It’s a Wednesday around 3pm and I am frantically slicing extra sharp cheddar for the grilled cheese I am making because I feel jittery and nauseous. I’m not sure why I thought the peanut butter covered waffle and blackberries I ate at 10:30 that morning would be enough to match the cups of black coffee I had been sipping on while I worked.
Sometimes it’s like I don’t even remember how to live in my own body. Thirty-nine years in it and I still seem to forget. I live so much in my head that my body becomes an afterthought. Oh, you wanted more food? You needed sleep? You want to move? You need to be cleaned? Hm, I didn’t know about that. Seems kinda needy. High maintenance even.
Is this executive dysfunction associated with a neurotypical brain that Tik Tokers talk about? I think maybe if I just tried harder I could create a system in which I mange to mimic the behaviors that seem to be both successful and acceptable to the majority and then who would even know that it’s all just for show and honestly, no one would care because as long as people play the game, the game can keep going. And honestly, my body may appreciate me doing the bare minimum to keep it running, even if my brain says it’s being too needy.
But anyways, I do know. I know that so often, I am playing along and there are a multitude of things that are illogical and inefficient and literally pointless and possibly unethical but still considered necessary and/or acceptable or expected.
I think everyone’s brain can figure that out, if it wants to. If it sits long enough outside of the box and looks in and sees things from that new angle where the power plays don’t really mean anything they way they do from inside the box. That’s what they don’t want us to do. They don’t want us to question it, to challenge it, to change it. They want the status quo, the division, the inefficiency. They want us in our boxes.
Who are “they” even? I don’t know, people in power, people pulling the strings. Nothing crazy, just the same old ancient greed and selfishness that have made people awful for centuries. That’s what people don’t like to admit – the pervasiveness of it. Nostalgia again, right? People want to pretend it’s some modern fault that has poisoned us, not a timeless one.
Somehow, we find that comforting, like the hope we can feel for the future is evidenced by the past. We can look back and say “oh, we can have this again if we just…” glossing over all nasty little details of the truth full of context and complications. Yes, it means goodness has always existed and that is heartening; but we are foolish to ignore what is has always existed alongside. That goodness didn’t exist in a vacuum, it was paired with hurt and loss and fear and sadness and anger and cruelty. We are foolish to ignore what it has sometimes cost people who were purposely excluded from reaping the benefits as those benefits funneled towards that greed that we’ve been warned about since the beginning. Joy and sorrow are often companions, aren’t they?
What is so scary about imagining a better future than we’ve ever had? Why not let our ache for a world we want to live in and leave to our children drive our creativity and our problem solving beyond anywhere it has ever been before? What if “how it is” isn’t how it has to always be? And if we can’t prevent and eradicate sorrow, if we must bear it alongside our joys, can we make peace with it and carry one another carefully through it? Can we trust the future with the tenderness of new joys alongside the expectation of the ones built sturdy into the frame of our existences by the ones who came before us?
We don’t have to abandon our histories, we can’t really; they are already woven into us, good and bad. We can admit the bad and honor the good. We can believe the foundations lain by those before us are both blessings and warnings.
We can remember to feed ourselves before we flame out in caffeine jitters.
