I can time travel.

I can time travel as close as humanly possible. When I go through my old things or pictures from the past, I get so hyper-focused and immersed in that version of myself that it’s disorienting. My brain floods with related memories and thoughts and feelings I had during that age just by looking at my monkey stuffed animals or pictures from my sixth-grade birthday party I haven’t seen in years. Everything I ever felt or experienced is still inside me. I can feel the shift out that altered state when I go to check my phone or when something from the present distracts me. But I’m still in a state of limbo, my child self who apparently stays dormant in me is now awake, and my outer shell is the twenty-something me who has a smartphone and her own car. It feels like motion sickness, but my body is still and it’s the pathways of my brain are doing all the quick and dizzying movements.  Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes I hate it. (I find it less of a ground-breaking experience when I’m content with my present day life and self.) Every physical thing that made this far is or will be in a dark gray plastic tub, my unassuming time machine.

♢ ♢ ♢

More existential thoughts:

• What if sexism exists because of evolution? Because men figured they’d have less competition if they teamed up/oppressed women?? And that trait got passes down millennium to millennium?? Creating the narrative that women are weaker/inferior??
• Our level of cognitive/existential awareness is so traumatizing, so beyond our ability to understand, that we hold on religion or other beliefs because we need an answer as to ‘why we’re here’/‘our purpose’ to try and cope with being able to think at the level that we do.
• What’s the bigger driving force/instinct in human nature: survival or procreation?
  • Reading books about the history of religion tend to focus on the basic human instinct of survival… but I totally forgot that there’s another view that procreation is the biggest human instinct. (Or maybe that’s mainly the religious/political view?)
  • Maybe since my survival instinct has been in hyperdrive all my life because of extreme anxiety, it drowned out my instinct to procreate??
• America looks down on the Middle East for lack of woman’s rights etc, but the idea of woman’s rights and equality (women getting jobs, owning property, etc) is SO NEW to the American lifestyle. AND it was because of non-religious, secular motives! (I think.) Progressive, liberal (oh, scary!) motives at the least. A place ruled by religion is almost always patriarchal. (I mainly think about the Abrahamic religions.)
  • American Evangelicals and Christian politicians who push the narrative that America is ‘Christian nation’ and want to pass legislation that fit their beliefs BASICALLY WANT AMERICANS TO BE LIKE THE MIDDLE EAST. IT’S THE SAME IDEAS* JUST A DIFFERENT LABEL!!!
• The three Abrahamic religions play a dangerous and deadly sports game, and the stakes affect the lives of everyone (including those not participating in the sport at all i.e. atheists, secularists). It’s so hypocritical it drives me crazy. There’s no rationalizing with them and there’s no ‘leaving everyone else alone’ because that’s exactly what religion prevents them from doing.

^{_{*modest dressing women, traditional gender roles, force everyone to follow their religion, just the run-of-the-mill conservative values because apparently the more strict and miserable you are in every single way, the more godly you are.}}