About a year ago, I experienced an intense betrayal. I wasn’t blindsided exactly, but I had no way of knowing it would happen. It was as if I was living one life and they were living another. They saw things in a light that made them feel justified in their actions, which to me, made no sense at all. There were people involved on both sides: some taking sides before hearing the whole story, others frankly just loving the drama; for certain there was a gaping lack of respectful communication and an unwillingness to face issues head-on in a productive way.

For anyone who has been through an intense emotional upheaval of some sort, you’ll know some of the phases you go through: Denial, Shame, Sadness, Anger. The path through, for me, was meandering-- it sometimes looped back on itself and repeated or moved quickly ahead and skipped steps, giving a bit of hope-- but it was always there, nibbling away at the back of my brain whether I was aware of it or not.

Right now as a species we are feeling a global sense of betrayal: no matter what your views on masking, politics, climate change or any of the other massive movements going on, I think we all feel betrayed by what we thought was stable and solid. We thought we could rely on certain things to never change and other things that we never even knew we were taking for granted, are now front and center as things we desperately miss.

As we move through the months of Covid isolation, political unrest, fire season and a hot autumn here on the coast, I can’t help thinking about what some call Covid fatigue, some call burn out- the need to feel warmth and comfort, a yearning to let our guard down and release ourselves from the constant nibbling at the back of our mind. We can’t stay on our guard this long without some of it seeping out through the cracks and spraying all over our loved ones or polluting our own psyche.

On a personal level, this amount of individual and global grief can get too much to handle at times. But then I’ll have a conversation with a friend- one whose views couldn’t be more different than mine- and realize that listening to each others’ points of view in a respectful way really can help uncover the fact that our motivations are all extremely aligned. Even though we may come at it differently, we all, in the end want the same thing. If we just stop fighting, backstabbing and letting our egos get in the way, we might just learn that we’re all in this together and learn to move forward united.

So as we go into a very contentious election season, further into Covid and into winter, it will do us all good to remember that we’re ALL just trying to get through the day. If we all put our fists down and communicate, I think we'll realize that we're just trying to reach the end of that cycle of grief: Acceptance.