For when it's all too much

This one’s for when it’s all too much. Genuinely terrible. When, as it has been lately, your world feels like it’s on fire. When life feels unfair and out of control and terrible and awful and relentless because it is. 

Public Service Announcement: things are going to be okay. They are. Even if they are as bad as you think. They’re going to be okay. Probably not immediately. Maybe not always and forever. But you are going to be okay.

You can’t see past the next bit. There is a future version of you, though. You can’t see them right now but there are many possible very okay things that future you might be doing. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things Future You may be doing:

Looking up to notice in surprise a beautiful sunset.

Reading a news story about something wonderful. Hard to imagine maybe but wonderful things will still happen in the world. People will discover things and fix things and learn things and invent things and achieve remarkable things. In fact, people do this kind of thing on a small scale every day, it’s just that the news cycle thrives on real live footage of a bus going over a cliff into the sea rather than a little story about that nice Mrs Bennett from two doors down bringing your Mum a curry when she’s had a bad back. 

Playing. You’ll do it again. Doodling on a page. Lining up the buildings with the rainbow by squinting. You’ll play. Animals play. Did you know that? People have studied them to see why they play, but that’s the point of play: there is no goal. Animals frolic and play just like children and, yes, even adults. Whether it’s joking or doing a sodoku or measuring how far forward and backwards we balance in our new shoes, or walking down the footpath avoiding the cracks, we all play. When we play, it unlocks things in our brains. New pathways form. Chemicals are released that make us feel good. Play a game. 

One day, you will accidentally lose yourself in a laugh. You will. You won’t see it coming but you’ll laugh like a drain and the echo of the laugh in your muscles will make you laugh again to yourself and you’ll suddenly realise: I’m laughing again!

Just by the way the fact that you exist at all is completely ridiculous. The likelihood of you being born is estimated, by people whose job it is to estimate such ludicrous things, to be one in 400 trillion. This certainly doesn’t mean you’re obliged in any way to enjoy it. You don’t have to feel any way about it all except that it is a phenomenally slim margin of probability and it consists of all sorts of things that probably wouldn’t otherwise exist too, like lemon meringue pie and the ocean and those huge socks people put over cars to stop the birds doing poos on them. Life is strange and confusing and a tiny bit surreal - not in the way people often use the word surreal (“Oh wow, I haven’t seen you since high school and here you are in the supermarket - how surreal!”) but in the way surrealist art is surreal, like a person with a crab for a face or a flight of stairs that goes in two directions. Life has not - as of the time this is going to print - been figured out by anybody. Being a part of it is like an experiment. Finding the bits you enjoy and the bits that interest you is as good a use of it as any.

Movies. Books. Music. Theatre. Radio. Podcasts. Computer games. Art. These are the things we humans have designed as ways of escaping and enjoying whatever this life business is. They might not solve anything. But they’re there for you, always, and sometimes you can lose yourself for a little bit, inside of something made for you by somebody else you’ve never met. What a thing.

You might not want to hear that you’ll be okay. You mightn’t believe it. You might know for sure it isn’t true. Thing is though, it is. Even if it’s just in a small way. Even if it’s a slightly different version of okay. Things are going to be okay. A cup o tea. A nice bath. A hilarious video about a monkey. A nice conversation that makes you feel a bit sad and a bit better. Some lemon meringue pie. You’re going to be okay.

This was written for The Big Issue. It was written during the Australian bushfires.