Day 177

Goal: 264 days. 33 minutes, 33 push-ups, lat pulldowns, goblet squats, and bridges.

Happy Thursday, and welcome to October. The fog is sitting heavy outside the basement windows this morning, the kind of damp, thick weather that makes the entire world feel incredibly small and quiet. I am down in the basement, moving through my morning routine and letting my mind wander, when it snagged on a phrase we have all been force-fed by the algorithm.

You know the one. A perfectly lit, highly caffeinated “life coach” stares into a ring light and fiercely declares: “Nobody is coming to save you!”

It is always framed as “tough-love” motivation; however, it makes my skin crawl. It is a lonely, frantic little mantra that takes our collective, systemic exhaustion and dresses it up as a personal moral failure. Leaving us completely isolated on our own sinking ships. It’s the battle cry of a culture that wants you to survive, but only if you do it entirely by yourself.

Then the playlist shifts and Amy Lee’s Sanctuary fills the basement. As it turns out, the lead singer of Evanescence knows how to deliver an existential truth with vastly better eyeliner and grace.

Over a heavy, driving beat, she sings:

Breathe it in, scream it out. No one’s coming to save us. It doesn’t scare me. I’m with you all the way down.

The entire wardrobe of the message changes when you change one single word. You vs Us. With heavily manicured fingers, the influencer points and tells you to fight your way out of the wasteland on your own. While Amy Lee grabs the microphone and acknowledges that while the sky might actually be falling, we are absolutely in this together.

At times, living with empathy is undeniably exhausting, and some days the apathy of isolation sounds so much easier. But if the world is going down, I refuse to endure it alone. I will take the “us” every single time. I would much rather sink holding hands with fabulous people than survive on an island of one, and if I cannot find many who think like this, I’ll just create a world where more exist.

Thanks for listening!