When the World Feels Like Too Much
I have a very eclectic taste in entertainment - a common trait - but for the last year or so I have been more drawn to watching tv shows and movies that are set in time periods no later than the start of the industrial revolution. Preferably earlier. Anything set in a more modern timeline has to be consumed in small doses and rarely tickles my fancy.
I started noticing how I wasn’t really interested in much of the things on my watchlists, shows and movies I either already love or have been waiting to see with anticipation. But now, suddenly, all I seem drawn to is “earlier times”. All of our brains are programmed to sense patterns as a way of making sense of the world. My brain is one of those which is also trying to unpuzzle everything. So, naturally, I wanted to understand why my personal downtime was consistently directing me into the past. And the one word that keeps floating back up to the surface is simplicity.
Our technological age of information has effectively obliterated the wall of the dam, overcoming the gentle river of information we knew how to navigate and flooding the whole damn town with more words than we can possibly discern. There is an overwhelming cacophony of voices - roughly 8 billion of them - all amplified and being held in space and time for the whole world to hear. Which says nothing of the tornado of other noises we produce through our daily living and work practices. I’m starting to wonder if the hum of human life can be heard in outer space. Like, past mars. ;)
And then there is the machinery. Oh, the ways we have bent minerals and metals to our will! Mastering the combination of engineering and manufacturing catapulted us across the land at new lightening speeds. All of a sudden, distance traveling became quicker and more affordable, and mass-production bloomed into our national identity. The way of life here had been changed forever.
Fast forward to the introduction of the internet and then just a tick further down the timeline to social media springing to life out of nowhere. Our way of life shifted again, moving faster than ever and every voice screaming to be heard by everyone. It is simply too much. It is literally impossible to keep up with it all. We take for granted the speed of the news cycle as just being “the way it is now”. As if it is somehow normal or healthy to try to consume every possible piece of information about what is happening everywhere in the world. F*cking. Yikes.
What kind of gets me is that, for the most part, folks around me all seem to agree that the world is spinning way too fast and there is just too much happening, yet there seems to be little no effort to slow our roll just a wee bit. Having my own world spin a bit too close to out of control reminded me of this need to slow the hell down and retreat a few steps. From here, an organic shift back to the “simplicity” mindset.
At large, the world is going through a precarious time in history. It seems every nation is individually experiencing something either continually or potentially disastrous in various ways. And collectively, there are struggles on top of that. Now, it’s more than just fast and noisy - it’s intensely emotional just about everywhere. This takes overwhelming to a whole new level. It’s enough to make any of us want to pull down the blinds, install sound-proof barriers, and get lost in Candy Crush for the rest of our lives.
Many of us neurodivergent folks are born with the superpower of preferred solitude. This doesn’t mean that we all want to be left alone all of the time. What it means is that we often are able to rest and function in our work at our best when we are alone. This is the reason why so many of us will go mute when things become too overstimulating and why we will so easily turn inward and retreat from the crowd without a moment’s notice.
I call it a superpower because I’ve come to understand that a good number of neurotypical folks really can’t tolerate being alone very well, especially for extended periods of time. But it is in the solitude where you can control the stimuli on and around you. You control the speed. You choose the next step. There is proper space to regulate and come back to the internal natural rhythms. And that I definitely know to be true for all humans. We need breathing room!
Watching period pieces also allows me to slow down. The more often I’ve been drawn backward in time, the more I have been percolating on why this is where I’m being drawn. Sure, the slower timelines are helpful in general, but there’s something else. Whether I’m watching Bridgerton or Last Kingdom, there is a common thread - small, close-knit communities. Even stories that cover vast distances have all of the action centered in fairly small locations. This is the part that is choking us - we’ve forgotten how to live in concert with our towns and villages. We’ve disconnected from our roots to call the entire nation and world our home. It’s poetic - but also kinda missing the point of life.
I’m guilty of this too. I love this planet we call home so very, very much. Mother Earth and her will of nature is the truest thing I think I can ever experience in this human form. It is her harmony with our creator which grants life here to all of us, from flora to fauna and all in between. That makes it feel natural for me to want to effectively save all life on earth and restore a deeper harmony for the betterment of this entire globe of beauty and life.
But I am only one woman. My reach has limits. My travel and exploration have limits. My time and energy have limits. And the truth is, the real type of saving that must be done needs to come from the collective, not just any one or dozen people. Reconciling this truth within myself has not been easy. At least, not until I began reminding myself what the true structure and function of democracy actually is. I too have been so damn swept up in the huge headlines and the things happening on a federal, and sometimes state, level which I could do nothing about that I had lost sight of where my power as a citizen of America and planet Earth truly exists.
As I sit here writing this during our nation’s birthday, I can’t help but to reflect a bit on what this country is and has been. We’re just shy of 250 official years on our own - still a baby of a country on the grand timeline of human history.
We have much to be proud of.
When Europeans began sailing across the open Atlantic in wooden boats, they weren’t just looking for a new land to call home, they were literally giving their fates to the powers that be - tossing their life or death with a coin flip and a prayer. We reference them cross this ocean (repeatedly) as if they were sailing the enormous ocean liners we have today. I personally can’t really fathom the grit, the ambition, the oppression, and other strains it took to willingly take on that risk for just a chance. Regardless of the feels around colonization, that shit is impressive.
