"Crunched ever inward" and its opposite

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A couple of dear friends sent me this Ed Yong interview about journalism as an act of caretaking (!!!), burn out, birding, and moral injury.

I loved every minute of it, but was especially struck by a phrase he offered up when referring to the ways in which our screen-focused, fear-based society is impacting our scope of concern. He said we are currently being “crunched ever inward” and that it behooves us to get out in the physical world with others—human and non-human, alike.

This feels so right to me, and my mind immediately wove a beautiful, strong-as-hell strand of spidery silk between Ed Yong call to resist being “crunched ever inward” and

Elissa Strauss

’ insight in her beautiful book, When You Care, that sometimes the act of care can be both crunch inward and portal outward. She wrote about the ways in which caregiving—whether for our babies, our elders, our chronically ill siblings or friends—can be both physically exhausting and existentially clarifying, both narrowing and widening, both isolating and transcendent.

This has certainly been my experience. Profoundly so.

When I became a mother, I was often flummoxed by the ways in which my world had to narrow. Suddenly I couldn’t do ten thousand things. I had to do two: keep baby A alive and then baby B alive. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I sometimes experienced the limitations on my time and energy as some kind of injustice. I had taken 30 years to build a life I really loved and now these two needy beings were threatening to ruin it. Didn’t they know I had parties to go to and deadlines to meet?

Me and Baby A when she was first starting to hug me back.

But what I also experienced was the opposite: that the wonder and honor inherent in being their mom was among the most powerful, surprising, and fascinating experiences I had ever had. My questions about their development led me to ask ever bigger questions about human development writ large. My observations about their identity formation led to observations about nature and nurture far and wide. My outrage at broken, inequitable systems that I touched because of my love for and duty to them, helped me look up and out and feel outraged alongside so many others.

The same has been true for the caregiving that I’ve been doing for my dad, who has advanced dementia. There are moments when I have felt like the most unlucky daughter—to have this man who was my person for so many decades become so profoundly dependent and often unrecognizable. I have sometimes felt imprisoned in my home with him, scared to leave should he do something that exhausts or endangers my mom. My life in these last eight months of being one of his primary caregivers has sometimes felt like an excruciating “crunch inward.”

But what I also experience is the opposite: that reveling in what remains of him is one of the most transformative spiritual journeys of my life thus far. Learning to move away from language with him is teaching me when and how to move away from language with the whole wide world. Learning how little I can control inside the four walls of my home is teaching me to power trip less everywhere I go. Learning how to endure intimate suffering is opening me up to the suffering of the whole wide world. Being made messy and truly truly vulnerable (not my tidy poetic version, but my very discombobulation on display in front of those I love), has made me more fully human and now I can recognize more layers of the humanity of others.

Distinguishing between the inherent suffering of dying and the unnecessary suffering of shitty systems that don’t serve elders or their caregivers has, you guessed, it propelled me into a vast collective outrage that I am riding into new investigations, new community, new advocacy.

Watching, up close, what it looks like for the ego to fall away and for utter dependence to return (just as it existed for my babies) is teaching me something about the life course that no book, class, or teacher could have.

I go inward to go outward through the portal of care, and in this way, I don’t have to deny that I am sometimes the flummoxed mother, that I am sometimes the unlucky daughter, but I am also, always, the most grateful seeker in the whole wide world. I have been crunched inward in a way that has allowed me to stretch outward—narrow and widen, expand and contract, struggle and transcend. When I am on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor, I am also a thread in the very American weave of fathers and daughters, and denial of bodies and decay, and triumph of love and lineage. And this knowing makes even the most cramped moments feel big and bearable, connected as they are to all that is born and someday dies, which is to say is and becomes again dependent, which is to say everyone.

Related readings:

• The unexpected magic of caring for others

• Forgetting and becoming

• Ten rules on the art of care