Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

this is my manifesto.

Yesterday, I was on the phone with one of my closest college friends. We were talking about everything that’s happened in the past few months, where we are now, and where we expect we’ll be. It’s a funny thing to play catch up every few months, when she and I used to spend the mundane moments of our days together. 

I was sick for most of February, and my immune system was so shot, that I was also sick this past week. In January, I had a few ribs out of place and I also had to get a new bumper for my car. In the first quarter of the new year, it felt as though I couldn’t catch a break. It’s like my world was ending and I could barely keep my head above water long enough so I could take a deep breath before plunging under once again. My personal world was drowning me.

Besides my internal world, the outside world is also drowning me and everyone else in it. The “unprecedented times” seemed to expand past 2020, and continue at a greater, more alarming rate. It seems that every day I turn on the news and see a headline that is much too similar to something I read in a dystopian novel. It’s eerie. 

It’s something that seems so fictional, to watch the world around me shift into something unrecognizable, that I start to lose a grip on reality. Not only is the world around me ending, but my ability to feed my sanity lessens too. 

I can’t help but want to fix everything. Maybe it’s the eldest daughter in me, or the fact that I refuse to believe that my future will die before I’ve even gotten the chance to live in it. And this isn’t to undermine myself, but at the end of the day, I studied writing. I’m a creative. I did not study political science, or law, or would survive long enough to say that I won any sort of war. But I can do this. I can write. There is something still valuable about opinions, especially in a world in which opinions are so easily swayed by how much one is paid to say it. 

Nobody is coming to save us. Humans put themselves at the top, and we refuse to work with anything we see as below us. We are the only ones who can save ourselves. Now if a superhero decides to show up, I would greatly appreciate it. But I think the Avengers would’ve assembled by now. 

At some point in the phone call, my friend said, “It feels like the world is ending. And I’m in New York City.”

The kind of city that only ever seems to fall apart in movies, but someone always swoops in to save the day in a spandex suit and other worldly powers. But Spider-Man only exists in theaters, and the rest of us still have to wake up the next morning and go to work, check the news, and pretend everything is functioning as it always has. 

This is my manifesto. It’s not a call to action, and in no way a solution. It’s just proof that I was here, paying attention, refusing to look away while everything collapses. Because if the world really is ending, at least I’ll have said something real while it happened.