I used to wonder how people survived things like war or depression or famine. I used to wonder if they just sat around all day feeling sad.
I was too young to understand this when 9/11 or the Great Recession hit, but with all the events in the past few years I’ve figured something out.
Food still needs to be eaten, hugs still need to be given, minds still need to be entertained. It doesn’t matter if you’re a broken husk of your former self and everyone else around you is too. You still need nourishment in both body and soul.
And because of that, you don’t sit in your house all day staring at the wall. You do stuff. You dig around until you find those good emotions. They mix in with the bad ones better then you’d expect them to. Except for the times when they don’t. And that’s fine. Because for now you’re still alive and finding some good emotions still stuck in the toes of your stockings that you’d forgotten about. Maybe mixed in with some grit and gunk, but they’re there.
And this isn’t a unique thing that we’re going through, really. All throughout history the survivors of various things have done the exact same things. They cooked dinner as the bombs went off and told stories as the mass burials happened outside.
And even when you fall off the brink and do collapse you still wake up the next morning. And then maybe you brush your teeth and maybe you don’t. Maybe you cry and maybe you don’t. But there’s still a crumb of hope stuck in the toe of your sock that you can’t quite get out no matter how many times it goes through the wash. And there’s something if not comforting, then at least interesting about the fact that everyone around you is going through, if not the same thing, a similar thing. A similar storm in slightly different raincoats.
So you get out of bed, you eat something if you’ve got something to eat, you chew ice if you don’t, and you continue to do something. What exactly that something is will continue to change, will continue to be unclear, but you do something, because that’s the only thing you can do.
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