Our first October in Arizona, my mom sent me a care package—a box stuffed with bright orange leaves from home and nothing else. My mom understood. I cried.

See, I’ve always loved fall. When I was a child, fall meant back-to-school, which nerdy little me absolutely adored. I lived to organize my new school supplies the night before school started. Fall was full of fresh starts, the smell of pencils and erasers, and endless possibilities. It still feels like that for me.

It’s always been the feel of fall that I love. The way greens turn to golds and reds, the way the sunlight changes, and the way everything gets bathed in a warm hue. Cute boots and sweaters and pumpkin spice everywhere. Cloudy days when all you want to do is curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book.

But as I get older, I find myself appreciating fall for more than the aesthetics and nostalgia of it all.

Fall is unique among the seasons. You can live in places that feel like perpetual summer or perpetual winter, and even perpetual spring. But there is no place that feels like autumn all year long.

Everything about fall is fleeting; we have no choice but to enjoy it while it lasts, because it doesn’t. Its entire purpose is transition—a gradual, gorgeous celebration of change.

Fall is when nature senses a shift coming and starts letting go of what she spent the spring building and the summer maintaining. I no longer need these leaves to be me, she says. I am still alive without them.

Fall looks like dying, but it’s not. It’s simply nature wisely looking ahead and shedding what no longer serves her. Nature won’t need all of her greenery in winter. She knows she will no longer need to produce; she can just be.

But she makes the absolute most of the transition. In fact, she’s particularly beautiful while it’s happening—not because her golds are prettier than her greens, but because her golds and oranges and reds make her greens all the more stunning with their contrast.

Lately I’ve been looking at life in seasons…

Our childhood and teen years are like spring. We burst into life, then we bloom. There’s always some new kind of flower unfolding. Sometimes it gets muddy, but the rain helps us grow.

Our twenties and thirties? That’s summer. The busy season of construction as we build careers and families and homes. Long days and short nights. Lots of fun, but the constant heat can be exhausting.

As we enter our forties and fifties, fall arrives. Kids start leaving and we learn to let go. We’re not old yet, but our own faces tell us it’s coming. If we are wise, we start shedding things that no longer serve us. It’s a season of transitions, but at this point, we know how beautiful change can be.

Then comes winter, the season of being. I’m not there yet, so don’t know its secrets, but I’m sure they are plentiful.

I believe everything in nature has something to teach us. In meditating on the fall of my own life, I find lessons in detachment, but also fearlessness. Nature doesn’t passively accept change, she celebrates it, making herself as bright and beautiful as possible in the process, showing us that life is so much more than we think it is.

I’m not dying—I’m preparing.

Just watch.

Watch me blow your mind with these colors.

Watch me change the whole world as I change.

Watch me let go of these leaves I made for living.

They were never life itself.

You only thought they were.

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I do, however, enthusiastically participate in elections. I vote, and I put a lot of conscientious thought into how I vote. I read my voter pamphlet, listen to candidate speeches, seek out arguments for and against different measures, and weigh them as fairly as I can.

And in my years of participating in elections, I’ve come to understand that my voting decisions are rarely about me.

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Seeing rationality fly out the window always freaks me out a bit. But I recently read something that helped me better understand why this phenomenon is happening.

According to a study by British researchers, people fall prey to conspiracy theories because they satisfy three psychological needs. (The researcher called them “desires.” For the folks we’re talking about in the time of crisis we’re in, I think they are closer to needs.)

1. A need for understanding and certainty

2. A need for control and security

3. A need to feel good about oneself

So yeah. Of course this pandemic has people entertaining all kinds of kooky, out-there conspiracies. Aside from the fact that we’ve suddenly found ourselves in a bizarre new reality, which makes bizarre ideas seem more palatable, a pandemic is perfectly tailored to conspiracy theory thinking.

After all:

The nature of a pandemic is living with constant uncertainty and learning as we go. There is no certainty whatsoever about any of it at this point, and our understanding literally changes by the day.

The pandemic is something we can’t control. And by threatening our health, upending our economic situation, and completely throwing off our sense of normal, it has disrupted our sense of security.

Then, to add insult to injury, our social norms are all jacked up because of social distancing, which messes with people’s sense of self.

And those things all feed one another. A lack of control makes us feel less safe. Uncertainty means there’s a lot of not knowing, which makes us feel insecure, which makes us feel bad.

