Look, I’m back. The universe decided to hand me a nice, humbling dose of some viral hellscape, so I’ve been out of commission for a week, feeling aggressively, inconveniently human. Coming up for air, I’ve realized two things. One: My immune system is apparently run by amateurs. Two: The world is, to use a technical term, on fire.
Let’s just name these muddy waters, shall we? It’s a cocktail of darkness, apathy, anger, and grief. We’re all walking around pretending we aren’t marinating in this collective numbness. It’s exhausting just acknowledging it, which is probably why half the internet is trying to distract us with “the top 5 places to see cherry blossoms” or “quiet girls living whimsically in their cottages.”
And look, I get it. Normally, I am here for a whimsical travel guide. My pinterest boards are aspirational as heck. But today? Who gives an actual flying shit? (Don’t answer that. The answer is usually “brands.”) I don’t hate those things. I will return to those things. But today they sit next to everything else and I feel like I’m going slightly insane watching people arrange their throw pillows while gesturing frantically at all of it.
I saw this quote recently; it might have been a note, or a YouTube video I watched in the wee hours while questioning all my life choices, and it said: “This is the first time that we’re mourning the future.”
We know how to mourn the past. We have architecture for it; monuments, anniversaries, the slow consolidation of loss into story. The past is there, but it stays put. The future doesn’t have that courtesy. You can’t hold a funeral for something that hasn’t died yet. There’s no grave; there’s just this terrible suspended knowing, watching something you were counting on recede before it arrives. It’s bereavement for something that hasn’t technically died. You just have to walk around knowing, which no one can convince me that is not a horror movie plot.
As a member of society? Yeah, accurate. But as a mother? Ay. What a stupidly sharp, and cold realization: What kind of absolute garbage fire are we leaving for our kids?
I get these moments of absolute spiral. Was it selfish? Was it a mistake to bring these beautiful, innocent little people into a world that seems hell-bent on its own destruction? How do I teach them that being “right” is not worth the cost?
They’re already here, already making it more complicated and more worth it simultaneously. The thought doesn’t answer anything; it just shows up and then I’m still their mother regardless.
The people with the actual power—those arrogant, self-serving, archaic sacks of bones who will literally die soon anyway—are running this massive, alienating experiment. They feed on fear. They use it like a drug to alienate communities, to push us farther apart, and for what? To maintain a grip on power that is inherently fleeting? It’s pathetic. It’s infuriating. And it’s working.
I’m standing here, again pointing frantically around me at everything like, “Does anyone else see this?! Why are we not all screaming? Why aren’t we doing something?!!” (And yes, that “we” includes me).
There is a supreme, dark irony in all of this, though. I’ll be mid-existential crisis, ready to storm the barricades or at least write a very strongly worded manifesto, and then a tiny human will cry and demand my chest for safe sleeps (💕). So I put the rage on a shelf, go be “Mama” for hours, and then come back to the screen, sit down, and try to pick up the thread of my fury exactly where I left it. It’s cognitive whiplash of holding both at once, every single day, and it’s exhausting. What grief! That the lightness still exists alongside everything and I can’t hold both without wanting to put something through a wall. I haven’t figured out what to do with it. I don’t have an action plan. I am a person who is now sitting on her couch (a miracle!) feeling the full weight of a world she didn’t design and cannot fix by morning.
I’m exhausted. The apathy has caught up. The virus didn’t just drain my body; the state of the world has been draining my soul for a while now. I’m allowing myself exactly this one lap of honesty to just sit in the mud of it today. To feel the anger, the hopelessness, the powerlessness. To not explain it, dilute it for someone else’s comfort, or apologize for it. This is not my “strong woman” moment. This is my “I’m tired” moment. Pretending this is a normal level of okay would be a lie, and I’m not about those.
But don’t worry (this is a reminder for me). I’ll be fine—I have kids, which means I don’t have the luxury of not being fine for very long.
I’m dusting myself off. I’m standing up. I have children who are watching how I move through this. It’s actually one of the things that keeps me upright through it. Not optimism exactly; optimism requires confidence about outcomes and I don’t have that right now.
What I have is something more like stubbornness. A refusal that doesn’t need the situation to be winnable to keep showing up. They don’t get to have this world and not have me fighting for it until I physically can’t. That’s not a plan. It’s barely a stance. But it’s where I am, and by god, I am not leaving them alone in this hellhole without a fight. All the way to my very last breath.
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