#Sofie Isenberg

[luxe-pauvre]

Those of us who only learned how to evaluate our lives using external markers were bound to feel unmoored when those parts of our lives were thrown into chaos. In the first six months of the pandemic, I lost career momentum, income, community, mental focus, even independence (I moved back in with my mom after over a decade). But the way I experienced those losses, as a growing sense of meaninglessness, was hardly objective or inevitable. “The curtain has been lifted, and we’re feeling betrayed. But there’s nobody to blame, because we kind of did it to each other and to ourselves, right?” said Cho. In her view as a therapist, “meaning” isn’t a concrete structure to be lost, found, or understood. It’s what we create, constantly, out of the stories we tell ourselves about what we see in the world.  And the story our culture currently tells is a very literal-minded one. Many of us value science and logical thought above all other forms of understanding, even if we don’t consistently apply them to our own lives. So it’s unsurprising that our conversations about the mind and mental health generally remain limited to what we can easily see and measure.

Sofie Isenberg, Spirit Matters