There’s a dragon that lives inside of me. I know she’s awake when my blood starts to boil. I feel her growing and emerging with each beat of my heart, and as she tenses the muscles in my arms and legs, readying herself for battle. She makes claws out of my hands and curls them into fists until my fingernails almost draw blood. She comes through my eyeballs, turning the whites of my eyes into streaks of red. She pushes so hard against my retinas; I think she might succeed in popping the eyes out of my head like two overripe grapes.
So many times, I want to free her. I know I suffocate her inside me with all this peace and meditation and mellowness crap. I can feel her singing through my heart whenever I push myself just past exertion, so I do try and take her out to exercise in a non-threating manner whenever I can. She is like a big dog who is allowed off leash in a dog park. Her boundless glee is intoxicating, and I want to succumb to her strength and excitement as often as possible. Sometimes when I can be in a spot where nobody will be alarmed, I also give her a chance to roar. She prefers howling to breathing and I can almost always get her to calm down the fastest when she gets to make loud noises at the top of our lungs.
But keeping the dragon happy and quiet has been getting harder these days. We are just now coming out of a Pandemic the world could have never imagined. I hate even talking about it because it draws so many feelings of defeat and loss of control and power that I can barely put the words on paper or give them a true voice.
The scariest part of the pandemic is not having someone to blame for how it all went down. Sure, everyone has a theory and a scapegoat and that is mixed with all of the institutionalized feelings of power and privilege that causes people to feel scattered and disconnected. There was also the part where we all had to keep away from each other so we didn’t kill each other with a virus. We decided as a society to stop touching each other, stop looking each other in the eyes, stop manners and formalities and social interaction protocols. Most of us thought it would just be for weeks and others guessed it would take more than three years. Most of us in the first camp would have never believed it still isn’t over three years later.
And it’s interesting too. We have so many books and theories on the Apocalypse and metaphors of zombies and anarchists and human nature. Yet, aside from the toilet paper hoarding, there wasn’t a whole lot of commotion on this front. I guess we as humans became a lot less interested in each other. We isolated ourselves in our homes. We stopped going into the offices or sitting in churches together. We stopped respecting some of the most common of courtesies because our worlds became centered on ourselves. Fear did not drive people to riot and protest and overthrow society like the dystopian novels would make you believe. If anything, it kept us all in our places and made us realize how powerless we actually are.
Our cultural norms turned from parties and nights out in town to sharing reactions to Netflix shows and movies over social media. We had lost the ability to process non-verbal cues and connection with one another with half our faces covered in these masks. Even now, our proximity to one another, how crowded of a space we will share with others, and basic hand washing habits have all shifted in this era. And we are suffering for it.
My dragon gets stirred up daily anymore. She is ready to deal blows constantly due to misunderstandings, power dynamics and the laziness of other people. It’s kind of like being on a freeway where all the cars are speeding 15 miles over the speed limit, there’s only 2 lanes, there are potholes that aren’t being patched because there aren’t enough workers or money, and nobody is using their blinker or concerned that while they are texting on their phone or reading their social media post that they might not actually have the reaction time they normally would. You are just waiting to get rammed into or overtaken and it’s like a match of roulette with your car every time you leave the house. All she does is roar. It is deafening.