In the winter of 2020, I was studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh. I was on an
exchange semester in my third year in MSE at McGill. I study Ecological Determinants of
Human Health, which falls broadly under the umbrella of Environmental Science and Global
Health Programs. My degree is the study of the unique interaction between human health and planetary health - an antagonistic relationship, concisely summed up by my father once as being “where the two biggest problems facing humankind meet”.
I love what I study. I find it stimulating, invigorating, and inspiring. But that spring in
Edinburgh, I was exhausted. I was inundated with complex and, quite honestly, terrifying
information about the state of the world, and had conflated my ability to succeed in my classes with my ability to problem-solve. In retrospect, I would call this “burn-out”.
A friend recommended that I read an article in the Guardian about a young activist
named Clover Hogan who was on the front lines of youth environmental activism. She was
speaking about a phenomenon that she called “eco-anxiety”, or the feeling of overwhelming dread, nihilism and paralysis that communities and individuals affected by climate change experience. This feeling, the article read, is particularly on the rise amongst young people who are faced by the imminence of the problem, but feel powerless to do anything to change it. This acknowledgment of mental health underpinning functioning ran antiparallel to the dialogue that I had encountered in my time studying at McGill: in order to make a meaningful impact in a tough world, in order to even scratch the surface of time-sensitive crises like environmentalism, medicine, health, development, you had to backburner your feelings and vaccinate yourself against emotional attachment. Instead, Clover argued that in order to find any sort of authentic agency, you had to tune into your own discomfort and anxiety, and cultivate resilience within your internal mental space before being capable of enacting sustainable external impact.
Reading this was the first time I had given myself permission to be overwhelmed by the
magnitude of the information that I was grappling with. I sent Clover a message on social media, explaining who I was, where I was from, and thanking her for elucidating something that I had been trying to put my finger on for a long time. I left her my email and expected to receive radio silence. Two months later, after a hasty exodus from Scotland and two weeks of
quarantine in Canada, she emailed me back. She thanked me for my message, apologized for her late reply, and asked me to tell her a bit more about myself. We immediately clicked in our ideologies, and kept up a consistent correspondence through the Spring, until she called me on Skype at the end of April. She told me she was starting a not-for-profit geared towards helping young people transition from a place of anxiety to agency, and said she felt that I would make an excellent addition to the core team as Curriculum Director. This is how Force of Nature started.
I told her I was massively underqualified. She told me that as a young, critical-thinking
person, anxious about the state of the planet, I basically had a PhD in eco-anxiety (and that she was trying to build a young scrappy team anyways). Six months later, I help lead weekly free Force of Nature workshops with young people from around the world, where we mediate discussions about how to metabolize fear and eco-anxiety, how to break down self-limiting narratives, and how to overcome internal obstacles in order to face up to external ones. Our ethos is to shift from a place of powerlessness to a place of agency - not by “invisiblizing” our anxieties, but by acknowledging and interrogating them.
I remember leaving classes in my second and third year about biodiversity loss; failing
food security; and cultural genocide; feeling as if I was wearing iron shoes. It never occurred to me that an overflowing filing cabinet of problems with no solutions in an unacknowledged corner of my brain was ripe for rot. This is only exacerbated now, when ending a Zoom call populates your immediate living space with the guts of your classes. This year, whether catalyzed by the isolation and uncertainty of a global pandemic or simply by the natural passage of coming-of-age anxiety into an uncomfortable confidence, my peers have started tentatively opening up about similar feelings of trauma with regards to processing difficult content. This is the beginning of a long-overdue conversation; one that starts not with “What are you doing?” but, “How are you doing?”
I’ve found that emotional investment follows a classic dose-response curve; too little, and you are unable to muster motivation. Too much, and your emotional-cognitive muscles fail from overstimulation. I’ve been mired in apathy on both ends, and as much as I would like to say that there is a neat panacea (a “Goldilocks” zone of anxiety, so to speak) that unlocks the highest level of functioning, in truth, it is a trial and error process. It looks like being overwhelmed, taking time to unplug, and dwelling on spilled coffee and cancelled plans, even when there are bigger problems to fret about. It looks like figuring out how to balance taking care of yourself and taking care of others. “Mental health” needs to enter the lexicon we use when educating young people about taking on the world’s messiest problems - otherwise, we are dooming a generation to burnout. At Force of Nature, I want to create an open and accessible space for young people to step into their own unique forms of resilience and involvement in advocacy. We do not purport to know the answers; we purport to be a conduit for people to find their own answers. We talk about being scared. We express uncertainty in each other and in the state of the world. We breathe sighs of relief when we let down our fabricated nonchalance, and our vulnerabilities aren’t
perceived as weakness. We are continually surprised upon realizing that fear and uncertainty are universal human emotions, transcending class, geography and culture. Above all, we take a moment to forgive ourselves for feeling overwhelmed.
If I could give advice to myself or to anyone feeling burnt out, hopeless, or
just plain exhausted, I would say “you can’t pour from an empty cup”. Force of Nature helped me realize that in order to show up to solve problems, I have to show up for myself first.
Written by Sacha Wright