Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms—Ranked!
by Arwa Mahdawi
Disclaimer: none of the below should be taken as self-help advice. I am a precariously employed freelance writer who sometimes eats potato chips for breakfast. I am the last person in the world qualified to give self-help advice.
For the last ten months my mental health has been, to put it in technical terms, extremely iffy. Being a Palestinian in the U.S. and having to watch a genocide of your people unfold in real time—funded with your own hard-earned taxpayer money and celebrated by your own elected officials—is a special kind of hell, 0/10 do not recommend. Thousands of children in Gaza and 143 children in the West Bank have been killed since last October and there is just nowhere and no way to exist comfortably alongside that fact.
Everyone is always telling everyone to go to therapy these days. “Have you thought about going to therapy?” various people have asked me kindly as the death toll mounts and more and more images of Palestinian kids being decapitated by U.S.-made bombs pop up on Twitter. Yes, thank you, I have thought about it. Of course, I’ve thought about it. Therapy is great for some people! But please respect my boundaries when I say I don’t think it’s for me right now.
I don’t want to waste thousands of dollars on someone who is going to tell me to breathe and journal and ration my doomscrolling. I feel like I’d need extensive therapy just to get to a place where I could gather up the emotional energy to find a therapist who is available and good and practices the right sort of therapy and who accepts my insurance and who isn’t completely ignorant about Palestinians. In any case, I think I’ll feel better if I donate that money to mental health services for the people suffering in Gaza.
Anyway, in the absence of a properly trained professional, I have tried a number of coping methods, and graded them on a scale of A–F, A being “Better for you than benzos,” and F being “Don’t try this at home.”
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!