I made the mistake of spending too much time on my phone last night—swipe swipe swipe

I sniffled into my pillow around 11 pm, miserable and thinking that we are all gonna die, starve, or be homeless. (Oh my god, I know, I know better.)

So I totally get your feeling of sliding between two crazy poles of fear and calm right now. It’s like an army has invaded our country, except it’s made of the people we love and the viruses they harbor. Now what? You can’t fight that with a missile.

This made me think: in keeping with my promise to only give YOU insanely freaking positivity while we get through this, here is a list of this ragtag army of fears that bruised me, and every counter-thought and feeling you can control them with.

Keep this list and USE it when you overdose on the news.

Ahem, ready?

FEAR 1: “I’m totally stressing. My boss sent me home and I’m FREAKING. What if I lose my job, or this goes on for so long that my own business crashes or I can’t pay my bills?”

THOUGHT ANTIDOTE: Okay love, why do you think this shift is necessarily going to doom the world? Let’s turn this into something else: what if you rebound into an even better job, or a career that better suits you on so many levels? What if you slide through this narrow period relatively unscathed after all? Why do you think you can’t survive a blip of a few months, or even a year? You’re going to come back with all your same skills. Nobody can rob you of your value or worth—those are staying right there with you.

Do you really feel your family, your government, your employer, and the world will totally abandon you, when we are all feeling this together? Do you think its in anyone’s interest for us all to lose everything, when we can collectively pull out miracles we never knew we could do? And you know who gets to decide about those miracles? YOU AND ME, right now. Vote wisely.

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FEAR 2: “I’m gonna get it. I know it. What if my mom gets it? Or my kids? Who do I know that will die? OMG I see mass graves.”

THOUGHT ANTIDOTE: Your body, all our bodies, are pretty intelligent. Even those of us with compromised systems generally have mind-numbing bounce back ability. I read last night about a 94 year old Texan grandma who just kicked the virus. So why would you open your immunity even more to it with fear? Toughen your inner immunity and your energetic immunity. Make it clear you don’t want this, and you feel strong. Be an energetic fortress. And then be a fortress for others.

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FEAR 3: “There’s gonna be a long depression. I will lose things I love, like my home, my work, my happiness. It’s going to be so HARD. Why me? Why now?”

THOUGHT ANTIDOTE: Again, what if things shift in a way we could never have imagined? What if we finally put down our internal political strife that we couldn’t see a way to quell before, and we start working together? What if we start trusting science, our media, our corporations, AND our governments again? Oh my god, I actually WANT that. Because I want to trust that the people who make up all those institutions are GOOD PEOPLE. They are people I know and love.

What if we realize how we need serious safety systems for society, and make that a HUGE priority for the next century? What if we already had something in place where EVERY ONE of us could weather having no income for 6 months without losing anything? And we had great healthcare that we can all use? What if this makes climate change become more understandable now, and we avert a future disaster our children could never have recovered from? Oh my god, what if this is precisely what we all needed—a good kick in the ass?”

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FEAR 4: “Yeah, but people are gonna die, Summer. I’m worried about people I love. I’m worried about the world.”

THOUGHT ANTIDOTE: I am too. I worry about my parents and grandmother. I also dodged the cancer bullet a few years ago, and it helped me know that everyone has an expiration label stamped on them. I cannot worry about those expiration dates when I don’t know what they are, or what they’ll be from. Doing so leaks out all the energy that I want to spend on loving people and sharing myself with them RIGHT NOW. So I will not obsess about them dying. I will love them more instead, right now. That’s all we can in the face of the unknown.

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