Grand conspiracy theories still don’t make rational, logical sense (though folks will insist otherwise), but they DO satisfy those psychological needs.

It’s easier to believe there is certainty in the situation, even if that certainty is that there’s an evil plot afoot, than to accept the reality that we are in the midst of a viral outbreak and economic collapse that we can’t currently see a way out of.

It’s easier to believe that the numbers are being skewed than to accept that mass death is happening and no one can stop it.

It’s easier to think that this is all a manipulative ploy to control people than it is to accept a reality where we have to make enormous sacrifices in order to save lives, and that there are no choices before us that don’t involve huge losses of one kind or another.

It’s easier to believe that someone nefarious is behind all of this—that it’s a #plandemic—because that means *someone* is controlling it, and maybe we *could* control it if we could just blow the lid off The Grand Plan.

It’s easier to think that the Chinese government or Bill Gates or the creators of 5G or the WHO or Dr. Fauci (seriously, people?) or some other boogeyman is pulling strings behind a curtain in some kind of master plan than to accept that there’s a virus no one can control running rampant through the world.

As much as it doesn’t make sense, for some people, conspiracy thinking is safer and more comfortable emotionally and psychologically than our current reality is.

It reminds me a bit of when that toddler was killed by an alligator at Disney World and people quickly started assigning blame. It was Disney’s fault! It was the parents’ fault! Really, it was a freak accident that was no one’s fault, but some people simply can’t accept that reality. Accepting that would mean it could just as easily have happened to them or their own children, and that’s too hard a pill to swallow. It’s easier to believe that someone was to blame, therefore it could be controlled and wouldn’t happen to them.

Assigning blame is the only way some people can make sense of a senseless thing.

But with a global pandemic, the blame has to be much grander—and grand, global conspiracies are a favorite theme in Conspiracyland. They are SO big and SO grandiose that it feels silly to even try to refute them. And the people who peddle these theories are really good at making people feel good about themselves for believing in them.

You know something the “sheep” do not! You are awake while the majority are asleep. You are informed and thinking critically while the masses are just doing what mainstream media tells them. You are part of an information revolution that sees what’s really happening while the rest have the wool pulled over their eyes. You are special because you’re in the know. It’s all being controlled, and you can be secure in knowing that you understand what’s really happening.

That messaging is incredibly effective on some people under normal circumstances. During a global pandemic, it’s downright hypnotizing, even for some people who normally wouldn’t be swayed by conspiracy theories.

And unfortunately, once people head into that rabbit hole, it’s really hard to get them back out.

It doesn’t matter that the globally coordinated scope of such conspiracies would have to be so unbelievably vast—with thousands upon thousands of people and hundreds of nations who can’t agree on anything suddenly being able to work together for evil and also keep it all a secret—as to be literally impossible.

It doesn’t matter that the majority of the world’s immunologists and epidemiologists—some of the nerdiest science geeks on the planet (said with the greatest of love and respect)—are most assuredly not part of a secret society working in cahoots with a Deep State or Globalist cabal to implant microchips or force vaccination on people, but folks who genuinely went into their line of work to help humanity through exactly the situation we are currently in.

It doesn’t matter that Bill Gates’ TED Talk on how we weren’t prepared for a pandemic in 2015 was not, in fact, a supervillain movie monologue outlining his diabolical plan, nor does it matter that Event 201 was just one of many pandemic simulations conducted over the years. Not even the world’s dumbest person would plan a purposeful pandemic in full public view, much less one of the world’s smartest people.

It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence that 5G technology causes flu-like symptoms and that any legitimate health concerns about 5G have exactly nothing to do with the coronavirus outbreak.

It doesn’t matter that the “mainstream media” that conspiracy theorists love to demonize is not a monolithic thing with a unified messaging plan paid for by a political party or George Soros or whatever, but rather competing entities made up of thousands of journalists who actually do care about reporting on reality and upholding journalistic standards.

Facts and reason and logic don’t matter. Once people wade into the muddy conspiracy theory waters, it sucks them down like quicksand. Reputable sources refuting or debunking their claims are just part of the conspiracy. Rational arguments fall on deaf ears. They think they’re the ones thinking critically, but as soon as you start making too much sense, they “agree to disagree” and walk away because the cognitive dissonance is too much for them to sit with for too long.

