How to Avoid Motion Sickness When the World Won’t Stop Spinning

The lifeline you might need to survive

I want to live. Not to exist, struggling from one day to the next. Sometimes, I start with gratitude, thinking of everyone and everything I love. My children first, always. My love. Stories I have to tell that I haven’t yet told. The incredible beauty of the world around me.

But every day comes with a new reminder that life as I knew it is not as I know it now. I want the pain to stop. But the world just keeps spinning.

I’d muffle the pain with alcohol or something to help me sleep, but I can’t reach for a bottle or a pill when I’m hurting. A family tree ripe with addiction will make you rethink that impulse. At least, it does for me.

So, I drink when I’m happy, but when I’m despairing, my hand hovers there, reaching. I put the bottle on the counter, think about opening it, put it away again, and think about a glass filling as if it’s any substitute for the real thing.

I don’t want to lose time. I want my time back. I want to sit in a crowded room even if I don’t know anyone. I want the crush of bodies at a concert, mouths open singing the words of the same song.

I want to stand in a long line at an airport and exchange small smiles with the airline attendants as I make my way down the aisle to find my seat. I want to run my eyes over the seat numbers and look for mine, to heft my carryon singlehandedly into its space before sitting down with a sigh to start scanning onboard entertainment. I want to land somewhere I’ve never been.

I want to wake up and roll over to the one I love, no longer separated by unending miles of travel restrictions. I want to watch him sleep for a while before joining him, wake late, and then do terribly ordinary things like putting on my makeup while he checks his email, talking as we get ready to go out for coffee.

I want to hold hands in a coffee shop, sometimes breaking off mid-sip to lean over for a casual kiss, sometimes stopping long enough to write while he writes.

I want to immerse myself in my novel, page after page flowing out without distraction. I want to be able to work without feeling the pressure of the world leaning over my shoulder as I do. I want to say something that has nothing to do with masks or restrictions or the heavy weight of injustice or a daily death toll that no longer seems to shock anyone, barely elicits empathy.

The world is spinning, spinning, and most of us are motion sick — tired of the world’s revolutions when we cannot seem to keep our balance. Instead, we plunge headlong into activity. Bake the bread. Grow the garden. Embrace fitness like moving faster will move us out of this darkness. Have another Zoom meeting. Another social distancing outing. Another glance at the time, the date, the year ticking by.

Breathe. Pull air in. Push air out. Count them, if it helps.

I told myself things would change with the election or that it would be over by the time the holidays rolled around. I lie to myself however I can to relieve a little of the pressure. I bake another loaf of bread, plant another flower that may yet die from too much attention or sudden neglect, and go for another long bike ride, hoping that sweat will be as relieving as tears.

I try to fix my eyes on something steady, so that the next time the world turns, I won’t be made sick by it.

But looking around, everyone else is revolving, too. Friends I never thought I’d lose, gone already. Family members I could never count on in the first place, proving it. Friends struggling through the mire of their own difficult years. My children cannot keep me steady because they are looking to me for stability.

And then I realize what I should have known all along:

I cannot fix my eyes on anything outside myself.

So, I close them. I focus on my own internal compass, and I hold tight. I know the world outside me is spinning, faster now, the chaos only building. It is neither fair nor just, and I have grown tired of balancing compassion with fury.

But, with my eyes closed and my focus set on myself, the world calms. Here, there are things I know for certain.

I know who I am. I know the life I’m supposed to live. I have children to raise and books to write. I have seasons to record in photographs, noticing all the tiny changes the rest of the world can overlook as they rush from one thing to the next. I let that sense of clarity fill me, and when I open my eyes, I’m not thrown off course by the madness of the world around me. I stand, resolute, and then begin to move, steady at last.

We never needed to look outside of ourselves, to fix our stability on something other. We only ever needed to remember ourselves — but more than that, we need to honor what we know. To tune into our internal compass means that we have to tune out the demands of the outside world. Instead of ignoring our physical and mental exhaustion, pressing on despite it, we find a way to give ourselves the rest we need — even at the risk of disappointing others.

If we want to stop being made sick by the world’s easy rotations, we have to do better than getting by and going with the flow. We have to create our own flow. We have to decide that what we need matters.

Of course, when I say this, I don’t mean discarding masks and putting other people at risk for the “freedom” of browsing a store unimpeded by a piece of cloth. That kind of reckless disregard for other people isn’t honoring anything but ignorance.

Instead, honoring our own needs could look like going to bed early on a night friends want to get together by Zoom. It could look like turning down an obligation because we just don’t have the energetic resources for one more thing to do. It could look like spending less energy on toxic relationships and investing more in the ones that make us feel good about ourselves and the world around us.

When the world is spinning, we don’t need to fix our eyes on anything outside of ourselves. We need to remember ourselves, to create our own flow, and to know that help isn’t coming; it’s already here, in us, waiting for us to remember.