Wonder Worry: Honorable Mention, Essay Memoir
Adrienne Wilson is the first to receive an honorable mention for her submission to the Climate Change Memoir Writing Contest in the category of Essay Memoir. Her story delves into intense feelings such as confusion, helplessness, and gratitude brought on by the uncertainty of our future.
By Adrienne Wilson
Some summer nights, I stand outside the door and stare up at the navy sky speckled with stars. Such magic.
Some February afternoons I take my shoes off on the beach because it’s suddenly, abnormally, 68 degrees. I turn my face toward the sun and revel in the warmth. Such joy.
In the spring I wake to the sound of birds chirping outside my window. And then I read in the news that those birds’ migration patterns are messed up or that another entire subsection of ice has melted away, or that another entire species of creature is under threat of extinction.
And I wonder what the word is for what I experience on the daily, which is wonder that is tinged with a deep, creeping worry. Which is reverent awe and gratitude tinged with terror. What is the right word for feeling so free yet so infinitesimally small, so frozen, so helpless?
The headlines tell us that what we face amounts to a collective existential crisis, the magnitude of which humankind has never seen. That our continued life on this planet Earth, our very survival as a species, hangs in the balance. That if we don’t “curb our emissions, cut our greenhouse gasses, take some drastic action,” it’ll be….too late.
Too late?? What do you do with that information? With your own experience? With your fear? With what you are coming to know? What do you do?
Maybe we mention it, in passing. Maybe we try to make it lighter, softer, like my friend and I barefoot on the beach (“well, it shouldn’t be 70 in February, but, uh, the sun feels nice…?”). Maybe we sigh sadly and then push it off for another time, another day when we imagine we’ll have more space to counter it, more capacity to engage with it, to face it, to brave it.
Moreso, we just keep moving. We just keep living our lives and driving our cars and consuming the lifeblood of the Earth. And we keep building and destroying and wrapping everything in plastic and creating more ways to build and destroy. And then we cross our fingers and keep hoping.
What we don’t do is talk about it for real. We don’t meet our friend at the store, in the park, at a cafe and say: love, this is it. What’s your plan? Do you understand? No. Instead we chatter and gossip and reminisce and try to find the joy and the happiness and the magic that is, of course, always there and will, I believe, always be there. We look for the pros and the positives and the happy notes and we keep a light tone. We look away from the harsh reality, because we’re human.
And then sometimes we do try. We do try. In our small, futile ways.
And we know. We KNOW.
But there is no word that exists for this particular kind of knowing. Or for the particular feeling of helplessness that accompanies the knowing. We are naked, unarmed, ill-equipped, and heading headlong into this foreign future, all of us, though the consequences will be uneven, inevitably. Some of us will skate by for a while. And we will all continue to look for those pros and those happy notes. And that joy. There’s always joy.