Fault Lines

I often think of my life through metaphors. This is part of why people take Arts degrees- so that they can conceptualize different ways of which they might live, and find methods in which to lead better lives. Because I'm doing my MA in Film, TV, & Media Studies, sometimes I view my life through the perspective of a TV show, each year consisting of a season (or 'series'). I genuinely believe that great life can imitate great art, and so it's very comforting to me to believe I'm the hero of my own life, with dragons to slay, destinies to fulfill, side-characters to rely upon, and a voice-over at the end of each episode which tells the viewer (also me) that I've learned something from this plotline. That's a story for another time.

The analogy I have most recently been turning over is the idea of thinking as my mind as a country. Bear with me here- as my life continues, more territory is claimed, more of my civilization is able to expand, with concepts like buildings, emotions as resources and energy, and ideas as people. When I was a child, there were very few buildings, and none more than a single story tall (which is a shame really, because what child is not delighted by huge flights of stairs?) As I got older, more complex structures were raised, more lines of communication between buildings were established. I don't want to boast, but it's a happy little city, like Christchurch.

However, just like Christchurch, I also built my cities on top of a foundation which hid fault lines. Geologically, fault lines are fractures in the Earth's crust which can be used to release massive amounts of energy which generates movements, and hey look, we're in an earthquake zone. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that it's not fun to live in an earthquake zone. Just like the people of Christchurch, I happily went about my business, building nice-looking houses and schools, figuring that if there was an earthquake, it almost certainly wouldn't happen to me, and more importantly, that it would be someone else's problem.

Well isn't that a cause for alarm to anyone who knows how the story of Christchurch ends?

Begging for natural disasters to leave you alone is almost as futile as looking at the destruction the natural disaster caused and saying to yourself “this is FINE!” because hurricanes will eventually come, and they will wreck the place that you live. If the place that you live isn't earthquake-proof, then earthquakes can make your life miserable. This is not an argument for misery by the way. This is an argument for getting yourself earthquake-prepared.

So I decided five years ago after my own personal earthquake “well, this is worse than all the other earthquakes, but surely this has to be the last earthquake right? Let's just rebuild so that everything is exactly as it was because we already know what that looks like” and boy, did I not think twice about that. It's true, I've had metaphorical earthquakes throughout my life (when I was sixteen, it was San Francisco in my mind). All the advice was to the contrary- go into therapy, start taking medication, start thinking about moving somewhere that doesn't have so many goddamn fault lines, but every time my response was “oh, but surely that was the last earthquake!”

So recently the worst earthquake ever happened, and it was part of a series of unrelated, but still crippling earthquakes. “Okay” I said to myself, “we won't survive another earthquake of that magnitude. Hell, if some light rain comes along we're going to be in trouble. We're in ruins, and rebuilding is just going to be monstrous”-

and it is, but I can't emigrate to someone else's mind. This mind is all I have.

So changes are in order. Measures have been taken, and will be taken. It's time to recognize that earthquakes are unpredictable, and that living in a mind full of rubble is barely living. The first thing is to stop the constant expansion of my mind, dialing back to enough territory that I can reasonably supervise. Reigning in the land I can see stops problems occurring outside of my conscious eye. No more binge-watching every TV show I hear of, no more reading any article that passes my way, no more talking to people I don't particularly like. The second thing I'm doing is examining my fault lines and figuring out what to do with them. Going to see a counselor is probably something I should have done a long time ago, but I ignored that because I was more interested in the next new thing.

The third thing is to document tremors and to make self-reflections on what has been going well and what hasn't. I'm never convinced by people who say that they know their own mind better than anyone, because sometimes you're not good at recognizing your own emotions, you're not able to rationally and objectively considers the actions you take. I need a way to externalize what's going on in my head for later study, a study in hindsight. You never know when an earthquake's going to occur.