The other day I got up, turned on the news, and lost my marbles in a dimension I had, up until now, presumed non-existent.
Then I wrote a bunch of nonsense (seen here, below and above), only to hang it out to dry for months while gradually realising that the only thing that had changed in my life was that I watched the news now.
Wait, work, stare, drink a little, cry, remember to stay awake at night, wait some more, then rewind to somewhere around March:
From all the ways my mortality could’ve made itself apparent, this is not one I expected to ever come across. I guess I should be grateful that the only thing I’ve parted ways with so far has been sleep. But that alone doesn’t make the now very much non-zero probability of things going massively tits up (in the possibly not-so-distant future, mind you) something not to be concerned about. There’s something in the air that tells me this cocktail of fear and confusion we’re all sipping is gonna take a good while to get through. Getting tipsy already.
Admittedly, that’s still incomparably better than having to go bed wondering if the roof’s gonna be there when/if you wake up. It’s bizarre to ponder just how different my life could’ve been right now had I been born just two borders away. Talk about dodging a bullet.
In a matter of days, something you’d always selfishly considered to be none of your business caught you by surprise. It also brought along a feeling that you have no clue what to do with because you’d always had the luxury of not ever having to comprehend it. And even if it’s just a fraction of the real thing (for now), it’s enough to burst the bubble you’d been living in and make you realise just how incredibly insignificant a lot of the things you usually worry about are. After all, it’s hard not to notice things being put in perspective when point B is made apparent courtesy of some unhinged guy sort of threatening nuclear warfare.
There’s nothing I could type here that would make things any better. I don’t know if there’s any value in saying all this at all, but my lizard brain thinks there is, which I suppose is why I’m typing this – in hopes that it helps me, at least. To say that not falling into a slump right now is difficult would be a major understatement, but at the same time, the importance of keeping on going is highlighted. I have good enough reasons to believe that nobody’s ever gained anything from having their face buried into a designated scream pillow 24/7. That much I’m confident of, and the logical conclusion I can extrapolate from it, is that for a person in a position similar to mine, being present, providing help in some capacity and otherwise carrying on could be perceived as good enough (by someone, presumably).
I don’t know how these things are supposed to work, frankly.
Chances are, you can’t change the world. If anything, the least you can do is actively not be ignorant to the things happening around you. As harsh as it might sound, I think that alone is okay; especially when you consider that most people won’t even get there.
If you don’t know what to take away from all this, don’t worry, I don’t know either. I take it the normal thing to do in situations like these is to take a step back and hijack the context to reevaluate your own existence. Again, I don’t know, but I suppose that’s human, which I guess is somewhat reassuring in its own self-serving fashion.
It’s probably not right to use a crisis as an excuse to bury oneself in their own individuality, but I don’t have the strength to get the soldering iron and do something about my wiring. I would like you to know that this is more about getting thoughts out of my head, rather than a way to satisfy some urge to constantly let everyone know what I think. Pointing out that not one person is going to read this anyway is a good-enough way of backing that claim up, so there.
…
The other day I got up, realised I was still here, and, already knowing what the term geopolitics meant, didn’t turn on the news.
Anyways, it’s May now.
I’m finally posting this as a side-effect of my newly continued effort not to let more weeks pass in a blur, more or less numb.
By the way, I finally managed to get a haircut last week, so I have that going for me, at least.
The humour of ways in which priorities shift sometimes is not lost on me.