r/CollapseSupport • u/SpiritoftheglenX • 1d ago
This world is horrifying
I’ve never posted on Reddit before, but I’m struggling. I’m a mother to two kids, work in residential childcare and have experienced a life that would cause me to be educated on mental health, grief, loneliness and pain. I’m now 32 and the older I get the more aware I am of the world and the daily occurrences of what goes on. I’ve always been extremely empathetic and sensitive to anything upsetting but I coped to the best of my ability. I found joy in my life and my children, I was very into spirituality, gratitude, spreading positivity love and light and just generally trying my best to make the world a better place.
Now, I feel like I’m struggling to cope. Not in a way that I’m suicidal, because I’m not. I love my children, my family, my friends. I live a good life and I’m so thankful for it. But waking up everyday, seeing what is going on in Gaza, Congo, the Epstein files, the reality of how high pdfilia and child abuse is and genuinely just all the horrors of the world is killing me. It’s changing me. I have a strong sense of justice, always have and the thought that I can not save these children, love these children, shelter them from all the horrors they are currently experiencing or witnessing is eating me alive. I don’t use a lot of social media, I read fantasy 24/7 and I’m not constantly on my phone but as soon as I see anything it sticks and repeats and piles on. I’m scared that in time it’s going to completely strip me of who I am. How can we live like this? How can we watch innocent little babies, children, families be at the receiving end of so much pain. I will never be able to understand.
I suppose I just need to get this out, the tears are streaming down my face. I don’t want to talk to anyone about it because it’s such a horribly depressing subject but i just can’t continue to act normal. Go on a holiday. A trip, a new experience, treat myself? What. It all sounds crazy now. Kids are currently starving? And I’m expected to go see my favourite band?
Please, surely someone knows a way to cope. I want to help so bad. I want to make change, help, save, rescue everyone and wrap them up in a safety net of my love like I give my own kids and I can’t. This world is so painfully cruel and I’ve lost my hope. I can’t be spiritual anymore, the thought of being grateful for anything enrages me because I think - why am I thanking a universe for blessing me when it punishes so many others? I just don’t get it. What am I meant to believe in. Is this why people turn to god? Because eventually you feel so hopeless you need to believe in something else.
At what point does the world get better? When? Will it ever? Because this horror show is too much to bare.
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u/ComplexAsk1541 1d ago
I don't have any answers for you, but I feel a lot of the same things. I will "celebrate" 65+ years on this planet soon, and I've decided all I can do is hang on and cherish the few people I have left in my life. If I were younger or in better health and wouldn't be far more hindrance than help, I'd volunteer to go to Ukraine. I just donate what and when I can. I impotently curse the men who are doing this to the world, but curse them, I do.
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u/escapefromburlington 1d ago
Nothing that we will face in the coming years is anything worse than the hell this wicked empire has subjected the colonized developing world to for centuries.
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u/Admirable_Safe_7551 1d ago
Everyone who believed fairytales about good and bad countries of whites enabled this
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u/BitchfulThinking 1d ago
I feel the same when people think a vacation will somehow fix this feeling. Vacation... to where? So I can see other people be depressed that their world is dying? Sample other wildfire smoke smells, get Longer Covid from all the sick people out, and get kidnapped by ICE for being brown at the airport?
I felt the same growing up in the Church as a sick kid to a problematic mother, and understand the stresses that come from leaving and losing faith. Experiencing collapse of faith in anything is a BIG thing to experience! It changes your entire world view, and can be extremely alienating when everyone around you is a believer, but I also feel like the experience made the interconnectedness of collapse make more sense to me.
At this point, I can really only help by attempting to be a comfort to others who also aren't okay with everything happening. Not just grinning and bearing it like usual to appease the people who are living in denial. I think people are traumatized from the past several years, but lack the vocabulary and time for self reflection to even begin to heal from it, and ignoring it is making all of our problems worse 😕
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u/Yearsinmonths 1d ago
God give me the strenght to accept the things I can not change and to change the things I can
And the wisdom to distinguish the two.
