Light shines in with a soft glow through the window. As the gold arcs down onto the floor, you hear your children outside. They are playing in the soft, evening light. Sticks in hand, voices raised, a scene common on these long summer nights. A waft of rich smells and spices carries through from the kitchen, tying the scene together as your partner makes dinner. Your scene feels fresh, serene, storybook in many ways. The space is adorned with the things you care for. The scene is dight with peaceful bliss, one that surely would assuage your mind. Tranquility, here it is, right? Despite these endless tides of joy and hope, it all feels fruitless. You are stuck, immobile. Your hackles are raised. You move through the moments with asperity, seemingly rough and on edge. It creates a contrast between yourself and the setting. Surrounded by all, and yet feeling like nothing. Despite the warm summer glow, despite the joyous rambunctious cries, despite the food and the roof and the everything-you-ever-wanted, something feels off. The golden light not gold enough, the joyous cries either muted, dreary, or frustrating to hear, the new house drab, the warm meal dull and mawkish. Nothing seems right, nothing fits. How do we get here, but never get there fully?
I HAVE BEEN BITTEN BY THE BLACKENED BIRD
What does that even mean? Depression? Isn’t that just a fancy word for feeling bummed out?
A blind way of viewing feeling “down”, maybe. But there is a point here. The universality of the feeling. Of the loss and the drag and the slog of life no matter what piece you try to capture to make you feel complete. We always end up numb and broken anyways, no matter what we think will fix it. We all seem to feel this way constantly these days. No friends, no life, too much work. Somehow so busy and simultaneously feeling like nothing ever goes on in our lives. The moments and years and lifetimes slip away endlessly. Nothing happening, and yet everything happening at once. It is an exhausting existence, and it often feels like one we never planned on signing up for. Why can we not be appeased with what we have? Why do we seem to hardly have the time to appreciate it in the first place? It is a strange feeling to have things right feel so wrong, to be off when you “should” be on.
Tell me one evening that you spent recently. Document it hour by hour. Reflect on your moments, your connection, your presence. When was the last time you took a deep breath? It may be surprising what you notice, when it seemed like there was not anything going on. A lack of awareness may be the key.
“What’s new with you?”
“Oh, nothing. Same old, same old”
And yet, we never have time for anything. For friends, for family for connection of any kind. It is always hollowed out and missing, yet the hole it leaves somehow gets filled anyway. We make time to scroll endlessly or to watch the next episode. To tell Amazon to bring us something or tell Netflix we are still watching, but not to tell those that we truly care about that we are still here and that we still care. Our priorities have been misaligned. It has left us feeling broken, because we were never designed for the type of input we experience day to day now. It is terrifying. We are scared to look in the mirror, to admit who we are and what we have become. We already know the answers, but we cannot dare to say it out loud.
There is seemingly no time to get out in nature with friends, engaging in natural ways with the land that holds us. Feeling the breath of the earth, the roughness of the ground beneath us, the prick of a pine needle or the way a tree trunk can hold your back up like few other things can. To breathe fresh air and connect human senses to the real world. To engage with the tribe in ways that are natural to us. We were programmed for these types of connections and experiences. These functions and drives that fulfill us predate the things that fill our lives now. We have been convinced there is no time for these moments. But I can always make time for a Survivor marathon. False senses of community, false connections to others, false, false, false. Our true drives and connections with others are lost, or at the very least distorted beyond recognition.
We have created a new baseline of what is entertaining and worth grasping for in our modern world. I guess along the way, we all decided that typical connection is either not enough or too much for us. But never just right, apparently. We need Skip, not cooking meals. We need an AI chat partner who truly “gets” us, not the authentic but unpredictable experience of real-life connections. We need porn, not sex. We need slime ASMR, not listening to the rustling of the branches in the forest. We need instant gratification at the bare minimum, and even that does not seem to be enough anymore. The hunt is constant. We have driven ourselves to the absolute extremes and to the highest demands. The furthest depths. And now we can’t seem to go back. Can’t seem to step away, get back, climb out. Because these new mind-digging versions of the real sensations we used to feel hit like a bag of cocaine. They do more than our systems were ever prepared for. The old sensations, the real thing, is hardly a whisper in the wind anymore. The feelings this all generates creates everything. It gives us everything. Which in turn has made it nothing at all.
We have lost our capacity to be human. To connect, to feel, to live as we were programmed to. We are strangers within our own biology, and we have no idea what to do about it. We don’t even know how to cope because this world is so far removed from the one we came into this universe expecting to encounter. The blackened bird is everywhere. It consumed us long ago. We cannot find our way out, and we can hardly see that we are already in its stomach. With this imbalance between our wiring and our experience, of course life feels dark. When you live in the shadows this long, you find new sources of light. They may stream with blue light, LEDs, and endless stimulation. But in our darkened world, we can accept it. Can someone just close the goddamn curtain and stop letting that sunlight in? It’s distracting.
I don’t know where we are meant to go from here. I don’t think there is a clear path. What I will say is that the shades of autumn seem to be passing through much more slowly this year. Capturing these moments, brief and small and often fleeting, may be the best way out. It is a silent push back. A small step back into the light. We will not tackle this all at once, but rather piece by piece. It is a soft and gentle dismantling of patterns. Of getting back to habits and systems our bodies are able to handle. To make this change, it must come from the sun, not the wind. Be gentle to help yourself, not hard on your mistakes along the way. Do not claw your way out, but move with a soft, cradling understanding. It will be a circuitous course to escape the blackened bird. But one day, we will all again be standing in the sun. And hopefully when that day comes, we will be better able to see the birds moving in.