Read this if everything feels scary and a little bit *too much*
It might not help, but it can't possibly make things worse
Join me in my misery, won’t you?
I’ve just been sitting in my office, faux working, for the last hour. I have been grasped by that weird paralysis, where my brain has so many tabs open that the Apple rainbow wheel of death starts spinning and suddenly the only thing I CAN process is the growth of five new coarse hormonal chin hairs that have popped up overnight, like bastards. I’m fiddling with them now, in between sentences. Staring into space, waiting for the wheel to stop spinning. Bear with me here.
I’m paralysed with unease, I think. Or maybe fear? It's a mild fear of course – I’m not in a war-stricken country or in any real immediate danger – but it’s a fear I’d imagine loads of us are experiencing at the minute. Things have taken a violent and grim turn for the worse, and there we were thinking HOW can this possibly get any worse.
OH, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.
Trump has been inaugurated once again in the US. He immediately told the Paris Climate Accord to do one. He LEFT the World Health Organisation (unhinged). He commuted or pardoned all of the January 6th insurrection criminals (!!!!!!). And he seemed to sign off on all those things as if he was signing a bill for dinner in a hotel – casually, without thinking too much, with a stupid f*cking smug smirk on his face. And those things are the tip of the Executive Order iceberg.
What’s worse, to me, is reckoning with the reality that HALF of the population of America voted for… that. For him and the squirming weasel JD Vance. People are talking about how it’s a dark day for America, but guys: It’s a dark day for the world. I’m not going about this articulately – I think this is what they call a stream of consciousness rant, but I need to get it out and you (unfortunately for you) choose to be here*.
*Please stay, my world cannot take another unsubscribe.
So there’s that. Then there’s images and statistics emerging from Gaza about how 69% of the buildings there have been damaged or totally destroyed by the horrific acts of war and gen*cide over the last 16 months. And the blasé comment from the aforementioned f*ckwit president who said he ‘isn’t confident’ the ceasefire will continue or be ratified. Well, f*ck.
Then, sure I read a tweet or an X or a Metazuckerbergmusk or WHATEVER that said – and I’m paraphrasing – “remember in The Handmaid’s Tale how they said things felt like they were getting a bit weird, and then BAM, Gilead was a crazy dictatorship where women wore bonnets and couldn’t talk and stuff?” It went on to say: “It’s started.”
To say that kept me AWAKE last night. I was lying there at midnight wondering why I couldn’t sleep, knowing I was tired, and I realised that my brain had taken that notion, put it to the tune of Merrily We Roll Along and was playing as low-level background noise on a permanent loop. Sleep is for the weak? Nah. Sleep is for the people who live in a society that isn’t very quickly descending into abject chaos. The climate issue alone is something I actually can’t bring myself to think about, because it brings me to the point of physical panic.
Then we move on to the guilt. Am I doing enough? Should I be donating more? Why am I complaining when people in Gaza are dying and homeless? Why am I complaining when women in Afghanistan are no longer allowed to speak to each other under Taliban rules? What have I REALLY got to be stressed about when I’m safe and healthy and not under constant and immediate threat? Our small worries sound ridiculous when we think of those elsewhere. And truthfully, they are. Big Guilt has me now, and I’d imagine it has us all.
So, right, there’s alllllllla that. Then you’ve got your own personal issues to contend with, please select all that apply:
Financial issues
Illness
Family issues
Marital issues
Job loss
Childcare problems
Seasonal Affective Disorder
One leg longer than the other
WHATEVER you’re having yourself
Add to that the MILLION myriad daily tasks and minor tribulations that we all encounter and is it any wonder everyone is flat out on SSRIs and up to their eyeballs in dissociative panic?
We’re all operating in something that – increasingly – feels like a simulation, where the person in control is just pushing the boundaries of everyone’s sanity to see how far things can go before we’re all begging for a meteor.
And look, I was the girl who built a swimming pool in the Sims, took away the ladders and watched to see what the Sims would do, and I was often responsible for fully avoidable Sims kitchen fires, just because I liked seeing the fireman arrive. But whoever is playing real life Sims up there… Give it a rest. We’re all tired.
Is anyone else feeling like this? I feel it so intensely, and then two minutes later I’m scrolling Instagram watching videos of people making really niche ice cubes and stocking their freezer? Like IN WHAT WORLD is this normal? Ours, I suppose. I’m writing this because I can’t not write it. I don’t know what point I’m making, or if there even is one, but I guess I just want to know if everyone else feels similarly? Feels like the bad news is never ending and the good news is being drowned out (if it’s even there in the first place). Feels so ill-at-ease, and so utterly, heart wrenchingly useless and powerless that it’s somehow easier to dissociate and go back to a mindless scroll and get lost in the minutiae of the day-to-day? To just go about our jobs, our lives and our trivia as if all of this madness doesn’t concern us, when CLEARLY it does?