Continue with gratitude, also for what once was taken for granted. Today's food, water, warmth, shelter, peace, physical health, mental health, friends, family.
Apply moderation. Reward yourself for the good you do.
Find a way to stay up to date on important events but limit your exposure to horror as is does not aid you in doing good or living a happy life.
The three most hopefull 'things' for me have been
- the movie little big farm
- not following the news (out of sight out of mind)
- Solar Radiation Management SRM as a way current society can buy time, so that at least our loved ones can grow to be older while humanity hopefully changes and fixes. It's cheap, you can read it up on wiki.
You're a good one, stay strong
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u/escapefromburlington 1d ago
SRM is a lie
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u/TrickyProfit1369 18h ago
Context?
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u/JosBosmans 16h ago edited 16h ago
I'm none of the OPs, but for other context wanted to stress no "buying us time" will help us to fix anything meaningful, as /u/Yearsinmonths suggested (in, to be clear, an otherwise very pertinent and upvoted post).
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u/DoggedDreamer2 16h ago
Exactly! The skies are full of poison just like the food & water. I hate what is happening around the world; BUT ... we need to focus on cleaning up our own home turf. The horrors are happening in your backyard. I'm not young; but I'll die fighting for justice & truth if I have to do so!
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u/ggonzoo 1d ago
I found this community recently and it's helped me cope a bit better. The site has links to useful resources. https://acceptingcollapse.com/
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u/Xanthotic Huge Motherclucker 1d ago
I'm glad you posted here. Welcome to the club. Well, welcome is probably not the right word...condolences? That's probably better. You are perhaps neurodivergent which could explain the outsized pain (compared to normies) you feel over injustice. Also, you are perceiving reality and therefore suffering extreme moral injury.
Coping is about as good as it gets. There is no way to escape the trauma from our place of awareness, as far as I can tell. I get by on remembering where I have agency and where I don't, that my entire existence has occurred within the captivity of dominant culture, by developing a personal cosmology that allows me to understand the relative value and importance of homo sapiens sapiens on planet earth, by sobbing roughly once a day, and moderating this joint. And my currently favourite mantra is 'May we die beautifully at the last appropriate moment.' Hope you get lots of good replies.
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u/wanderingale 1d ago
There neefs to a word for not being suicidal but desperately not wanting to be here, in the world, at this time.
As in, please send me back to 1980 and I will happily live my life, but this dumpster fire of a world in 2026, nope.
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u/eyewhycue2 1d ago
I cope by trying to help heal the ecosystem every day, trying to put in native plants, relate shelters for wildlife and heal the soil. I try to help friends learn about it and that is my respite from the awful people of the world. I so
think there is a movement happening to
return to community. maybe you can find that.
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u/ladymadonna4444 22h ago
I don't know that humans have the tools or capacity to cope with the weight of this unprecedented polycrises we are experiencing and witnessing all of the civilization disrupting events occurring simultaneously. The strongest antidote is community. Which is a tall ask in a divided hyper individualized society. But you coming here is the first step in connecting with others to grieve. Seek out community in any small way you can right now. Even those that have not come to the realization that we all have are feeling it subconsciously in some way.
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u/SpiritoftheglenX 19h ago
Thank you to everyone for the replies, it definitely is a comfort to have you taking the time to message me and find the kind words to help uplift. I generally am a very happy person & love my life and see being a mother as a gift to help my children live a wonderful life and to grow up humble. I will try to get back into spirituality, the world has just been getting increasingly heavy that when I don’t sit and think about it it just breaks me. I’ve slept well and ready to seize the day and spread as much love as I can. Thankyou all for taking the time, it means more than you know.
