Climate anxiety 1

It rests on the skin like a balloon filled with syrup pressed against your bare arm.

To cite numbers would be an insult — you know the rate at which things are changing.

You can’t intuit the exponential rate of collapse, but you feel it crawling along your fingers every time you see photos of plastic islands in the ocean, awe-inspiring like mountains and canyons. It swallows you whole every time a lull in the day grants you a brief respite from school or work, during which you inevitably try to resolve the speed at which things are changing — something measured and captured by cold, bitter statistical models — with the lack of any meaningful action to adapt to or resist it.

You know why it hurts? Because it’s a betrayal.

Do you remember the classes? There were so many classes. From elementary school on. At least once a semester. And the documentaries and public service announcements and after-school specials and demonstrations and scientific data. So much scientific data. It was always there, in the background. Someone must be working on it. Why trouble yourself? Surely someone is seriously working towards a solution. And likely succeeding. Surely.

Because at no point did you think it was something within your control. It seems silly and quant to suggest that at any point in your life you believed the Burning was just an engineering problem. That it was not the result of the very political and social structures that govern your every waking moment. Something so deeply woven into the fabric of your life that it seems utterly fated. Impossible to overcome. A cosmic sieve.

And now we sit here.

Arrested.

Not moving.

Strapped to the floor.

Losing our voice.