I'm Turning to Escapism During This Dark Time — and I'm Still Trying Not to Feel Guilty About That

It has been a hard, heavy few days. Oh, who are we kidding? It's honestly been a hard, heavy few years.

I know I'm not alone in feeling pulled under by the state of the world right now. For me, and I'm sure many of you, it feels like I'm playing a constant game of emotional ping pong, my thoughts bouncing back and forth between dread and the mundane realities of real life. As hard as it is to show up in real life, we have to — for our jobs, our families, our responsibilities.

And between the mental load of life and the dread of living in this timeline, it feels like I have very little room for joy and escapism...but I also know that I owe it to myself to find those pockets for me.

And so for me, that looks like finding avenues for escapism. It means getting invested in a TV show (Tell Me Lies is so good and made for us millennials). It means treating myself to a new cozy sweatsuit, because sometimes physical comfort helps bring emotional comfort as well. It means reading lots of romance (I typically prefer thrillers or heavier reads in the winter, but this year, I'm sticking with my spicy romance novels even through the colder months).

I won't lie. I have a lot of guilt when I find myself caring about things that feel really frivolous right now, and this is something I've been struggling with for years at this point. Maybe even my entire adult life.

But the reality is, there's always something heavy happening. A school shooting, a natural disaster, a humanitarian crisis...the list goes on and on. And we can't harden ourselves and stop caring...but we also can't let it consume us entirely, and finding the line between those two things is incredibly hard.

This is something we struggle with so much as women: We hold the world’s burdens on our shoulders, and we have a really hard time not beating ourselves up if we focus on the things that take us out of the darkness. But we owe it to ourselves to indulge in healthy doses of escapism. Because it’s not healthy to carry the weight all the time. We all deserve to put it down and allow ourselves moments of frivolity. 

Emotionally, I truly believe that is one of the greatest challenges we face as women: The constant tendency to put our own needs last. We have to fight that tendency — and remind each other that it’s okay to care about the light things that bring us out of the darkness.