I have always loved turtles. The Pennsylvania woods used to be flush with them. I was once pulled out of class in elementary school to help a teacher identify a turtle they had found. I brought in baby snappers for show and tell. One summer I named and photographed over 30 box turtles that we rescued from the roads after a rainstorm. After swimming with a sea turtle for the first time in Hawaii, I had a turtle tattooed on my ankle.
Who was at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle “Coming Out Of Their Shells” live show tour when it stopped in Philadelphia? Certainly not me because that would make me much too old and thus irrelevant to society.
When a lot of things are awful at once, our brains start to ration emotional responses. We can’t cry over every disaster and sad story or we’d not get much else done. But then every once and a while a random thing will hit you in just the right place to cause an emotional pressure release valve to loosen.
So you’ll be sitting there, completely in control of your shit, having op-eds telling you that you are experiencing trauma and grief and thinking “good thing I have this big, healthy base later of trauma and grief I can use as a cushion like a manatee with a layer of blubber to keep them warm, but for emotions” and then 10 minutes later you are crying over sea turtles. Sea turtles don’t have a layer of blubber to keep them warm.
And in this wave of eyes stinging and heavy breathing you know that it’s not really about the sea turtles. It is. But it’s everything. It’s everything, and then the sea turtles. It’s turtles all the way down. With crying.
You remember your winters without hot water and your constant fights with the power companies. You remember the paper thin walls of apartments and the asthma attacks. You don’t care any less about everything else, you just had a weak point in your dam labelled “turtles”.
I think maybe my brain gets worn out on worrying about the same shit and sometimes needs to test its emotional tolerance by switching to a new problem. Good news, my ability to be outwardly sad still functions! Seems like a waste of energy to the part of my brain writing this, but what do I know? Only that I just care a lot about turtles and also everything.
