Member-only story
The Creative’s Response to Collapse
Sarah sits at her kitchen window, watching what most people wouldn’t notice. The way her neighbors’ routines have shifted subtly over the years, months, and weeks. How the birds have changed their feeding habits. The almost imperceptible shift in social interactions on the street below. Her brain, which doctors once labeled as “hyperactive” and “overstimulated,” processes these patterns with the same intensity that once got her kicked out of traditional classrooms for “not paying attention to the right things.”
For years, she couldn’t explain why certain things felt wrong. When she tried, people’s eyes would glaze over. Her partner would gently suggest she was overthinking things. Her therapist recommended meditation for anxiety. But she couldn’t stop noticing — the subtle wrongness in supply chains, the fragility in social systems, the unsustainable patterns that nobody wanted to discuss.
She followed her intuition despite the labels — paranoid, anxious, catastrophizing. When she felt compelled to learn food preservation, she learned it. When she couldn’t shake the feeling she should stock extra supplies, she did it. When her body screamed that she needed to build community connections, she built them. She couldn’t always articulate why. She just knew, with the same somatic certainty that made corporate meetings unbearable, that these skills would matter.
