How the Hell Are We Supposed to Hold It All?

” Breaking our contracts with insidious individualism — together.”

Extracted from the Substack by JESS SERRANTE

My loves, we are living through fast-moving, heart-shattering times.

The looming threats of World War III and AI dystopia. Powerful pedophilic political puppeteers. ICE terrorism against our communities. Seemingly endless ongoing assaults upon human and more-than-human life…

So many of us feel defeated, fragmented, frozen. How about you?

How the hell are we supposed to hold it all? If Joanna taught me anything, it’s that we cannot do it alone.

We have been fed endless myths that teach us that individualism equals strength — the lone wolf, the fierce independent woman, the self-made hero who needs no one, and arrives at the perfect moment to save the day. These stories are dangerous because the truth of course, is that strong community, not individual strength, is what gets people through dark times such as these.

There is no script and no playbook for living through times of unraveling but the one thing I know is that if we want to lead with love we need to break our contract with insidious individualism and practice embedding and entwining ourselves in loving connection with one another.

Individualism undermines the belonging that most of us are so desperately hungry for, but breaking our contract with it is harder work than it might seem. We have been well trained by our culture.

Check in with yourself. When in the last week did you:

• Swallow your heartbreak or outrage at the state of the world instead of sharing it with a loved one?
• Say “I’m fine” to someone who genuinely wanted to know how you were?
• Feel moved to reach out to someone and then talk yourself out of it? — It’s too much. I’m too needy. They’re probably busy.
• Default to doom-scrolling over reaching out for connection — to a friend, colleague, or the natural world.

If any moments came to mind here — welcome to the club! There is nothing wrong with you. This is what it looks like to be raised in a culture of separation.Subscribe

The Great Turning is an invitation into a culture of belonging — but we have to be the ones to build that culture. No one is coming to do that part for us.

This is not easy work for people who have been wired to believe that separate = safe, but what wildly worthy work it is nonetheless.

Together, we can practice feeling the full, achy reality of what’s happening on our planet without being swallowed by it. We can remember that none of us carry this alone, so that we can start acting together. We can learn how to love ourselves and each other through the fear and vulnerability and into a lived experience of interdependence. We can redesign our lives in the pursuit of deep community, solidarity, and belonging, no matter how daunting it may feel.