pros and cons of fishbowls

*house keeping note: I’m not on social media at all right now. If you want to interact with me, you can comment on this post on the website and I will respond of course. Thank you to all of you who take the time to read and engage with me on these things, I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

Hows your post rapture tribulation going? Good? Yeah me neither.

Man, every week in 2020 is a roller coaster that keeps going faster and faster no matter how much i throw up in protest. Thats part of the reason I deactivated my Facebook and Instagram recently.

I am myself a roller coaster. Some days it feels like things are decelerating toward a resolution, other days i can tell I’m being dragged up a hill to only be sent down the other side at a hurling speed.

Its a hard age to keep your bearings.

Long time readers of the blog know that I am in Charleston right now, but kinda under protest. I was moving to NYC to do BJJ and comedy before covid, but got marooned here temporarily.

Planning to move then being stuck has given me so much time to think. Too much time to think, but I’m hoping to return to writing as a way to make sense of it myself.

One thing I’ve been pondering is the environments we end up in, and the environments we choose for ourselves.

Sometimes we make a conscious decision, I am going to the gym. Other times, the tides just kinda pulled us there, I am at a jam band concert jk.

When people say fish bowl in reference to an area, its almost always in a negative context.

But a fish bowl has advantages.

If you are in a fishbowl, the amount of things that can eat you has been greatly reduced. The environment has a comforting regularity. Sure its smaller than you would like,

but sometimes small feels good.

Theres no shame in admitting that.

Fish bowls operate on a schedule. The pellets drop down at 7 a.m. and sometime in the afternoon, and theres usually extra. Water gets cleaned every other wednesday. Everyone knows you here. You have a purpose, you have notoriety, you are often the only type of fish like yourself that the neighbors have seen.

In a fish bowl, you are being cared for, and in this fucked up life, thats kinda nice and depending on the time of life, necessary.

The only thing that can ruin the experience of a fish bowl is thinking too much about it.

Who put me here? Wtf is up with this fake ass little castle? Why do we only get pellets?

Every fish in the bowl, somehow, someway, knows there is an ocean.

Its an inescapable instinct.

The greater, the danger, the abyss, the bliss, the rebirth, the cloud of witnesses, the darkness, the reward, the vastness.

I don’t think theres a way to be happy without swimming in those waters once in your life.

To extend the metaphor, I don’t think every person is built for the ocean. The ocean is a dangerous place. It is the alternate reality of the fish bowl. There is no schedule, there is no caretaker, there is no mercy. There is just you, and what you can bring forth out of the darkness. And I think when you are in a fragile state or have something to take care of, the fish bowl makes a lot of sense.

But despite my own aforementioned set backs, I know in my heart I am made for the ocean. I want the big swim, I want the expanse. I want to extend who I am.

Whoever you are, if you are hiding behind plastic seaweed or admiring the waves, I hope you find the secrets you are swimming for. I hope you get to be exactly what you always knew you could be, but were too afraid to say out loud. I hope you find a way. I hope you take yourself seriously, and trust that there is room for you in this world, and if there isn’t, you will create that room.

Love to anyone who sees this. No matter who you are. I hope you find it.