This bad feeling
My anxiety has been through the roof. It is a privilege, I think, to live in the modern world with all of its luxuries and still have the same hotblooded feeling that you get when you are actively running from a wolf.
Fight or flight instinct is built inside our blood. My brain can understand how lucky I am, and how safe, but refuse to give up its own internal desire to escape imaginary crisis.
Anxiety feels like a nightmare during the day, while you are awake.
This is practice. What am I practicing for? The end of the world? For all my practice, am I ever better off when danger hits? Am I safer? Do I fail less frequently to protect myself? Is my brain just a computer running its programming wrong?
I dream about drowning. I dream about men getting killed by the good guys. About a man getting trapped in an air-free space on a boat. I dream about traversing a hellish playground of dangerous natural water features. I dream of being a captain: I am controlling a boat in a wet, dusty fog. It is my responsibility to take this looming tower of oak to safety, but no good institution has ever taught me how. I’m frame-of-reference-less, lost in the pitiless sucking voice of the deep terrible sea. I’m the same woman I’ve always been, with her competencies — a Girl Scout’s knowledge. My ship is sinking. My men are drowning. I am a poor captain, and I am suddenly at the helm knowing we have been lost for miles in a starless, loveless sky.
I dream about my ship sinking, the bubbling lungs, the electric lights screeching to black. I’m sorry, I am trying to save you. I am trying not to lose my orientation. Our little ship: we are a beetle on her back in the pool. We are a spider in the drain. We are a sopping bird in a hurricane. An octopus in a tree. How did we get here? The sailors are my charge and I am watching my sailors get wet. Their lungs get wet. I can feel that wet hair and those young, fighting lungs and and I am the one to keep those sailors calm and get them back to a waterlesss land. It is my charge to give them fire, and bread, and beer, and a joke about living when you’re not supposed to live. I am the captain who deserves the scorn of the dead. Here we are, heaving against a primordial death. This black and spinning sky. I am a useless captain but it is not in my disposition to let go or stop trying, although we are damned.
I am always a disorganized navigator in a strange place: controlling ships, rafts, submarines, triremes, felucca, water, water, every night. I dream of trying to control the most imminent force on my planet and all of its violent and ambivalent aliens.
I know that the acidity levels in the ocean are rising, and we’re entering a slow, massive, sixth extinction one decade at a time. In 100,000 years, I wonder if the oceans will be green like the explosive reset of an aquarium. I wonder what the sky will look like as the ocean dumps carbon back into the atmosphere.
I wonder what will survive. I wonder what, on our paper thin layer of ground up earth Earth, what will matter?
Still, in my narrow corridor of existence, I suffer for small mistakes, relive little terrifying moments and panic because instead of living all possible lives, I am only living my own.
“I want you to give yourself grace,” I tell myself. There is no wolf. The ocean won’t boil out all existing life for another 100 to 200,000 years. There is no man caught in the wrong chamber of the submarine. It is not your responsibility to explain it to anyone that he is dead. It is not your responsibility to traverse this waterway.
You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Walk into the fear. When the wolf is not chasing you, stop running. When the ship is not sinking, stop trying to save it.
When you still have 100,000 years left with a blue sky and a blue sea,
Look up.
