How to Navigate Chaos

1. Step Away.

You may have read “Step Away” and assumed I meant, physically step away. That can helpful, especially if you are surrounded by people whose emotions are affecting yours, but it’s often impossible. 

Even you are stuck in one physical location, you can make a habit of finding sanctuary. 

In 2016, I was obsessed with the idea of finding sanctuary, of feeling safe. It’s not like I felt like I was in mortal peril—just Peril, exactly like that, with a capital P. But sanctuary is not always a place, and safe is unreliable as a feeling.

Instead, sanctuary is a state of mind I’ve learned how to visit.

I have meditated to get there. I have journaled pages and pages. I have emptied my heart’s worries into a friend’s compassionate ear. I have spent whole weekends with my phone in a drawer and my laptop in a bag. I have walked for hours to burn off the adrenaline and reach the calm underneath. 

Sometimes, I had to slow down and say, Deep breaths, Shelby. Sometimes, I had to remind myself, Stop solving that problem. Many times, I had to stand still, and tell myself, They’re not here now. They can’t hurt you.  

Many paths can lead to sanctuary. Some of my methods may help, and some may not. 

Experiment. Find your own.

Sanctuary doesn’t have to last forever—only long enough to give you a bit of breathing room. 

2. Feel What You Need to Feel.

These times are unusual, often unprecedented. There’s a lot of information to process and a lot of uncertainty to navigate. It’s normal and natural to feel like you’re swimming in emotion.

Blaming someone else for your feelings and staying in a state of blind rage can feel good; lamenting that we are living through end times and giving into despair is also tempting; but it has never helped me feel what I’m feeling.

Even numbing, by throwing myself into fury or work or substances or busyness, has only delayed the inevitable.  

Until I sit still and allow myself to unpack all the emotions swirling through me, these feelings have clouded my mind and colored all my thoughts. It has obstructed me from getting clear-sighted. Running on unexamined emotion, I’m likely to scramble around, trying to solve a problem before I have the information I need or writing list after list without taking any action.

This is the only antidote I’ve ever found for a hurricane of feels:

• Feel a feeling until it starts to settle, sometimes with the help of a licensed therapist, sometimes with a friend, sometimes with my journal.

• Name what the feeling is.

• Remind myself that it is just a feeling, not my whole life—feelings can and often do change like weather.

• Be incredibly nice to myself through the whole process.

If I’m absolutely concerned about the intensity of a feeling, I give myself twenty minutes, or ten, to really feel it. I let myself cry if I need to. This way, it doesn’t take over my whole day.  

When I make room for my grief, when I give it a pocket of time to take center stage, it can’t invade my whole life. By looking at it and naming it, I create an exit for the emotion to pass through—instead of continue to stew in it. I let it go as many times as necessary—until I can breathe more easily and see more clearly.

And this is what I have learned over the years:

If you can be brave enough to walk towards your pain, even if it’s just a little every day, you often find your way past it. 

3. Cultivate Clarity.

You are a human being with limited energy and resources. You only have one life to live and a certain amount of impact to make. 

The bad news: you can’t save the world alone. At best, you can only save your own corner of it.

The good news: if enough of us save our corners, we can cover a heck of a lot of ground together.  

Note on corners: we need to save all the corners, not take from one area to make another area better. You may be more committed to your own corner, but that doesn’t make your corner more important than other clear-sighted people’s corners.

This is an “AND” situation--not an “OR.”  

Like I mentioned before, we have enough talent in the world to cover a lot of ground, provided enough people cultivate clarity on what their corner is and the most impactful ways to take care of it. 

After I’ve given myself and my feelings some breathing room, I focus on understanding my particular corner. It’s a delicate balance: narrowing down what bothers me the most and what motivates me the most, finding the intersection between my actual talents and my possible contributions.

It’s easy to get stuck in the trap of wanting to do more, to do something (even if it’s not the right thing), but finding the next right step can be baffling, especially if you’re overwhelmed.

I start by looking at what is right in front of me, typically what is bothering me.

This means that the next right step differs from day to day. For example, some days, I screw my courage to the sticking place and do the hard thing that makes me sick to my stomach. Some days, that courage is used to simply face an uncomfortable truth that makes me sad—about myself, or society, or my country’s history, or a current situation. Some days, that courage helps me point out an uncomfortable truth to other people. Some days, that courage helps me face the blank page and work on the kind of writing that can give solace, even hope. 

On other days, especially when I have pushed myself too hard, when I have become sick at heart or just plain sick, my immediate next step is more humble: rest and heal. 

You may want more insight on figuring out exactly what the next right move is, but I have discovered that the process for cultivating clarity is different for every individual.

I only offer this, because keeping it in mind has helped me so much: if I am in pain or in fear, I start with resolving that first, in whatever way that works. Yes, it takes time—and I often worried that it would take up all my time.

But by dedicating time and other resources to it, I also developed tools that worked for me—tools that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

This essay, for example, only exists, because I made a commitment to resolve my own pain and fear before rushing off to make the next great thing.

4. Confront a Negative.

People are going to disagree on what the most threatening negative is. That’s okay. Negatives are different for different people. That is a good thing. There are a lot of negatives, and like I mentioned in step 3, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

We can all support clear-sighted people who are working to take care of their corner. It’s as easy as noticing them and saying, I see how hard you’re working. I see that your heart is in the right place. Me too. Let’s keep going. 

Certain negatives are unavoidable--family struggles perhaps or internal battles.

Note: Some of the most important negatives I’ve confronted are internal battles. On days when I have been exceptionally hard on myself, the negative I’ve needed to confront was simply making my mind a nicer place for me to live.

Some are simply necessary--confronting a bully, for example.  

You feel moved, you feel called, and you act. Often, the action is difficult and scary, and sometimes, you may say to yourself: I really don’t know if I can do this. Then you’ll either dig deep and act anyway, or you’ll take a break, reassess, and then act later. 

But taking action has been the best way to help me dissolve fear and hopelessness. After years of practice, I’ve retrained myself: One small, courageous step toward wholeness always feels better than fearful, isolated inertia—every time.

Momentum in the right direction, even just a little, makes it easier to believe that more is possible. 

5. Nurture a Positive.

This one is the hardest to achieve and the easiest to dismiss. In a panic-fueled culture, no one wants to devote energy to joy when everything, falling apart, feels so bleak.

Steps 1 - 4 are not enough. Even if you skip straight to the fourth step, confronting a negative is still mostly a negative. You must actively nurture a positive—some sort of container for meaning and joy. 

This is also different for everyone. Large or small, it all counts.  

Some of my positives are grand endeavors—healing a once-contentious relationship, for example, or speaking in a classroom to encourage young kids to pursue their passions, or writing a novel, or starting a whole new website to share what insights I’ve learned. 

But some positives are deceptively simple, like playing with my goddaughter, taking a walk in nature, or creating small pockets of beauty. Often, I’ll just buy myself cut flowers and arrange them in a vase in my apartment. I live alone. No one sees these flowers except me, but I feel joy every time I look at them.  

Making one person happy is enough, even if that person is yourself, even if the happiness is only big enough to fill an afternoon. 

Creating joy and meaning—even only that small amount—shifts the needle, but it’s more than that.

In all the chaos, with so much noise focused on destroying what we don’t want, what if we reserved a little more energy towards creating what we do want?

Joy and meaning are the building blocks for the kind of world I am ready to live in, the kind I nurture with my time and energy, with these daily practices, with all my creations and all my relationships. 

In the midst of chaos, joy is a revolutionary act.