How are you handling yourself during these times? 8/28/2021
I wish I could say I was doing well. Time has been moving so fast yet I feel like I’m going nowhere. I see the destruction and human suffering all around me and I care deeply but I feel helpless to affect any change. I have no goals or aspirations. I am not sad nor angry, I am just me. We live in a fractured society where two separate realities exist. There are real people suffering in this world and most of us care about celebrity gossip and the next tik tok trend.
I saw awful things today, videos of people having their entire lives shattered in an instant. Dazed, confused, and shocked with what’s happening around them. I get anxious thinking about my career or how I am not productive enough. I have the luxury to feel below average in today’s society yet all my bills are paid for, I have savings, and have a beautiful wife and child on the way.
I try to imagine being in one of those videos going viral on the internet. I try to imagine being a child who knows nothing but hardship having my mother being blown away in an instant only to see what is left of her spread out on the floor having to now deal with the world truly alone. I try to imagine being a father making the decision for my family of leaving everything behind trying to escape a doomed country whom I have called home my entire life. I can imagine risking it all, giving up every comfort in my life, and fleeing to an airport to get on a plane for the first time to a country I have maybe seen in pictures leaving my belongings, my family, and my safety.
I sit here and imagine these things from my single-family home in the northeast with a picket fence and a fridge full of food and it makes me sick. I live the American dream yet I want more. I will wake up tomorrow on my king-sized bed and scroll thru Instagram as many others will. I will make my coffee and sit at my desk at my remote job while waiting for five pm to come quickly. I won’t have to worry about my safety or when my next meal will be. I will be bored, complacent, and wanting more.
There are cracks in that reality from time to time and I think about things like this and it disgusts and saddens me. Writing these things down makes it real. It helps break through the reality that I live in. It makes me grateful for the things around me and the people that are in my life. I hope one day I may have an effect on the world in some small minute way. However, maybe that’s just me being stupidly optimistic and greedy for thinking that I matter in some way. In that bombing today I wonder if those people dismembered, dead, and dying if their lives mattered. I wonder if they felt the same way as me. All of that humanity is gone in an instant.
I am not sure what I am getting at here today. I wonder if it is me venting about my first-world problems or not. I wonder if I sound pampered, spoiled, and damn right infuriating. I wonder if you feel like me. Think about this for yourselves. Think about your life. Think about everything that is happening around you. How are you handling yourself during these times?
Comment below if you want to talk, everyone has a voice and people deserve to hear it.
