Creating Safety

If you can, find a quiet and calm place and stay close to loved ones

You’ve never experienced anything like this. A threat that comes not only from the outside but also from within. What do you do when your thoughts themselves become dangerous?

You struggle to control them.

From the outside you may appear calm and still but inside a storm is raging—an exhausting, day-and-night battle. The pain is unbearable—yet what else can you do? There is…that. Yet to even contemplate such a thing brings only more pain.

There is much I want to say to you, in time, when you are ready—when you are able to hear.

For now, if you can: stay close to family, to loved ones, to those who care about you. Find a quiet and calm place to rest, and in that place create whatever small pockets of familiarity and comfort you can.

Much of this is out of your control—that is true.

But it’s possible you might be mistaken about what, exactly, is out of your control.

You’ve become convinced your external circumstances are hopeless, that you’re in a no-win scenario, that there’s nothing you can do. So there you are, paralyzed, yet simultaneously struggling so furiously on the inside.

But perhaps the outside world is not so intractable as it seems. Perhaps you’ve been focusing your efforts on your thoughts and feelings while neglecting spaces where you may yet have influence.

Perhaps it is your internal world—your thoughts and feelings—which cannot be controlled. Perhaps they never could be. Maybe that’s not actually a problem. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.

If that were true, what then?