Then, people with genuinely nothing but their own skills, vision, and tenacity, these few simple folks began to carve out an entire country in a totally foreign location lacking the infrastructure they were accustomed to. I mean, we’re talking like every single episode of every season of Survivor playing out at the same time along our eastern coast for a couple hundred years straight. At this point in our history, we cannot relate nor comprehend. But we can appreciate that which we can only hear about.
Our fight for independence and ultimate victory is our proudest piece of American history. We managed to remove the shackles of a distant and oppressive monarch and establish our own sovereignty - a feat that well established countries overtaken by colonization had not been able to do. It is the pivotal point in our history which forever defined our country’s character as being big, bold, brave, and unrelenting. And that is a badge we wear with honor to this day.
On the other hand, our country’s history is also soaked in shame and wrong doings. African enslavement, indentured servants, and indigenous extermination and relocation being the most egregious and just the beginning. I am predominately white with my ancestors coming from England, France, and Ireland. But I am also Innu, a nomadic indigenous people from northeast Canada of which barely more than 30,000 remain today due to French settlers forcing reservations on nomadic people. I was raised in a very mixed way as well. I grew up in a rural small early colonial settlement town while I was being raised with native customs, beliefs and traditions. Let the inner turmoil of our nation’s history begin!!
It has taken me decades to come to some sort of inner balance/peace over this very topic. To find this, I had to dig into our nation’s history from the perspective of the slaves and the indigenous peoples who chose to fight alongside the patriots of the Revolutionary War. It’s easy to have heavily polarized views on this history, but to me, there is too much nuance woven throughout the many small stories which comprise the whole.
What I have come to appreciate is that everyone fighting with the patriots was fighting for their own freedom, no matter when that might come. They understood that one battle is not the last and that you cannot take on every fight in the same battle. They understood how winning one battle created opportunity for the next. They understood how to choose the right side to align with, even when they didn’t agree on the “law of the land”. They understood patience and the long game despite every reason to give up hope. However, what will always hold a piece of pain in my heart and soul is how the loyalty of these people was repaid after the war was over. We could have done better. But we can also still do better. They saw that for us.
I think the two people who have best helped me to find this peace are my dad and my adoptive grandfather. My father was a Marine who came home from Vietnam with a Purple Heart. He only ever told me bits and pieces about his experience in that war, mostly just factual things, but he did engrain in me a deep understanding that this is the land of the free because of the brave. He helped me to see from an early age that our warriors deserve utmost respect for sacrificing their lives for the safety and security of our home. He also taught me through his own actions in my life that it is important to help others around you, particularly when they are in need, and regardless of who they might be.
My grandfather’s story was a little different. He was a Lakota born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He was also born during a time when native children were being ripped away from their families and sent to highly abusive Catholic boarding schools. They cut his hair, made him take a “Christian name”, and never again allowed him to speak his native language. He had every reason to hate this government. Yet, he enlisted in the Navy and went on to become a S.E.A.L.. His contributions to our country’s military were significant, and even still, years later, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his native people, rifle in hand, at the Second Siege of Wounded Knee. He was a patriot in every sense of the word. He loved this country, but he hated what his people endured. Still, no matter what, he fought for what was right.
When the great forefathers were writing the Constitution, they had a clear objective in sight: freedom through less governmental oppression and more communal governance. They saw that the people living here should be the ones making the decisions and choosing the people to represent them in the places they could not travel. And that is how they wrote the document we love so much. They couldn’t have even guessed what this place was going to look like in 200 years (imagine their faces now!), but they still gave us the authority to maintain our own government. And they called it Democracy.
We’ve been overwhelmed and exhausted into believing that our government works form the top down, just as the hierarchy of all major companies in the world. More than that, we’ve become too overloaded to not submit to trusting that the people we elect will “do the right thing”. The trouble is this isn’t how democracy was designed. At all. Rather the opposite. The power starts at the bottom and then trickles up. This very intentional design was the forefathers’ way of ever encouraging us to invest our interests and time within our own villages, towns, cities, and states. It is their reminder that each of us is small on our own, but the world is big, and we are a part of that.
Since you’ve come this far with me through my ramblings on this post, I will leave you with my unsolicited advice on the topic at hand. When the world feels like too much, go home.
Leave social media, tell the news on tv to piss off, and go back to your roots. For me, this means reinvesting myself in my hometown, a place that hasn’t always been very welcoming to me. It means returning to my devotion of the land itself by cultivating a more cohesive community. Importantly, it also means turning my political attention to my hyper-local civics.
This town I grew up in and keep returning to time and time again is deeply entrenched in its robust colonial history, as it should be. And although the town might argue like a well-seasoned family at times, it is clear that the people who live here do give a shit about what happens here. Now, regardless of how well I may or may not fit in within this town I have known for the last 35 years of my life, I’m investing in my neighbors and town by reinvigorating the local civic responsibility. None of us have to take on the world, just our own backyards.
Our ancestors fought so, so, so hard to get us where we are today - from establishing communities in wild lands to ensuring voting rights and fair representation for everyone- now, I fight for what they gave us.
Raw thoughts. Real talk. No filter, no fluff.
Drop by anytime—no perfection here, just honest musings and a little chaos.
