I’ve been letting myself get overwhelmed by emotion a lot lately.
I don’t mean that I’ve been overwhelmed by my own emotions. And neither do I mean that I’ve been overwhelmed in a functional sense. But, when a moment of high emotion is offered to me – and there have been so many lately – I have let the full wave crash into my heart until it floods me and, sometimes, escapes out my eyes.
That metaphor was alive. I am not responsible.
I’ve been trying to pay attention to what breaks my heart the best, so that I can try to be of service there. So that I can at least divert some money in that direction, until I find a better way to contribute.
And the thing that gets me every time is the idea of mothers fighting deplorable circumstances to simply keep their children alive. And failing. Pouring every drop of every single resource that they have, and still losing.
I am sickeningly lucky to be able to ruminate over whether I let my son watch too much Dino Dana. Or counting up the number of vegetables I give him in a day and being proud to reach seven like it was fucking difficult.
We face so little peril that I can’t even speak about it because I have no fucking clue.
But my son dying is the one thing I can think of that I won’t let myself really think of. I float half out of those imaginings before they reach their ultimate conclusion. I pre-empt them with a rational distancing the way I used to prepare myself for the next scene in a horror movie. It’s not real and it’s not really going to happen.
But it’s happening to other people right now. Right fucking now. Sometimes – often – because of things other other people are doing or not doing. And I’m probably one of those other other people.
So maybe I can do or not do some things a little differently.