Toy Dinosaurs

I was diagnosed with anxiety when I was twelve years old. For most of my adolescence, it only got hard to breathe when I imagined my grandparents dying or had to present in class. As I aged, I found that nearly everything made it hard to breathe. Driving. Caffeine. Grocery shopping. Last summer, the culprit was climate change. 

I became obsessed with climate change. I would stay up at night and watch Our Planet and cry. I would cry for the polar bears. The elephants. The flamingos. During hurricane season, I would find people on TikTok who lived in the path of the storm and stalk their pages for updates. I was scared to go outside because of the poor air quality. I shed real tears when a paper receipt flew out of my car window. 

I didn’t do anything proactive. I didn’t join an environmentalist group. I didn’t take shorter showers. I didn’t carpool. I didn’t plant trees. I just sat and waited for the world to end. 

With medication and therapy, my existential dread began to lessen. I let myself plan for the future. I imagined having cats and a blue house with a yellow door. However, a hint of sorrow remained. My life felt precious but only because it was doomed. 

Here is the part where you might be laughing and thinking, “Madianna, your life has always been doomed”. And you would be right. Life is a great journey to death. I now take great comfort in this fact.

When I used to think about climate change, I imagined the planet withering away like a rose. How silly. The planet would not go so gently into that goodnight. The planet will be here long after me and long after the human species. The world will not end, only the human species. And has that not always been our destiny? Are we not born to die? Are we not merely occupying a space in time?

Perhaps dinosaurs too thought the world was ending when they began their descent into extinction. But the world is still here. And it is full of children who run and play and have toy dinosaurs and grow up and die.

This is our moment in time.