AWO…
Awareness Week Overdose….
I have to admit to finding some days are filled with numerous calls to action, invites through memes and adverts to pay attention to XYZ Awareness Week, or ABC Awareness Month….one day a couple of weeks ago there were 5 awareness weeks calls for attention…
Now I’m not dissing any efforts to raise awareness of matters and issues that we can remain ignorant of for the most part as we busy ourselves in our daily lives…. Many we might not even have heard of, so for us to have useful information brought to us (we don’t even have to go look in a library) is essentially a good thing. A service if you will. We might not want to live in ignorance of everything our fellow human beings are living with or through. We may wish to have some knowledge or an inkling of how the world is.
Yet, I do find myself wondering who decides what week is for what awareness campaign? 
Is there a risk that with so many coming, day in day out, that in some respects we’re going to be switching off and not noticing, seeing perhaps, but not attending with any thought and so after the seeing is the swift forgetting, scrolling past yet another ribbon in a different shade of purple or green this week….
Perhaps missing the invitation to give awareness to this matter this week as we walk on by, physically and/or metaphorically.
In becoming the norm, in becoming just another thing in among so many other things, are we going to miss all these things? Are we being overloaded? 
Is this another facet or aspect of compassion fatigue, where our emotional understandings are called on so often that it becomes necessary as a form of our own self-care to shut the door, to scroll on by without attending so as to not let any more in, and to close the curtains of the mind to it as well, so as to not have sight.
When a week, has 3 or 4, 5 6 or even 7 or more different Awareness weeks ascribed to it, which of them has the week? Where do we place our attentions? How many could there even be?
Innumerable, I suspect, as there are as many different experiences and difficulties as there are people in the world….
Some matters keep recurring, as people are people and we tend to keep doing people things….the recurring matters having themes of Life.
The pain of grief.
The hurt of trauma.
The confusion of betrayal.
The isolation of abandonment.
Perhaps it would be fitting to declare Time For an AW-free zone! Instead of a week of this or that, Time For is an ongoing People Place, where there is Time For you and for your life to be witnessed respectfully, and where healing from pain can and does happen.
Rosalyn Young is a qualified mental health nurse with 30 years
Experience in govt and private agencies helping those in crisis
and in recovery. She has studied counselling to degree level,
and specialises in working with survivors of childhood abuse
and neglect, PTSD, DID, and emotional regulation problems.
She lives in Lincolnshire with her husband and a variety of
companion animals, is a brewer of mead, and student of
growing things in the garden.
