On Anxiety
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines anxiety as an “apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill : a state of being anxious”. We’ve all experienced this at some point in our lives, often characterized by physical symptoms of varying ranges — clinical or otherwise. I start with anxiety because a few different strands of what happened around me are tied by the theme.
I went to London recently, around the time of the heat wave of summer 2022 experienced by most of the West. It has been the UK’s driest summer in 50 years to the degree of having drought predictions in parts of the country. Some areas in London that I visited truly looked parched, and I am from India and grew up witnessing some really hot summers.
Cut to Washington DC — I am back home, jetlagged and doing my laundry. And out of nowhere, I hear water gushing. I rush out of my room and notice water leaking out of the washing machine. But there’s more. I run downstairs to the living area to see a gaping hole in the ceiling, water gushing out of it and the living room furniture being flooded. And I panic, call to my roommates and we find some means to collect water, shut off electricity and turn off the washer. This moment of sheer panic and helplessness subsides a little but as I write this we continue to live in a house that is full of dampness, a gaping hole in the ceiling of the lower floor and uncertainty about whether we ought to be moving out at any point.
And this is a small incident, and an isolated one. But one that invoked anxiety and continues to keep us on the edge. And because I was thinking about the heat wave in Europe I could not help but juxtapose this incident with that of a climate reality that is imminent in our future. And while I cannot fully fathom the climate anxiety that front line communities are currently experiencing, I can only imagine how impairing it would feel to experience the anxiety I felt was multifold.
While I was in London, I had the opportunity to visit Tate Modern, an art gallery and museum on the banks of the river Thames. While at the bookstore at Tate, I discovered an independent magazine on climate change called Its Freezing in LA. And coincidently, the first article I read from it on the evening of the water leak incident was about climate anxiety.
In this article, the writers discuss how climate anxiety is characterized not from actually living through climate disasters, but that it’s brought on even before the onset of any real calamity. Much like we experience anxiety in other areas of our lives, it’s brought on by thinking about potential future scenarios that cause us to feel pain, hopelessness and so much more. And this is particularly concerning considering how humans cope with large scale uncertainty and scarcity — through violence, and chaos.
To quote an excerpt from the article Climate of Anxiety from Its Freezing in LA’s issue #4,
“In the long premortem of global warming, climate anxiety is something of the opposite of clarity. It is a swirling and a rugpull; a gnawing and a mourning; a quickening and aberration of time…It is a fear of death, or atleast a recognition of it in the mirror. It is imprecise. It is pain.”
Anxiety, climate or otherwise is prevalent. And the fear is getting to a point where this lack of clarity becomes an everyday reality.
~Varsha
