I remember a drive home from school at age 13. My Mom asked me, as all parents will, ‘what do you want to be when you grow-up?’ My answer came easily, I daydreamed about it, my journal was full of it, ‘self-sufficient!’ I responded. When she asked me for more information I described a small cottage on an acre of land, living at one with nature, growing and hunting my food, treating my waste. When she asked me why, I told her that I wanted to be able to close the gate when it all fell apart and the world became too horrid. I’m not sure she really understood, she sent me to therapy.

In the absence of the money to buy said cottage on an acre of land, I instead became an environmental and sustainability scientist believing, I guess, that I might somehow interrupt the trajectory that mankind was on.

I never spoke about my knowing. I internalised it all. I observed the world around me and wondered how we were all so asleep, so disconnected, so self-obsessed. I was lonely. I didn’t have the language; I didn’t know where to start.

My career, now more than three decades long, was useless. I was paid to be an expert for a government that couldn’t hear. I was paid to write legislation that no one ever enforced, I was paid to provide permits for risky activities with carefully specified rules that were never obeyed, I was paid to collect data that was all neatly arranged into very powerful databases that informed nothing.

Ten years into my career I recognised that science was not changing anything, that it couldn’t in the system that we had fallen into. Knowledge is not power it turns out. I turned my attention to citizen science to helping communities access the science that could inform them. I worked with farmers, foresters, fishers, land managers. It felt purposeful, it still does.

It was only in 2018 with the publication of Jem Bendell’s paper on Deep Adaptation that I started to speak openly what I had sensed my whole life. The community that was born through that paper was incredibly helpful. I jumped right in and finally let out the breath I had been holding for decades. The relief was profound, but I was thoroughly disorientated for many months as my perspective shifted from internal and personal to external and collective. The grief also came as a surprise. I thought I had grieved fully but apparently not.

I know now that I will never be through with grieving, that there is no such thing as ready. I know there is no map, process or formula for how to be or what to do. But I also know that I am not alone in this, I know that there is no solving the crises and, most importantly, that there are spaces I can be where it’s ok to bring all my not knowing and all my messiness.

Groups like Collapse Club, Deep Adaptation, Resilience.org have been life changing for me. The work of metabolising the truth of our predicament is too big, too heavy, too exhausting, to tackle alone. We need each other, we need witnesses, we need to witness. We need to be held and we need to learn how to hold. We need to build our relational muscles, our compassion muscles, our responsiveness muscles.

For me these groups are like a gym or an exercise class. These are the spaces where I train and prepare myself for the labour of hospicing the world that I have known. Many of my dearest friends were found in these groups, the people who know me best, the people I most trust. I would be lost without them, I will be lost without them but knowing they exist and are facing into the trouble is fortifying and will, I hope, keep me going when I can no longer connect with them.

I’m not sure that I have found ‘my purpose’ but my husband and I are quietly stewarding an acre of land (yes, with a small cottage) where we are doing all we can to build resilience for the more than human world that we share the space with and for the humans that may one day find themselves here.

Little by little we have built growing areas for food production, including a Walipini that extends our growing season up here in the cold north. We have installed solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, rainwater collection and irrigation systems for vegetable production. We have built chicken housing, tool stores, wood stores and compost bays. We have planted trees, shrubs and herbs in the small woodland. We have installed two wood stoves in the house for heating and cooking and some energy efficient infrared heating that will allow us to do away with the central heating and our reliance on gas for warmth and hot water.

The wish list remains very long though, a small orchard, perhaps a wildlife pond, a reliable and clean water supply, a solar hot water system to supply water for showering, some renovations to make the house more accommodating including installing box beds in the loft for extra people and, one day in my wildest dreams, a small off grid log cabin to extend the accommodation capacity further.

It’s hard work, harder than we anticipated and we honestly would have been better starting this twenty years ago both in terms of earning capacity and energy but here we are. We have made a home here, and we are building a simple and small life. We have started a small resilience community where we trade resources and time and can share our challenges and successes.

It has involved a lot of sacrifice, but only the things that we would have lost anyway as collapse unfolds. It has also involved many gifts; big skies, such quiet you can hear the flap of a birds wings as it flies overhead, northern lights, 24 hours of light at midsummer and long, long cosy nights in the winter that invite a return to the rhythms our ancestors danced. I wouldn’t change a thing.

There is still grief, anxiety and gloom but their visits, while frequent, are temporary and there is always some labour to occupy our bodies while our spirit leans into the emotions of the moment.