#I spent quite a while going in circles around the taj mahal complex trying to get out into the city to look for context clues

[screambirdscreaming]

It's actually wild how much playing geoguessr for hours last night stabilized my brain out of spiralling.

I've been SAYING to myself things like "the world continues to exist and you have to stay grounded in it rather than spiralling about problems you can't in any way reach to push back against, and certainly doubly so if you are stuck spiralling" and also "the perspective from the place you live is so skewed from the material reality of most of the world and you have to account for that when informing your political stances" and other such things. But it hasn't really been getting through the immediacy of panic and dread.

And weirdly what did get through was spending hours clicking along a road through a place I've never been in a region I've never heard of, looking at how people build their houses and the structures along the roads where they sell various things to passersby, squinting at the signage to try to figure out which words might be place names, looking at all the unfamiliar plants, street dogs following the car.... that's the world the whole world is out there with more depth and detail than you can imagine. It's all out there.