Don’t Look Up
Fieldnote on what the body knows before the mind agrees
5AM.
The kind of quiet that feels like a gift.
Dark room. Soft breath.
That thin edge of morning where nothing has asked anything of you yet.
And then… one click.
X
I don’t even know why.
Some somatic reflex.
Some old pattern reaching for… something.
And almost instantly…
My body shifts.
Not my thoughts.
My body.
Stomach tight.
Heat in my chest.
A kind of internal bracing I didn’t consciously choose.
Scroll.
Scroll.
Scroll.
And it’s not information.
It’s impact.
Accusations without depth.
Certainty without context.
Strangers throwing volatility at strangers.
Headlines that feel like alarms.
Fragments of catastrophe with no beginning and no end.
Rage bait.
Rumours.
Half-truths dressed as urgency.
And I can feel it…
My nervous system doesn’t know this is a screen.
It thinks something is happening.
To me.
And here’s the part that stayed with me…
This isn’t just about what I saw.
It’s what it did.
Because within minutes, I’m no longer in my bed.
I’m inside a world that feels unstable, volatile, unsafe.
And yet…
Nothing in my actual environment has changed.
The window is cracked open.
There’s a spring breeze moving through the room.
Birds are starting their morning conversation.
The light is just beginning to rise.
I am safe.
But my body doesn’t believe it.
There’s another layer to this for me.
I don’t enter the world as a neutral observer.
I enter it as a body that learned, very early on,
to scan for danger.
C-PTSD doesn’t wait for context.
It reacts to tone, speed, unpredictability, intensity.
So when I open something like this…
I’m not just reading.
I’m scanning.
Bracing.
Preparing.
For what, I don’t even know.
My stomach doesn’t care if it’s “just a headline.”
It tightens anyway.
Churns anyway.
Responds as if something is happening now.
Because to the body…
there’s very little difference between perceived threat
and actual threat
when the signal is loud enough.
And this morning,
it was loud.
Yesterday, I was in an EMDR session.
Doing the slow, deliberate work of teaching my nervous system
that not everything is happening now.
That not every signal is danger.
That I can come back.
That I can choose.
And then this morning,
in less than five minutes,
I watched how quickly all of that can get overridden.
Not erased.
But flooded.
So I closed it.
Walked to the sink.
Cold water on my face.
Again.
Again.
Stepped outside.
Bare feet on the ground.
Birds in my ears.
Spring air in my lungs.
And slowly…
my body started to believe me again.
No app has ever regulated me.
No headline has ever brought me back.
But water has.
Air has.
Earth has.
Presence has.
And here’s the part that keeps echoing…
This isn’t just about me.
I have C-PTSD.
My nervous system already knows how to scan, brace, prepare.
But what I felt this morning,
wasn’t entirely mine.
We’re living inside what I can only describe as an algorithm apocalypse.
Not the end of the world.
But the relentless amplification
of everything that feels like it might be.
Systems designed to capture attention
are now shaping nervous systems.
Training them.
To expect danger.
To react quickly.
To stay alert.
Even when there is no immediate threat.
You don’t need a trauma history
to feel anxious in a system that rewards anxiety.
You just need exposure.
Repetition.
Volume.
What used to be a survival response
is becoming a default setting.
We are, collectively, becoming bodies
that don’t know how to come down.
Flooded without resolution.
Activated without action.
Informed, maybe.
But at what cost?
We’re reacting to the tip of an iceberg…
Headlines.
Tweets.
Clips.
But beneath that…
Editing.
Framing.
Incentives.
Algorithms that don’t reward truth,
they reward reaction.
We’re not seeing the whole.
We’re feeling the sharpest edges of it.
Over and over again.
And somewhere along the way,
we started calling this “staying informed.”
But are we?
Or are we just staying activated?
I’ve been mostly off social media for almost three years.
Not perfectly.
But enough to feel the difference.
Enough to remember what it’s like
to not have the world injected into your nervous system
every waking moment.
I grew up Gen X.
Catching crayfish.
Riding bikes until the streetlights came on.
Coming home dirty, bored, alive.
Boredom wasn’t something to fix.
It was space.
Space where imagination lived.
Where the nervous system could settle.
Where life happened at a human pace.
We didn’t have the world flashing in front of us
at all hours.
We didn’t carry catastrophe in our pockets.
We didn’t wake up and immediately plug into volatility.
And I’m not romanticizing it.
Things have always been happening.
The world has never been simple.
But it has never felt this intense.
Not like this.
Not inside the body.
And this is where it gets honest.
Because I don’t control the system.
But I do have a say
in what I let reach my nervous system.
So I come back.
Again and again.
To this.
To breath.
To body.
To what is actually here.
I am in control of my life.
Not the feed.
Not the noise.
Not the volatility of a world I cannot hold all at once.
This breath.
This body.
This moment.
This is my world.
The algorithm will keep escalating.
That’s what it’s built to do.
But your nervous system?
That’s still yours.
Maybe “don’t look up” isn’t about ignorance.
Maybe it’s about remembering to look around.
Or inward.
Or at what’s actually here.
Because if I lose my body
trying to keep up with the world…
then I’ve lost the only place
I ever actually live.
