Switching

I've been pondering how to make sense of the unreality and groundlessness everyone I know is feeling right now. And two things—a podcast I chanced on and a made-up image—suggest an answer: We’re switching.

I’m not sure what drew me to the @marcmaron interview with @kristinhersh . But something told me to listen, and I’m glad I did. Hersh, who suffers from PTSD, talks about how a friend clued her into a behavior she was unknowingly exhibiting: "Switching.” It’s a dissociative and self-protective persona.

What clicked it into place for me—ha ha, pun intended—was a mental image: An imaginary structure that operates as a gate between modes. I know it because I wrote about it years ago, on the very first page of Fatherland:

"...within this giant watchworks, discrete moments of your life are contained in round chambers: A tiny, spotless capsule of memory. These circular rooms are in turn surrounded by larger rings, each a sort of rotating, gated crown that, as it turns, reveals and then hides the pathways into and away from this and every other moment of your life."

It’s not a tangible object. It’s a metaphor for the ways we shuttle between different realities and choice points, how impersonal it can seem. What I see is that this image is a way to understand "switching."

Put another way: Right now we’re being asked to straddle two worlds. There's the waking one, where we’re crushed by a waterfall of catastrophic news; a climate gone haywire; social uncertainty. And there’s the nascent one, the one in which our interconnectedness finally comes to fruition. Of course, it's also the one in which this cartoon—late-stage capitalism, nationalism, fill in the blank—ends, and something far more uncertain emerges.

Caught between these realms, how could we not feel unsteady? If you do, take heart: You’re not alone, and what you’re feeling isn’t wrong.

Will it end? I've no idea. But for me, the idea that it's not a mistake helps me ground, rekindle myself, and keep going.