Short Essay: Trapped in the in-between
I’ve always wondered what does it take for someone to be at the brink of insanity. With time, I realized sanity is the primary culprit. The world’s greatest artists are the most demented and deranged. That is expected when life and beauty is birthed from pain. Manifestations of the macabre human desires and psyche are found within sanity which present themselves in daily life. The unspeakable happened in the span of a few years as death, domestic terrorism flavored with deeply ingrained racism infects the news like the flu. The only exception is that there is an apocalyptic plague that literally infects the news as it ruthlessly takes the lives of our loved ones while we’re forced into isolation.
If you are reading this, then congratulations you’ve survived another day. There is no other way to say this regardless of how brute it seems. Mother Earth is crumbling right before our eyes and her plague is mankind, yet we normalized this. We are desensitized. Instead we resort to live in liminal spaces. A liminal space as in an in-between, a space where you have left something behind, yet you are not yet fully in something else. It’s a transition space. To be in a liminal space is not living, but merely waiting within a fatefully changing reality. We live in an age where this disconnection is so apparent that we have created illusions of intimate networks to keep us close. We’ve become dependent on the idea of change without action.We depend on rectangular black screens to sustain our lives, but this is not a life and we are not living.
Despite brutality, illness, death, inhumanity, there is a world filled of marvel. There is more to this life than COVID-19 and archaic racial barriers established to maintain white supremacy. It is time to look into our roots and remember that we are made of cosmic matter. There is an entire universe waiting to be discovered. There is a universe within ourselves. It’s time to look into our neighborhoods to honor the people doing good. It’s time to reconnect with live through action and not through observance. You can live thousands of lives within this lifetime, but the choice is yours if you want to live them. Proactively helping our neighborhoods, our loved ones and ourselves is to heal. Documenting these actions will only prove there is still a life worth living. Safely exploring the world will remind us that we are more than a social media handle. We are human.