely. It is poison for me. But it is also a source of information and connection and distraction. 

Unfortunately, all my social media channels have become places that fuel my fear. Even LinkedIn, which has mostly been about work related stuff is sharing me more posts about the rise of fascism and the anger people outside the US feel toward the US and Americans. It feels irresponsible to hide my head in the sand, but I have a tendency to catastrophise and that is not helpful for anyone and just makes me sound unhinged to people.

It is also posing a challenge for my husband. He's trying to stay resilient and he wants to know what he can do to support me, but my worries are so extreme and when I express them, he has to fight back to maintain his own resilience and equilibrium. 

Here is something a friend posted on LinkedIn that is an example of the sort of thing I carry with me but feel crazy for talking about: What to Expect When You're Expecting Catastrophe. The friend who shared it is in Spain and is a fan of US things. He is not someone that engages in catastrophizing, so him posting this fuels my deeply negative beliefs more than if this were shared by someone who always posts stuff like this. My husband would considering this an example of doomerism, so I have chosen not to share this with him. Reading it results in a physical response - a pit of dread and grief in my stomach and a low mood.

I need to find a way to change my thinking so I can cope with reality without making things worse. I need to find ways to have conversations with people without spreading all this fear and it is a big concern of mine that I will be traveling to a conference in the Netherlands.  I know that the state of the US will be on everyone's minds and that my friends will want to talk about with me, whether to commiserate, offer support, or express their own fears and anxieties. I would like to be a friend that they can talk to - not someone who is so negative and fearful that they have to walk on eggshells around me.

While my husband has been in Sweden for both work and family stuff, I spent the past two weekends with two different friends, each of whom know a different side of me. One is a friend I have known a very long time (for me) from fandom and another is an academic/running friend who I have gotten to know better the past two years. 

I need to get to a therapist for many reasons, but one of the big ones has to do with the fact that I have developed a lot of coping strategies that stem from past trauma or my own innate low self-esteem that have become counter-productive. I am now at the stage of life and career where I can see this leading to a crisis or breakdown of major proportions and I need to get ahead of this before it happens. 

One of my big coping strategies is overfunctioning. I'm glad there is a word for it, but it is exactly what I was trained to do in my family. I was the oldest child and only girl and my father would explicitly tell me it was my responsibility to help mom, to look after her and to keep my three younger brothers in order. When my brothers would misbehave and fight and break things (as kids do, I suppose) and mom would begin yelling at them and before dad would come home and scream at us and threaten to put our heads through the wall (his favorite threat - but he never did anything physical to us), I would run around in a hurry putting things away, tidying the best I could so at least my mother had less mess to deal with.

Then after my father sexually molested me and told me not to tell mom because it would hurt her, I accepted this and swallowed my history in silence. I made the decision to not ever tell anyone ever because I knew the information would only hurt people. (I was 11). I knew/believed that because my mother was a stay at home mother, if anything happened to my dad, she could not support us and so four kids would probably be sent away to different places, probably to live with our different godparents. So to keep the family safe and together, I decided to be very good and not say anything.

This is something I still do, I realize. A lot of my motivation for taking on certain roles right now is to keep things safe and stable because people and institutions around me are falling apart (or at least this is my perception). But I don't think all of this is in my head.

In 2016, the US finally elected a president who facilitaed the overturning of laws and policies that respected human dignity and bodily autonomy and which I had come to accept as the norm. We did just endure a pandemic that shut down many things and led to many deaths and so much burnout and overwork. Since then, there have been two ongoing wars/violent conflicts that have inflamed attention among the young and the policy makers in the US and universities are now folding under congressional and wealthy donor pressure to retaliate in ways I don't comprehend. And there has been so much dysfunction in my own university, particularly at the department level that has overturned all stability.

My response is to step up to tidy up this mess even though it is not what I want to do, even though it means giving up (for years) things that give me joy, and my very real fear is that it means failing in the most spectacular way possible because I am not capable. For example, I may or may  not post about the ongoing struggle with Belgian tax-law that is consuming some of my time. But why should a US-based professor of applied linguistics need to know anything about Belgian tax law?

I see myself doing this in my marriage too and as a result of what I perceive to be my own husband's burnout and by the fact that we also work in the same department. When he cannot function either at home or at work, I step in.  I realize I have made several decisions that directly stem from trying to take the weight off my husband who I see as falling apart for his own reasons. I want him to get help, but I don't know how to make him see he needs help.

So because I cannot control or assist him or control other people around me or the institions around me, I turn to overfunctioning to quell my panic and to try to make things better. But it's getting dangerous.  And it is making it very hard for me to say no to things that are time-intensive, difficult and extremely stressful, so that I can do the things that I AM good at, enjoy doing, and will do well and effectively (like my research, teaching, running). 

I hate thinking about the future now because all I see is hard work and no joy left, at least not for a good decade. I am looking back on my 40s with such longing and nostalgia as the peak years of my career where even though I was massively overworked in Sweden, I got to do a lot of the things I loved. I feel like my time is over and the long slow winding down of my career and life is all that is ahead of me.