Right now, it all comes down to what people are emotionally and psychologically able to handle, and there are a whole lot of people who just cannot live with a pandemic level of uncertainty and insecurity. When you desperately want answers in a situation where there aren’t clear answers, you’re left to either accept that reality or go with a made-up answer so that you don’t have to sit in the excruciating uncertainty of it all.

Conspiracy theory pushers live for these times when they can prey on people’s fears and provide the certainty and security people crave, no matter how outlandish or unreal the conspiracy.

And I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t have the time or the energy to fight every conspiracy theorist I encounter. But I do feel a tiny bit better knowing why so many people seem to be falling for this stuff at the moment.

(Next up I’ll get into where we find facts, how we determine what are reliable sources, and how to identify misinformation. I feel like that’s needed more than ever now.)

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Financially, my family is fine. We’ve taken a little hit, but nothing we can’t handle. I lived through economic hardship as a child; I still remember the taste of government cheese. If things take a turn for us financially, it won’t be easy, but I’m quite confident we won’t starve to death.

I’m not afraid of getting the virus and I’m not worried about financial ruin. I’m not grieving any personal loss at this point. Objectively, I’m fine.

So why am I so frigging emotional?

I have cried more in the past few weeks than I have in a year. I find myself tearing up nearly every day as I read stories from doctors and nurses on the front line, stories of people saying goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime, and stories of people watching businesses they’ve poured their heart and soul into crumbling before their eyes. I feel their grief. I feel their sadness. I feel their fear.

I’ve always known I had a strong sense of empathy, but I also have a strong logical/practical side that balances it out. It’s like I’m always wading in an ocean of people’s emotions, but I know how to keep my footing and brace myself to stay steady. I know how to position myself in the water to withstand the tides, and I know how to keep from wading in too far. 

But with the pandemic, I feel like I just got hit by a tsunami. The emotional surge swept me off my feet with no warning and I find myself tumbling in the water, with all of my normal management mechanisms rendered useless.

And I can’t swim out of it. The nature of my work—work that I love—requires me to be immersed in coronavirus stories all day long. Even though a lot of that work is seeking out stories that provide hope or highlight the best of humanity, it still means diving in nonstop. So I’m feeling it. All the time. All the uncertainty, all the pain, all the grief and sadness and despair and worry that people are experiencing. I feel it. 

It’s not like I haven’t experienced being hit with empathy waves in my work before. I’ve written about hard human things like the refugee crisis, racial injustice, child separation at the border, MMIW, hunger and malnutrition, and more. I’ve wept my way through researching those kinds of stories and have always felt like that empathy made me a better writer. But for the most part, those stories were known waves, where I could somewhat predict the push and pull. And of course I had the privilege of diving in and then swimming back to shallow waters. 

But this is different. This wave hit without warning and there are no shallow waters to return to. And to make it worse, all of those other hard human stories are wrapped up in this tsunami as well. This pandemic will make most if not all of those issues worse. The human toll of this is enormous—and not just in the virus’s death numbers.  

Life as we know it has has shifted and we’re all reeling from the shift. The emotional impact of a global pandemic and the economic crisis that goes along with it is no small thing. The weight of it is a lot, friends. It’s so much. It’s overwhelming.

And then I feel silly for saying that because, again, I’m fine. And I know my empathetic feelings are just a fraction of what the people experiencing these things are actually feeling. I know this.

Then again, feeling even 10 percent of this nurse’s fear of dying, that daughter’s grief of losing a parent, this husband’s despair at knowing his wife died alone, that quarantined doctor missing his children, those hourly workers not knowing how they’re going to make rent—when you add it all up multiplied by thousands or millions, it’s a lot. 

I also know this—our world needs more empathy, not less. So I’m learning not to fight the current and trying to accept that I’ll be living in this wave for a while. Rather than struggling to swim out of it, I’m letting it carry me to places where I can do some good, whether that’s bearing witness to someone’s pain, sharing stories with compassion, channeling extra resources and lending a helping hand where needed, or praying with or for everyone who is struggling.

And when it feels like I’m starting to drown, I visualize swimming upward toward the light at the top of the water. I float on the surface, face to the sun, letting the tears flow as needed and letting my heart feel what it feels. I recognize that the grief, sadness, fear, and despair below me are mixed with love, compassion, generosity, and solidarity. I celebrate the fact that feelings are what unite us as humans. I remind myself that there’s never been a tsunami that hasn’t receded. 

Then I take a deep breath and dive back in. 

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