My Drug

Getting lost in a story is my drug of choice. My escape. What I am escaping is the world and how depressing it is. It is comforting to just lean back and enter another reality where the problems you are facing are not your own. In the story, they are fighting the bad guys, saving the world, becoming heroes. In real life, our fight seems hopeless and there is no end. What good am I here? We are all just a single number, lost among the billions. Every single one of us is no better, no worse than another but, of course no one person wants to give in to that truth. So either they step upon others to raise themselves or they become the stepped upon. And everyone loses because we are all so jaded. And meanwhile the world itself begins to crumble. And we're all so caught up in our own struggle to truly ever be able to come together and do anything about it. So what is my place in this mess? What is anyone's responsibility and how far does one's responsibility span? What if I just want to escape? Am I a bad person for shirking a supposed responsibility? I want to be happy. I want to support myself and not feel guilty for how I live my life. Feeling guilty, this is a big thing.

Guilt.

Just by being born, just by living, I am adding to the destruction of the planet. We all are. We begin marching to our own death as we emit our first exhalation. It starts small but then we learn that we are a middle class, white, american, and we buy our laptops and our ipods and cars, live in our overly air conditioned and heated homes and throw away our masses and masses of package waste. What would it look like if it followed us, if we had to step through it, drag it, wear it? Would we try harder to make sure it never even began? Every girl and boy comes to a point in their live where they are capable of the realization of their detrimental contribution to the earth and they can either do something about it or ignore it. Either way, so much has already been done. Every day, think about how many children are being born. Think about how each and every one of us is another bullet through the earth's heart.

I need to go get lost again. In the woods, in a story, anywhere but here.