An Essay from a Grieving, Very Angry Storyteller About the State of the World \\ Or Why I Choose Survival Over Death

I am angry.

Oh gods I am raging.

I don’t know how long I can contain and delay my rage and grief anymore. I am close to bursting. I need an outlet. I need Alexander (it’s become a book that’s emblematic of my passion – both hopeful and angry). I need to talk. I need to yell and scream and find catharsis and make something beautiful and radical out of the nonsense that is the last half of the 2010s. I need I need I am angry I am angry.

I am angry that the world is gradually sliding towards the idiocy of fascism, elitism, racial/religious/national/genetic supremacy, apathy, helplessness, and corporate greed. Communities are being destroyed, lands are dry and burning, seas are hot with oil and blood, and voices are stolen and exploited for the greasy luxuries of the ever-shrinking ever-powerful rich. We’re dying. All of us are dying. 

I am so angry at having relive this horror.

Is this what they felt too – the artists and writers of the 20s to 40s – when the world wars began? Did they rage against the dying of the light?

How did they believe, and what can they tell me now? They are dead with their histories and I am alone with my future.

How many times must we continue to relive this? How many things must be destroyed before these evils become pointless? 

Greta was right in saying these evils have destroyed our dreams. 

It’s so easy to give up to emptiness. To lie down and close my eyes and hope that I die to feel nothing or wake up to find that Deus or Humanus Ex Machina has saved the day.

Unfortunately, I’m naturally a very angry person (despite all appearances). I am too angry at everything to leave the engine running with monkeys at the wheel. To wait for fate or a hero(ine) or some divine intervention to intercede on my behalf.  No.

NO.

NO.

I am tired of waiting! I am angry! I hate this!

I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it: I love the world too much to let it go. I know the compassion and joy and wonderfulness that humanity is capable of. We as a species would not have survived without the strength and industry of our mothers, the stories of our firesides and tapestries, the care of our community, the generosity of our earth – those are the things that kept us alive and beautiful. Meanwhile, war and fighting and hatred and individual hoarding are constant idiocies that certain people insist are essential YET are completely antithetical to survival. When will we learn this? When will we stop being stupid? And when will we finally break the cycle?

I am grieving!

I am bored!

I am not built for frontline activism. I am not loud. And maybe I am a coward or a flake for not wanting my face and body to be out there, to be known and targeted. I salute the people who are able to do this. Thank you for your service. But this is not a service I can provide.

I am only ever really good at stories. (Not those faux stories that capitalism pretends is necessary to get someone emotionally invested in some corporate entity or product) 

But sometimes I doubt if stories are relevant or even useful considering all that is going on. But this is a stupid thought. For one thing, why is anything that isn’t individual sacrificial extroverted heroics lesser? As I have said before, it’s our chain of mothers and storytellers and caretakers that have kept us surviving. And it’s more important than ever to maintain this legacy of survival when all these monkeys are telling us it’s better to physically and spiritually die for their benefit. For another, there’s a reason why art that sends a message gets banned, censored, destroyed. It’s the people who know how to understand our world, and also contain it into a message, that reminds us our true power and our true heritage.

I am so angry.

I don’t know how long I can hold it. 

O muse!

Give me the strength and the will

To keep the eternal fires alight

For a humanity that has survived

Long after I have.