After the birth of my third child in July, I was hit with debilitating postpartum anxiety. Exhausted and sleep deprived, I nonetheless spent the darkest hours of each night wide awake, while the house slept on, mind whirring with horrific possibilities.
During Mass, instead of submerging into the liturgy, I would imagine a man walk through the doors and start calmly shooting my fellow parishioners. I tried to drag my attention back to the altar, but it pulled against me, toward the unlikely nightmare, and I submerged there instead, mentally running through various avenues of escape, scenarios that would somehow enable my son to survive – the infant cocooned against my chest in a carrier, protected from imaginary bullets only by a thin layer of stretchy cotton and the flesh of my body. So, not protected at all.
It was around this time – once the anxious monster in my skull robbed the Mass of its peace – that I chose to disengage from the world. I stopped reading the news, stopped the endless thumb-scroll through daily litanies of sorrow from around the globe, sorrows that fed my mental monster, no matter how far removed. I checked out, completely. I stopped reading about the latest Hollywood rapist, the latest blood-feud in Washington, the latest domestic tragedy, the latest global atrocity.
When I traveled cross-country recently for my grandfather’s funeral, I had to fake my way through small talk with strangers, leaning on vague phrases – “Oh, I know,” “Yeah, tell me about it” – shaking my head as if I did know, as if I didn’t need to be told about it. Could I believe the weather happening on the east coast? No, I couldn’t. The only weather I could believe, the only weather I knew, was the weather outside my front door.
I steered clear of Facebook, which is its own strange minefield, photos of chubby babies and too-flattering selfies alongside headlines of horror – headlines of articles that few actually read, but we share them anyway, to at least feel like we’ve done something; we’ve shown that we’re woke, we’re aware.
What is the value of this fleeting mass awareness? The news cycle, after all, must keep churning.
I’m not entirely sure.
I’m now being treated for the postpartum anxiety, and life is ebbing back to normal, but I’ve continued fasting from the news. Because of this, I feel more attuned to the duty of the present moment, more attentive to the small joys and ordinary sorrows of the world within walking distance.
Still, I feel vague and intermittent guilt about my ignorance of current events, as if I’m shirking a civic duty, maybe even a religious one, by living in a smaller sphere. I ask myself: how can I pray about these horrors if I don’t hear about them? And I tentatively answer: I can pray nonetheless, for redemption and peace, and for the people I know. Let the Church hold and carry the afflictions of the earth, because my hands are too small. I’m not, after all, praying alone.
Sometimes I find myself imagining what a medieval parish life would have been like. A romanticized version, no doubt. But I think of the ordinary man tilling out his mark in the soil, the ordinary woman sewing a garment for the baby she hopes will live to wear it. I think of them taking the small trek to their parish church, seeing the same people there they’ve known all their lives, for better or worse. They take the body of Christ and return home, ignorant of the latest political maneuverings in the Vatican, ignorant maybe even of the current pontiff’s name. And are they the worse for it? Christ still comes in the Mass, regardless.
Is the voracious consumption of information a virtue? Is seeking not to know a vice?
I had dinner with a friend the other night, and he was talking about how modern buildings are sometimes designed to be seen from an airplane’s view, rather than from the perspective of someone on the ground. Maybe that’s a good metaphor. Is it better to see the world from above while speeding along? To have a vast scope, but at an impossible distance?
Or is it permissible, even beneficial, to know the world at dirt-level? To have a sightline that only goes so far, but the faces within it are familiar and clear?
I had the exact thing happen to me after I had my daughter. It lasted for three years. I too had fears of shooters during Mass. I occasionally think about it three years later, but I no longer battle uncontrollable fear. Thank you for sharing your story! God bless you.
Thank you for these honest reflections. I usually “fast” from daily news during Lent, in part to repent of the fears and anxieties the daily barrage fosters. Such obsessions can foster in me a lack of trust in God’s sovereignty and goodness. Our technology has enabled us to live beyond our inherently delimited physical design. We can travel across the globe in a matter of hours, converse across the globe in real-time, and “know” about every crisis and rumor of disaster happening at every moment around the world. This movement toward omnipresence and omniscience is beyond what we are created to experience. It is no surprise, and certainly no act of sin, to humbly accept our physical and epistemological limitations. God bless you in your restoration to peace.
Abigail, there is no shame or guilt in humbling ourselves before the Lord, in saying, I cannot handle this, my God. I must give it to you. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small. On the contrary, there is something wrong in feeling we have a responsibility to solve problems we don’t even understand. Your painful anxiety was a blessing for you, propelling you to a spiritual maturity that might not otherwise have been possible.
Our 24-hour news networks inform us about the latest famine in Africa, the insanity of violence and terror all over the world, and thus cause us to be blind to the hungry among us, the hurting neighbor, the rejected child, or even the abused animal we pass by.
I don’t watch news beyond the headlines once a day, I don’t do any form of social media. Such obsessions are deadly not only in a social sense but in a far more important spiritual sense. God wants us to heed what he puts in our path, not what CNN puts there, not what is posted on the internet, and not what terrorizes us in the night when fear makes us forget who is God and who is not.
You are not alone. I very rarely consume more than the headlines because, as you say, the burden is impossible to bear. Sometimes I feel guilty, especially on behalf of my children, because I almost never watch television news, and I remember that when my parents watched the nightly news, that was how I learned about things like politics and geography. Then I remind myself that when I was ten – the age my oldest child will turn this year – the images on the nightly news were of the Berlin Wall coming down and the Soviet Union being toppled. The news was harsh, but there was also a sense of human triumph, of good defeating evil, that one could gain from it. There was depth and complexity and hope. Now, it seems there is almost never anything reported but backbiting and despair. That is not the worldview I want my children to absorb. It’s also not a very complete picture of the world, even if the news isn’t precisely “fake.” Nowhere in scripture is being well-informed lauded as a virtue, so I have decided that preserving naivete’ – both theirs and my own – is far better than allowing us to lose hope.
To a fault, I have taken the conscious perspective that if it does not touch me personally then I cannot sincerely, and probably not practically, pray for or hold real concern for it, whatever it may be. But I have lately started coming to the realization that my conscious efforts to interact with my immediate surroundings in a Christ-like way (in what I understand the spirit and essence of the Christ to be) have the end result of that world unconsciously touching me. I am moved by the world, sincerely and practically, through reciprocation. This world, the one I converse with, is truly mine.
My social responsibility is below par, no doubt. But then again, Jesus never saw no skyscrapers.
Thank you, Abby, for conversing with me.