So much of my life is dealing with other people’s consequences.
It’s like this one time I was at a youth camp and one night they served mashed potatoes. And the consistency was top notch, they were super thick and lumpy but still creamy and I was like, these are absolutely the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever had. Of course most things at youth camp seem to be the best things you’ve ever had so that wasn’t a special feeling per say, but the point is that I ate a ton of these mashed potatoes; I even started taking them from the other kids (should’ve been a warning sign that they didn’t want to finish, but ce la vie).
And then at some point, about an hour later, my stomach decided that it was going to very slowly explode inside my body. Turns out these potatoes were thick because they were instant (because youth camp) and the cooks were all children (because youth camp) who hadn’t put in enough milk. So instead of expanding in milk they expanded on stomach fluids. Like a lot of stomach fluids.
And so I laid there, writhing on a church pew for what felt like would be the rest of my life. Even as I got home I could still feel the dragon that was processed dirt roots shifting and gurgling like when you fill a water balloon from a wildly sputtering faucet.
We are short term creatures whose short term decisions fuck us over in the long run. We kill the planet to build a new house. We avoid a conflict to keep momentary peace. We distract ourselves with dumb shit to keep ourselves from finding purpose in it all.
And the thing that really, really sucks is that the earth and the universe are so so much older and larger than us that no matter how hard we try to expand our scope, even if we manage to think about and plan for our great-great grandchildren, it will always be small.
When my great grandfather raped one of his domestic servants, he wasn’t thinking that he might pass down three generations of transgenerational trauma. When my grandfather’s family cut ties with him in New York due to gambling debt, he didn’t know the lack of support would lead to poverty, isolation, abuse, his daughter’s depression, his daughter’s daughter’s depression. When my parents got married, they didn’t know that the love they gave their kids as an escape from their loveless relationship would take on an inescapable bitter edge.
In my high school AP Psychology class we learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where stacked in a 2D pyramid was (apparently) the category of every human need. At the bottom was basic things like food and water, and at the top was Self-Actualization, some kind of spiritual awakening maybe I never 100% got it. The idea was that you can’t move on to the concerns of a higher level without the needs of the previous level being met. And at the time I thought I wanted to reach the top, like I was supposed to scale the pyramid or use it as a map. Now I think it’s more of a heart monitor.
Where are you now?
Are you breathing?
How about now?
My short term decisions are sure to screw over a bunch of people who don’t deserve it. But also, sometimes, I just need to make sure I’m still breathing.
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