“Sleeping Beauty Got It Made”

Sleep is for the week!

And every day, I’m dead-walking. 

If I could sleep for a whole week

Then maybe a day would be bearable. 

The sun calls out from behind these blinds,

begging me to de-vampirize. 

I work better at night,

there’s less noise to drown-

And actual thoughts to be found. 

Dark shadows tattoo the crevices beneath my eyes 

Friends always comment on the display

Little do they know it’s a battle.

Dark circles or sanity at bay. 

If He won’t take me now, then I must stay.

I sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep,

Until I can just barely bear to be awake. 

“Love” in the time of COVID.

Does anyone else feel completely decimated by 2020? I never imagined that I could live in a time, in the U.S., where empathy and ethics were demonized to the point of extinction. We’re entering into the final month of 2020, and there’s little hope in site for compassion to be normalized.

This year has highlighted how we are unable to communicate in an effective way as a national community, and how we have lost any ounce of respect or trust for each other. We prefer to fight and avoid responsibility, rather than listen to opposing opinions and find a process for peace. We cannot even agree as a nation that COVID-19 is a serious disease and that we need to uniformly put in the effort to lower infection rates by wearing masks and respecting social distancing standards. How can we find order without agreeing on standards and boundaries? In a way, we are in a toxic relationship with each other. No one is listening, no one wants to work things out, we all just want to be heard and told that we are correct.

Aren’t we better than this?

Maybe we don’t always hurt each other. Maybe we just enable each other to hurt ourselves. Are we seeking validation for our demons? Does this just perpetuate more toxicity in the world? Wrong and right are not written in stone, but self torture seems contrary to the meaning of life. When you live in a world where bad things happen and you ignore them, that is a form of self torture. I like to believe there’s a part of us that has an instinct to help, but when the act of “helping” poses a threat to our identity or livelihood, we ignore. In the animal kingdom, there have been many cases of the maternal instinct kicking in, and a female animal “adopts” and cares for an abandoned baby animal of another specie. But then there are other cases where that female animal may eat or ignore that abandoned baby animal. Maybe it’s just easier to let the amygdala take the lead- fight or flight. What we don’t agree with, we either actively oppose or we simply ignore. Assuming we come from apes, perhaps this year is just a sign that we are still primitive creatures who’ve just learned how to use words and put them on paper.

Is it antiquated to perpetuate predator -prey social norms as a society?

I believe it is.