Meh
I struggle to produce any meaningful, impactful writing of late. It’s not just my inner critic playing mind games with me, it’s an overwhelming sense of low level despair at the way things really work in society. You grow up and cruise through life with one vision and then something happens, the curtain gets pulled back and you see some sh1t and you can’t unsee it after that. Did I just describe the birth of a cynic?
Do journalists report fact or do they shape a narrative? To what degree are we all being rage and fear farmed? What drives the human addiction to racism—why can’t we seem to let that fiction go? Do we even consider children human beings? Does Hollywood exist to provide a distraction as much as it does to help create and promote a narrative? Why isn’t human displacement considered an environmental crisis? How can I be living in a time where travel to space is possible and very intelligent people are saying that sex is not real? I think about this stuff and mostly I blow my own mind trying to figure sh1t out.
How is it that we become our own worst enemy? How is it we never learn from our history? How is it we swallow bullsh1t so easily? Anyway, sometimes I question this whole thing. All of it—what’s the point? It can feel like a game sometimes. Or like a hamster wheel. I guess, in the end, people are people, with their own self interests and society moves the way it does. We as individuals get to choose how we muddle through it—that’s our super power—choosing. We act to do the right thing, and not to produce a result. There’s a difference and sometimes I think we forget.
So here we are at the close of another year. Some of us love this time of year, some of us hate it. Some amplify joy and some gorge themselves on consumerism, some can only feel it as it is cosmically here in the northern hemisphere—growing darkness. I have cycled through all of these in my life. Grinching out takes a great deal of energy and I would rather just feel joy. When you finally realise it’s a choice, you have unlocked a new level of adulting.
I’m working on an essay about fragility in the Muslim community and planning another about a (super woke) digital anti-racism course which I recently took. On my artist side, I’ve started creating winter-y and even Christmas-y illustrations.
So, I guess as the darkness closes in and the cult of consumerism ramps up, and all the cumulative grief this time of year triggers rises up, I will make an effort to resist joyfully and mock the things about all this that irritate me.
