Thoughts swirl in my mind like a colony of blind army ants, trapped in a ceaseless, spiralling march-each one lost, yet compelled to follow the others. When I'm caught in a wave of negative thinking, this analogy feels painfully true. But when I'm clear of it, it all seems a bit overblown.

Ant mills, with their hypnotic, disorienting patterns, are oddly beautiful to watch-yet the ants, locked into the loop of following each other, march themselves to their deaths. Only an outside force—a shift in the environment or a few exhausted ants breaking away-can interrupt the cycle and stop the march. For those who manage to escape, I imagine it's hard to understand how they got pulled in so deeply to begin with.