Canary in the Coal Mine

For some reason, Sunday is just not a great day for me.

I was happy with Friday and Saturday. I kept myself busy: reading and writing, volunteered, went running (YAY) . But Sunday morning came and when a friend texted me for breakfast, I just rolled over and piled the blankets back on. Sorry friend, I just could not muster.

It was a beautiful day too. A day to go to the Fall Festival, to walk in the park, to enjoy the change of the leaves---where you can find them. But I just felt that empty sense of loss. The aching vacuum of depression that takes hold of me sometimes.

I finally left the house to have dinner, and ended up going to a movie, and I was even cranky about that. It did make me feel better to lose myself in the film. Thank you for that, friend. I would have stayed home and let myself drown (not literally, things aren't that bad, after all) if I had not made a promise.

I am growing so disappointed in humankind. As if the "kind" got erased. Like no one seems to care about anything important anymore. It's heartbreaking for a canary like me. By that I mean, the canary in the coal mine, the warning that the air is going bad.

I went through bouts of therapy years back, trying to puzzle out why things happened and what to do about them. One person told me,"You are sensitive. You are the canary. You probably always will be. But we need people like you in the world to tell us when the air is growing poisonous." Of course the only problem with this metaphor, I realized later, is that the canary dies.

I know this kind of thing is not unique to our era. People, for whatever reason, are awful to one another sometimes. People forget the Golden Rule, or choose to ignore the real implications. People don't personalize the suffering of others. I know practically that it's too overwhelming; that if you put your heart out there for every starving child, every school shooting, every dictator that massacres his own people, you would never get out of bed. If you thought about how corporations are in control and how little one person can do to change our lobbyist-ridden government, and how eventually money is all that matters.

I just hope and pray. And I am trying, in my own way to find my voice, before this canary is dead on the floor of her cage.