streitlustig

You know the memes and blog posts going around that say "this is grief"? I'm just gonna say, for the record, that I don't think this is grief. I mean of course it's grief in the largest possible sense of "grief is how we process pain," but I'm suspicious of trying to stuff our feelings right now into any we-know-what-this-is box.

Because we don't know what this is. We don't know the danger we're facing, we don't know what we'll lose, we don't know how much we'll suffer, we don't know whether we're safe, we don't know whether we're getting things under control or whether the worst is still to come or what the worst will look like or what our world will look like on the other side of this...

I'm suspicious of premature meaning-making efforts too. Yeah, maybe this will be the wake-up call we need to realize all that air travel wasn't necessary and we'll save the planet and everybody wins except for all those people who died yay! But also maybe all those people dying will make us so desperate to cling to what we know that we'll bounce back to normal in to time, ya know?

Remembering to breathe, and trying to name what is, seems like work enough. For me, anyway.

Which is to say that I am feeling super argumentative recently - not irritable exactly, I just have this overwhelming need to point out the errors in other people's arguments arguments and patiently explain to them why they are wrong. (See above.) And I'm noticing this in other people too. Is this a vain attempt to deal with a loss of control? A healthy impulse to engage with the situation and try to collectively work this all out? Or am I just bored?