How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.

These giant fish survived the asteroid and the Ice Age and so much more only to be wiped out by cosmically puny obstacles: our dams, our boats, our chemicals, our taste for caviar.

Humans suck

as long as you stayed together with M, no one could tell you that you weren’t queer. Conclusion: The proximate cause of death may have been your inability to imagine how to be queer and alone.

We're not biologically wired to be alone and that makes us stay in bad situations

Why is prey in nature videos always “unsuspecting”?

Good observation

I acknowledge this metaphor of predation is cheap. I don’t fault the sand striker for hunger, or for hunting. It works much harder than I do, someone who buys meat already dead and plucked. Part of the reason I find its body gruesome may be a hardwired instinct in the animal in me, an animal that fears snakes and creatures that move like them. When the sand striker snatches a fish and begins to feast, it is not thinking of what the fish is feeling. It has no complex brain and no sense of morality, which means its intentions are never cruel. A worm cannot shirk a duty it does not know. But we can.

Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong.

In the critic Sianne Ngai’s terminology, my own irritation with myself is my ugliest feeling. It is the scab I will always pick at and never allow to heal, my smallest festering wound.

💯 resonates

So I have to ask you again. How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?

Love this. Humans can make changes as I hope you do on a individual level