The following is a part of response in a conversation about being part of cultivating both personal and collective well-being during times of crisis and stress.
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It's been really rough for most of us for quite a while - both personally and collectively. From what I know, I think the way you are handling everything is quite incredible. These aren't the conditions that support a thriving, healthy, flourishing human life and society. Without assuming why therapy was not useful for you, a really common experience is when a therapist (or an entire modality) assumes that our societies and communities are healthy. Therapy then aims to help us fit into that society, thinking that this outcome would support our wellbeing. But the impact is often a pressure to accommodate injustice and oppression. In many cases, anxiety and depression are responses to the oppressive conditions in society (such as racism, gender and sexuality antagonisms, and their intersections). If we are paying attention, personally and collectively, these responses can let us know that something is wrong.
In this way, anxiety and depression can initially be an appropriate response to unhealthy conditions, in that they can help us understand changes that need to be made in society. They can alert us to the need to recognize and dismantle oppression. But when we don't have a healthy society or community, it's easy to get stuck in these responses. When we don't have clear pathways out of our anxiety and depression, these capacities may become traps instead of warnings.
I think this is also why so many of us respond by wanting to be helpful - to be, like you said, therapists, or social workers, community organizers, human rights workers, conflict transformation facilitators, and the like. We are working together to create these pathways to make healthier societies, communities, and individuals. We understand that our liberation is collective liberation, at least intuitively, and that solidarity, mutual aid, liberation psychology/sociology/education/etc. are ways to transform these traps into opportunities for healing and transformation, as they are meant to be.
Most days (on many days I'd say every day!) is hard work for me. For those of us who have been living similar things, we know what you mean when you say "I don't think I'm stopping myself from getting better but I'm afraid people might think that." It's hard to cultivate health and wellbeing in a world like this one, overflowing with oppression. But I come back to that insight that my struggle is a sign of health. I don't want to adapt to injustice. I don't want to thrive in the status quo, because that would mean I'm accommodating, even promoting, all the bigotry and oppression that harms us. This is part of how I keep going, because I understand my existence as a vital part of carving out the possibility that things can be transformed. If I can keep recognizing and healing my own internalized oppression and dominance, that benefits me and also brings one more point of transformation into the world. We're part of a long, continuous line of people who have been doing this. And if MLK was right, that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, it's because people like us refuse to let go of that arc. We keep bending it. It's us, all of us, together.
Some days, it's all I can do to keep from letting go. Other days, the transformation feels joyful, inevitable. Either way, I know that, while I can't guarantee an outcome, our persistence is what keeps the door of change propped open. We are nourishing the possibility of change - nourishing the capacity for all the wonderful, beautiful, creative, caring, and wise aspects of human potential. It's the best way I know to spend life, a most beautiful choice that arises amidst the terror and injustice that would otherwise engulf us.
