In Clipped Wings, I wrote: “The duality of people is not a give and take, it is not a push and pull. The duality of people is the continuous explosion of a dying star. Burning hot and bright and then imploding into a dense dark giant. A death and rebirth, of which the byproducts can be lovely and life giving, but always a cycle of intensity and stillness. Never a slow burn. Never an uneventful transition. We are, it seems, dramatic beings and we live a constant series of dramatic endings.”

And this is because we are animals, denying our nature. Imposters who have boiled down our mating calls into slights of hand. Frauds who stifle our roars to form polite smiles. Shams who settle for daily inner battles with the beast inside of us in order to present a front of composure and civility.

We have violent hearts and we’ve built our lives of porcelain.

Simply being the top of the food chain doesn’t remove us from it. We still have the souls of strays. We yearn for a tribe in which we can establish absolute trust, on which we can hang our survival. We crave a mate that we can pour our uncut passion into. We feel a feral protectiveness for all that we covet, we know a trembling territoriality for the things that were hard fought. We are baser creatures, at our core, who developed a dangerous ability to imagine. And somewhere along the way we imagined ourselves as something other than our roots. We imagined refined perfection, and god-like decorum, and still, abstemious hearts.

We’ve lived for so long with a howling wracking through our forms, savage emotions flooding our thought centers, uncultivated desires driving our warm blood, and we strain them through the constraints of our imagined idealism and allow the animal inside of us to rot at the pace our life span. That’s why we’re all anxious and wound, that’s why we’re all sad and uncertain. That’s why we’re all apologetic, paralyzed wells of fear and unease. We are denying our nature.

We don’t allow ourselves to roar. We don’t allow ourselves to sink our teeth into the meat of something. We don’t allow our emotions to come to fruition as exactly what they are. We’re all primal animals with violent hearts, caged in the flesh of something calculating and rigid. And the longer we maintain the fruitless attempts to warp our nature into something alien, the less we will be able to move, to act. Because while our wild hearts call for the things that feel natural and true, our reprogrammed brains sow the seed that these are things to be corrected and tamed. This mask of civility has convinced us that our very nature is something that is wrong with us.

No wonder we’re all so fucking depressed. Of course we all have anxiety. If the stork were grounded in the bog, she’d surely perish. If the lion was condemned to mere purrs, he’d fall certainly. We’re wild animals with violent hearts who’ve docked their tails and clipped their wings.