Sometimes you just feel... a displacement, you know? Like your emotional response is calibrated WRONG for the situation and you're just observing it happen to someone else, but it’s actually YOU. And I was driving back from the Cape last weekend, the traffic was BRUTAL getting out of Provincetown, and my phone was dead so I couldn't even listen to a podcast, and I saw this old man on the beach. Not one of the tourists, definitely local, with that kind of weathered look you only get from being outside constantly, and he was just sitting there on a piece of driftwood, staring at the ocean. And the tide was coming in, fast, like it always does there, and it was getting really close to the houses, the ones built right on the sand with those flimsy stilts, and you could practically feel the water eroding the land away right under them. And I just kept thinking about that house we looked at in Weston, the one with the perfect lawn and the granite countertops everyone else has, and how it felt like such an OBLIGATION to even consider it, because it’s what you DO at this stage, you buy the house and you start talking about schools. And here this man was, watching his literal house disappear, probably his family's for generations, and there was this… profound melancholy radiating off him, even from across the sand and through my car window, and I felt it, I absorbed it, like a sponge. And it was so ACUTE. And I’m just driving, inching along, and I could feel this tightening in my chest, this pressure, and it was so much more INTENSE than the mild irritation I usually get when thinking about the suburban treadmill, which feels like it should be the same thing but it isn't. And you realize there’s a qualitative difference in anxieties, a hierarchy of existential dread, and mine just feels… minor, almost trivial, compared to this man’s quiet vigil. And it made me feel like I was experiencing a borrowed sorrow, like I was eavesdropping on someone else's grief and internalizing it, which is almost a form of emotional appropriation, I think. And it wasn't even MY grief, it was his, and it was so much BIGGER than anything I’ve ever felt about anything, even about the prospect of signing a 30-year mortgage and being stuck in a cul-de-sac. And I got home and my husband was watching some golf tournament, and he asked if I had a good time at the beach, and I just said “yeah, fine,” and went to bed early. And I can’t stop thinking about that man and the water, and how my own discomforts feel like such a manufactured problem in comparison, and how that makes me feel GUILTY for even feeling them. And it’s like I have this vicarious trauma, or something, but it’s not mine to have, and I don’t understand why it’s sticking to me so fiercely. And I just feel… unmoored. And really, really sad, but for reasons that aren’t even mine. And I just don't know what to do with that.