There are days when I want to crawl into a corner and cry because of the atrocities that are committed daily, hourly, minutely in the name of ‘humanity’. This world is just so broken, and I am just so little. It’s frustrating, and heart-breaking, and soul-destroying if I allow myself to forget the starfish – that throwing one out of a million starfish back still matters to that one. And dearest God, it is hard to remember sometimes, especially when I have a broken care meter.
I’ve been reading tonight about the over-sexualisation of prepubescent girls and, in the course of my read-click-read-click-read spree, I stumbled onto information about the Nestle boycott. I’ve heard about that somewhere very recently, like in the last week, probably from similar sites in a similar read-click-read spree, and tonight just solidified my desire to have nothing to do with the company. Details here. So now I’m all depressed about the state of the world, because it’s when I get into read-click-read sprees that my broken caremeter affects me most – because I have almost no ability to STOP once I get reading something, anything (yes, I compulsively read, even the cereal box, if there’s writing on it and it’s in my line of sight, I’ll be reding it), and so spress like this pile depressing information on my head like snow, piling and piling and piling until it’s like an avalanche and I’m suffocating and I can’t do anything and I feel useless and the only thing I can do is walk away and stop caring.
And then I hate that I don’t care any more 😛 Welcome to the bizarre and unnatural cycles of my head.
But then. The pasta boiling in the pot beside me right now is at least made entirely from real, pronouncable ingredients. There are no apparent connections to Nestle that I can detect. Doubtless, millions of other corporations are doing stuff just as screwed up, but I can’t battle them all, I hyperventlate just thinking about it, and I cling to the starfish, and remember that I am not here to fix the world, I’m not, I can’t, I’m not God… I’m pretty much only here to fix myself, and I do that by caring for others.
So I let go, release the death grip on my heart, allow myself to feel just a little of that caring. I bundle the rest of it tight, the pain, the frustration, the fury, and I give it over to someone who is the only one who can deal with it, and I take a deep breath, and remember the starfish, and force myself to smile at a pot of bubbling pasta that, to the best of my knowledge right now, is cruelty-free.