American Psychosis

My nightly angst has overflown through my pen.

“I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning…”

-Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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I watched the children die in bombings while I scrolled on my phone and felt their anonymous weight on me. Like the accumulation of loose coins in my pocket, they held no specific impact, were meant to purchase no specific thing, and only when they gathered enough mass would I call them change.

But nothing would.

A drip-feed of horror peppered my screen, filling the interstitial spaces between trad wives, health hackers, conspiracy theories, and kitten videos. The explosions called to my fickle attention, to click and promote, like and subscribe for more, but it all seemed so two-dimensional, so obvious where it was heading, not a single tasty bit of bait to bite down on. Plus the accounts hadn’t even created captions and I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn up the volume on that massacre in a public place. It might disturb others.

I kept scrolling. The weight accumulated in my rib cage, acidic and heaving. Content nausea.

The videos continued, always different, fresh scenes of violence. They grew and multiplied and I thought surely there must be an end, it must start repeating at some point, ouroboros eating its own tail, but with the magic that only the internet could provide I was born anew with each swipe. There was always more of it–more schools bombed, more hospitals caught in a drone strike, more mud, more filth, more death.

I was worried the woman next to me on the train might see it and think I was a terrorist, but she looked at her own phone.

What does genocide mean, now, in 2025? When the documentation is so pervasive, so easily accessible? Twenty years ago these videos would have been burned, the filmer killed and buried anonymously so they couldn’t surface at a UN session and provide damning testimony. We all saw it, and swiped it away, afraid of being complicit in a growing universal consensus that the world is fucked and not getting unfucked anytime soon.

The videos spilled outwards and gathered more weight. Violence took over the other panes. The walls that held their realities separate broke down, and they flowed together. Here was a woman cooking in an unbelievably clean home, perfect meals from perfect ingredients cut perfectly by her perfect hands. The range exploded and left a gaping hole of bloody rubble. Here was a permanently shirtless man, a mass of muscles and veins that looked like something throbbing and phallic, who let me know that carrots were robbing my masculinity. Machine gun fire from off-camera penetrated him over and over again, nonconsensually. Here was a podcaster, thick headphones and boom mic, spoon-feeding me rage in easily digestible lies. His studio burned around him, and I watched the montage until the camera went black.

I scrolled on and on, lapping up the horror, greedily filling my pockets with an endless stream of loose coins until the weight of it buckled my shaking legs and forced me to my knees in the center of aisle 24, car 2, of the red line commuter train. And then, finally, I cried. I emptied my coins and my stomach and spread it around me in great heaves.

Someone cut a reel of it. They pulled the trigger. I exploded, and went viral.

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I wrote this for our local open mic night. The theme is Pocket Change, and I loved the double entendre of change. I’ve been writing a number of pieces like this recently, a personal reckoning with the state of the world I guess. I hope that the angst doesn’t turn you away.

The idea of instagram reels spilling over and fighting with one another is really enticing to me—the break-down of reality and rules that leads to the creation of extreme consequences in an otherwise inconsequential space. I think it’s the sudden inability to ignore what’s happening in the world that’s most seductive to me, as an idea.

Photo of Gaza by Mohammed Ibrahim.