(I wrote this in Swedish and have tried to translate it. I normally wouldn’t post something like this here, but I wanted to share it anyway. I apologise for the self indulgence. I know there are wars out there, and in a way this is about that too. It is a text about not fitting in, about animals, about the destruction of forests, and about the madness of humankind. Please feel free to skip this post if it is not of interest.)
It is difficult to explain to others, because I can hardly explain it to myself.
When my days fill with people and conversations something begins to happen to me. Slowly at first, almost imperceptibly.
It is as if I grow thinner. As if I begin to dissolve in all these encounters. In the end I no longer quite manage to hold myself together, no longer quite understand who I am within it all.
People become shapes I do not fully comprehend. Outlines, voices, gestures. Through observation and experience I have learned what is expected of me. How I should respond. How I should smile. How I should be.
But sometimes it simply does not work.
I cannot.
I cannot, cannot, cannot.
My social strength drains away. At first almost imperceptibly, then more quickly. Inside me a quiet panic grows, something I try to conceal. Eventually it turns into resignation, and finally into a kind of helplessness.
And yet I have always carried a longing to be liked. To be one of those people who seem to move easily among others, one of those whom everyone naturally warms to.
But I never quite found my place there.
Instead I found companionship in imagined worlds. In books. In television series. Through them I lived among people at a distance, close enough to recognise something of the human world without quite belonging to it.
In watching animals, in the quiet presence of the animals I have lived with or still live alongside, there is something different. A stillness. A balance. Something that asks for no interpretation and no explanation.
I do not have to guess what is expected of me.
There I do not have to play a role.
When I cannot leave people behind for a while, when I cannot step away from them, beyond them, far enough to breathe again, something inside me begins to give way. Panic perhaps. Or anxiety.
I feel such an urgent need simply to walk away, to get into the car and drive without direction, that when expectations hold me back I almost cannot breathe. When I cannot leave, I fall into a dark hollow.
At the same time I know that I am fortunate. I have found love. A love that has walked beside me for a quarter of a century.
But even with the love of my life I cannot always explain myself. I cannot expect to be fully understood when I myself struggle to understand. When I try to give shape to what I feel, the words often become flat and inadequate. They say something other than what I meant.
But there is one thing I do not have to explain. We share a sorrow over the madness of humankind.
Our strange capacity for destruction.
All around us the forest is being massacred.
Lorry after lorry, loaded with felled trees, passes our house. Clearcuts spread where forest once stood. Lifeless rows of tightly planted spruce replace something that once was living, varied, full of voices.
Wild animals must survive on the conditional mercy of humans. They withdraw, adapt, endure where they can.
And yet we humans so often speak of ourselves as the developed ones. The moral ones. The ethical ones.
If that were truly so, it is difficult to understand why it is we who are destroying the world around us.
For it is in the quiet, wild landscape that I find my refuge. My rest. My life.
When that world disappears, I too become something that is hunted.
When I cannot escape I feel trapped. As if in an animal factory. As if in a house of slaughter. Surrounded by a system that insists this is normal, that this is simply how the world is.
Sometimes it feels as though there is no way out.
titsay
theartofmadeline
stormborns
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
