The Echoes
An Echo · v1.00
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
Living in this world can feel claustrophobic.
Everythingisjustsodamnclose.
Everything presses inward until the air itself feels like a blanket that is just a little too warm.
Obligations crowd one another until even rest feels like a profound decision—until a simple sigh cannot occur without first negotiating with no less than three internal committees.
This is why so much talk about mindset feels false.
Life is not simply what you make of it.
Sure, a positive outlook can help.
But it cannot create choices where none exist.
Sometimes the problem is a lack of opportunity.
Sometimes it is a lack of capacity.
Sometimes one decision, made under pressure or without full understanding, becomes a debt paid for years into a future no one could have seen clearly.
This is where the closest truth reveals itself:
Control is a state of mind.
It is something we invented to keep humanity from going insane.
A false state that absolutely needs to exist, because the alternative is so, so much worse.
When I take “control,” it is one of the only times I do not feel as though I am floating in space, burning alive, or somehow doing both at once.
Ambient oxygen be damned.
We want to believe we are in control because the alternative is impossible to live inside.
Control gives us something to hold onto.
It can take many shapes, most of them with pointy edges.
Some become sharpest only after someone introduces a protractor.
A method is comforting because it implies the problem has agreed to be solved.
But most people are not living in an open world with a character select screen.
They are choosing from what remains after circumstance has already narrowed it.
People lie to themselves.
They lie to each other.
They hurt people.
They love people.
They choose hope.
They choose death.
They choose something because, unless they have found a system large enough to obey, most people are making it up as they go.
And even when what they choose is completely wrong—even when it is the worst possible use of their time—at least it can feel good.
Until it does not.
When I feel things going wrong, when I feel myself losing control of what was never in my control to begin with, the safest retreat is often something familiar:
I lie to myself.
The nerds on the internal committees approve the wording and decline to certify the result.
The way a well-meaning adult lies to a child who is being exposed to something confusing and painful.
Everything is going to be okay.
As if any of us have the damn right to make such a profound claim to someone else, let alone ourselves.
No one is ever really in control and stable.
No one is ever really okay and well.
Stable enough, perhaps.
Well within acceptable parameters, sure.
Had the problem been sufficiently defined to produce an answer?
Status: undeclared.
If they were, they might be gods.
Possibly, They Might Be Giants.
It depends on which language the mind reaches for when ordinary language stops working—whether it comes from a birdhouse in your soul or from the far reaches of Istanbul.
Not Constantinople, mind you.
Look, if you cannot phase yourself elsewhere, perhaps phasing your mind out of your body is the forty-second-best option available.
At the very least, there is one lie I can still tell myself:
The world isn’t the boss of me.
Not when I am in control.
Companion Track: “No Control” — Bad Religion
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