This Timeline Sucks!

Is there another one I can join?

The world is so chaotic and tense and just stupid right now. Every morning when I wake, I check my phone with a sinking feeling, wondering what the busier, angrier, half of the world did when I was asleep in my bed in relatively peaceful New Zealand. I often wonder if I slipped into a different reality by mistake because this one does not feel at all natural. There’s something just … odd about it. Shifting political alliances, erratic global markets, extreme weather events, the rise of AI, billionaire greed and control, the fact that we’re importing butter and selling it cheaper than local butter—just wtf is going on?!

The world’s most powerful scientific machine is the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. It’s 27 kilometres long and uses superconducting magnets to smash protons together at the speed of light. Scientists use it to explore the sub-atomic realm and understand what happened after the Big Bang. In 2016, there was about to be this momentous particle discovery when a weasel got into the machine and fried it.

Some people think that altered reality and plunged humanity into a new chaotic timeline, where the world is increasingly becoming unstable and weird. Mainstream science rejects this. It does sound utterly ridiculous, blaming the world’s problems on a weasel. And yet … weasel theory makes a weird kind of sense. I mean, 2016? Come on.

Hey, I’m a writer. I believe in nothing and everything. Just recently I discovered the theory of quantum immortality (not discovered as in, I invented it, but more like, I read about it on some social media post). And that theory goes that when you have a near-death experience or an actual fatality occurs, you die in that timeline while your consciousness is flipped into another timeline to live on.

Multiple worlds, multiple timelines. It’s both comforting and maddening to think there’s another me out there in the quantum universe, living her best life in peace and luxury. Of course, on the flip side, there’s probably another me starving to death in a dank dungeon while rodents—weasels probably—nip at my toes.

The point is, this timeline sucks, and I feel untethered and adrift. I know I’m not the only one. I do many things to anchor myself. I meditate and take long walks in nature. I see my friends and op-shop for clothes—there’s something soothing about the smell of pot-pourri and the clack of hangers along a metal rod! I have housework and study routines, and I know I feel at my best when I’m not on my phone checking world news.

And I write. I write myself out of my unsettled despair. Maybe that’s where I’ll find my new timeline—somewhere inside my soul where the air is sweet and unicorns play and green hills roll on to the horizon.

Love Tab xx