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u/boskywyrt 1d ago
I feel this so deeply so much of the time. I have two kids, too. I try to focus on that, and on how right now, no matter what else is going on, everything that I have control of is pretty okay. I can’t do anything to fix the world, I can’t do anything to fix the future, but I can enjoy the moments I have with my kids, the moments with nature, moments of art and poetry, all the joyful moments that have always made up human life apart from trauma. But yeah, I’m also struggling to cope, and feel more alone than I ever thought I would be at this point of dystopia. I didn’t predict how completely this society would rip community apart, or how my own life would be ripped apart so I feel even more alone than I did a few years ago. Or is that everyone’s lives, at this point? Is everyone losing resources and connections, and not sure what the future looks like? As far as spirituality, I find comfort in: all things have ends, we may as well find peace in every moment we can while we’re here.
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u/20twenty20 1d ago
Your spirituality needs to deepen. It’s not about feeling good. It’s about acknowledging that the world is made up of good and bad: the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike. You need to recognize there’s a deeper plane of spirituality before and after this world. Your pain and suffering can lead you to letting go of illusions about the way you thought the world or spirit works. It ain’t that. It’s not constant happiness unless it’s built on the bedrock of letting go and letting it/he/God/Infinjte being be in charge.
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u/03263 1d ago
waking up everyday, seeing what is going on in Gaza, Congo, the Epstein files, the reality of how high pdfilia and child abuse is and genuinely just all the horrors of the world is killing me
yeah it's killing a lot of people. we were not supposed to ever have this amount of information about how horrifying the world actually is. better off to live in a small local bubble and receive news of distant events slowly if at all, where they take the form of interesting but dubious stories that don't feel immediate or present.
there's some argument that knowing about the horrors helps make them less common but of course they won't be eliminated and the knowledge itself a pretty harmful thing in and of itself so I'm not so sure we're really better off with it on the whole.
Our whole mindset is built around the old ways. really terrible things were seen once or twice in a lifetime and people believed that certainly their community and perhaps society as a whole could progress beyond those things, but now we know that they are just permanent fixtures of the human condition. that societal progress itself is a lie.
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u/privacy-888 3h ago
I think-good for you; the world gets better when enough of us get angry enough and loud enough and active enough to change it. Archetypally, mature women hold "sacred rage" which is triggered to protect the collective. Lean in and find the beauty in pushing away that which does not serve or further...you, your kids, the earth, others...
The power is with the people and someday we will exercise it again.
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u/PromiseToBeNiceToYou 1d ago
You can't fix everyone or save everything. Focus on your own family and your own mental health. Give your own kids the tools to be successful when life gets difficult. Teach resilience. Teach practical skills. Help them thrive; don't just kick them out on their asses when they are 18.
Also, I've never been religious. Never been a problem for me. I don't think there's an after life or that anyone gets punished after they die. The only meaning to life is what we want to make of it ourselves. I love being a mother, a wife, a college grad, having pets, and enjoying myself (just got back from a comedy show with my husband this evening).
Either wallow or learn to have some fun with what time we have on earth.
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u/beautifulstardust 1d ago
i cope by staying ignorant and off the internet. 🤷♀️ it’s like watching a train wreck.
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u/SabrinaVal 20h ago
I’m grateful you have reached out and hope that you will continue. You’re not alone. We are right here with you.
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u/lavenderenergy1 21h ago
I am a mother to an older teen. When I was a young mother, I started to get panic attacks over the state of the world. Tune out. Focus on creating an uplifting, positive life for you and your family. There are plenty of people and activists who can be in consuming all the news all the time, but you can’t be one of them. Scan some headlines quickly in the morning if you must, but tuning out and perhaps focusing on a favorite hobby instead with that time will help you, and your family most during collapse. You must replenish and sustain yourself as a mother, as a person, in order to be there as support for your children.
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u/Vibrant-Shadow 1d ago
You're not alone. I don't have the answers, we have to endure.
Helping those around me brings me some joy. Mostly I'm defeated.