Chinese Lunar New Year, Ramadan and Lent are all converging around the same time symbolizing light over darkness, and yet I can taste rage in the corners of my mouth. My heart pounds with it. I can’t look at anything for longer than a minute without wanting to shift my eyes somewhere else. The only thing I can stay focused on is scrolling information, testimonies, redactions, witness statements of the E- Files.

I was a huge fan of Scully and Mulder of The X-Files long before her British accent came back, or his divorce was final; before they both wrote books, before she had a hit show and he had a podcast. Their passion and determination to discover the truth was what kept me watching every single week. This feeling, this need to follow their intuition even though everyone laughed at the basement office, the ‘will they won’t they’ all of it. Because, “The Truth is Out There” and they knew it, so they kept going.

I won’t go into the details because that’s what has kept me in a state of literal panic for the last week. Reading the gory details is like stopping to watch a car accident, or overhearing a terrible story of a neighbour’s break up without walking away. My brain screams “Look away!”and I really want to look away from this… and Gaza, Sudan, BC, Minneapolis, Ukraine, Congo, and so many more. I want to look away but then I feel this overwhelming guilt of privilege that I CAN just look away.

Friends tell me to care for my heart or I’ll be no use to anyone. My therapist tells me it’s all a distraction from sitting inside my own very real feelings. My son tells me I’m making myself sick and to stop listening to every single podcast, news update, horror story. I wake up in the night thinking of all the missing kids with their faces on the side of milk cartons, the posts that I continue see of lost kids, the missing women who still haven’t been located, or were found on a pig farm.

I work in communities of women and children so I stare off, eyes wide and unseeing. Horrified. Blank. My heart pounding as I eat and eat and the acid rises in my throat.

A good friend said to me today, “You can keep going like this but it’s not helping you or the survivors. It’s also not helping the women in your community right now and they’re hurting too.”
What can I do with this awfulness behind my eyes? The voice inside me says, “Tell the truth. Cry, make art, breathe and hold space. Let them know you are able take a break from it so that they too can take a break.”

I’m trying to take mini sabbaths to breathe, recalibrate, reboot, reclaim, unplug and plug back in. For me that looks like walking away from my phone, like drinking hot water with nothing in it, like letting myself cry and not hiding or apologizing, and like writing here today. This is your permission slip from Scully and Mulder to take a break and regroup when you can breathe again.
You don’t have to be a sexual abuse survivor to feel this. You just have to be human.

One SA survivor said when I asked how they were doing in light of the E-Files,
“I think that as long as I can talk about it I’m ok. It’s when I shut down and can’t talk, then I know I’m not processing it.”
Hours after I’ve scrolled about the survivors, the “kings”, “princes,” and monsters that go trump in the night, I can’t stop scrolling my mind. I want to know that someone is raging with me, that someone is going to hold them responsible so I can rest. I want to stop the secrets and how much this all is hurting.
If you have it in you, check on the women in your life, check on the humans with whom you share space. And since we never know exactly what to say in these moments, here’s what I suggest.

“Hey, this is a hard time right now in the world. It’s hard for me too. I’m here if you need a hug or a cup of warm water without anything in it. Do you wanna watch some X-files reruns with me?”

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