The world’s gone a bit mad isn’t it? I mean if someone turned round tomorrow on the news or in a tweet or someone said, hey did you hear – the moon fell off and there’s no such thing as men now and we’ve run out of bread, in the whole world like, because of Brexit, you’d be like… oh… right.
MAD. Everything has changed. It’s been the most turbulent, unsettling, worrying set of years I can ever remember. And there isn’t even a war on. Not one with guns anyway. Not in Europe.
I dunno. My way of coping is just to block it all out while reading my news sources with some sort of Alice in Wonderland expression.
It can’t be real can it? The world can’t actually be this bonkers?
Who gave all these crazies the key to the world? It’s like all our collective parents are gone on a two-year cruise and the looney teens have been left in charge. The teens with lots of opinions but not a scrap of sense. And a penchant for home made drugs that makes them make not very clever decisions. And they’ve been on a binge for weeks now and the house will never be the same again and their hangover is at paranoid levels.
Sometimes I want to sit my children down and say – girls, it wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t always this scary, this topsy-turvy, this frickin’ WEIRD!
Change is unsettling. Change for the absolute worst is a travesty.
The trouble is – none of us know where it will end. Will our parents come home, turn on the lights and shoo out all the high and obnoxious teenagers? Will they get in industrial cleaners, wash out and scrub down all the recent stains left by ignorant, uneducated drunks?
Trump. Boris. Brexit. Climate Change. Fear. Fascists. Immigration. Racism. Media that makes no sense, communications that are paid for and targeted, what is real anymore?
How do you cope? What do you do when faced with this onslaught of madness?
Turning back to the basics helps I suppose. Walking. The Sea. Fresh air. Babies.
But then I look at babies and think – what sort of world are you going to grow up in at all?
In a glimmer of light, a white flag among the rubble, watching hundreds of thousands of young people marching this week in a strike against climate change filled me with pure hope.
Just because this current generation are fecking everything up doesn’t mean the next will, right?
Right. Hope. HOPE. Let’s hope.
Because sometimes … it’s all we have left.
I can’t be the only one feeling like this. I have this terrible fear that we have lived through a golden age – a time when we didn’t realise what we had. Cohesion. A peaceful few decades where everyone forgot the horror of world war two and chose to work together instead of against.
Is this why there’s a craze for books about the holocaust at the moment? Are people trying to remember?
Speaking of books I wonder if that’s where our solace may lie. I for one have been throwing myself into literature lately, as an escape and as a way to make myself feel better.
Recently, I chose to read 1984, by George Orwell. You know, just to see what it was like to live in a world that had gone a bit mad.
In one of the early chapters, Orwell writes of a scene where helpless immigrants, women and children are tossed about in a tiny boat on the Mediterranean. They are shot at by the Government. They all drown.
My hair stood on end. Immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Bodies washing up on shore. Governments turning a blind eye.
In other chapters, Big Brother is watching, listening, through mikes in devices in the character’s homes.
Oh hello Alexa. Apple. Voice activated software.
Maybe I should stop reading that book. I am afraid of what will come next.
So instead, I will write for myself. Control the words, the thoughts, the feelings, take back a little bit of automony in this crazy, crazy world.
Delete Twitter. Quit watching the news. And go for a walk with the kids.
When I’m back moving that is, when my broken ankle has healed.
Maybe that’s the problem with being laid up and immobile.
Too much time to think.
While others don’t take any time at all.
Have you been feeling unnerved lately? Let me know in the comments below…
December Girl is now available on Audio. Visit Amazon or Audible or click on the cover below to download.
This is exactly how I have been feeling lately. I watched the chaos on the news last night and I developed a really big headache….literally! It’s unsettling. You have articulated beautifully I think how a lot of us are feeling. Please let it stop!
It’s so overwhelming at times. Usually I block it out but sometimes I am unable to. Hoping for a more peaceful 2020 but I doubt it is coming!