Drowning In Anxiety

Climate change doesn’t just have an impact on the world around us. It’s also burrowing into our psyches.

- Véronique Hyland

Ever since I could read, my time-honored method of dealing with any kind of uncertainty has been to flood the zone with data. Terrifying-seeming symptom? Hit the CDC website to convince myself it’s probably not an aneurysm in progress. Unfamiliar destination? Learn so much about the terrain that I could double as a local travel guide. But one patch of my anxiety quilt has gone unassuaged by this information-seeking compulsion, and that’s climate change. I’ve probably read more about the topic than anyone who doesn’t need to for her job. And with every article I read, book I devour, or haunting image of an emaciated polar bear or trash-gorged whale I see, I sink deeper into the quicksand of hopelessness.

Then there’s the never-ending soundtrack that is my inner monologue: Am I abetting the decline of my own civilization? Sure, I recycle, I don’t buy throwaway fashion, I call my representatives, but I’m a part of an industry (fashion) known for stoking a demand for more, more, more, even as my own habits tend toward self-abnegation. I’m incalculably lucky that my dayto-day life hasn’t been affected by climate change in the way that so many others have. But the fact that the threat is more abstract only makes the black hole seem more menacing. When will it swallow me, my hypothetical kids, and my even-more-hypothetical grandkids?

And what makes the anxiety worse, of course, is the fact that virtually no one around me wants to talk about it. I’m not friends with any climate change deniers, but when I bring up the latest 10,000-word article warning us that we have a mere decade left before everything starts melting, the reactions range from blank stares to Debbie Downer jokes to “For the love of God, this is a child’s birthday party!” (Okay, I might be guilty on that last front.)