The first few days after the Presidential election, I could barely move. Most of them were spent just lying in bed, nightmare scenarios running through my brain, and my body swelling with nausea.
Somewhere in my last two years of college, I remember making the conscious decision that I should never own a gun. Those days after November 8 were a crystal-clear example of why.
I’m going to stop there. It took me forever to write those three grafs, and most people reading this can probably write their own account of the trauma and grief that followed the realization that we had put a totalitarian man-baby into the White House.
My emotions about the situation are highly unstable, and anything I write from here on out is likely to be how I’m feeling in the moment. I’ve been zipping back and forth from panic attacks where I feel that we’re all doomed, to periods of extreme anger when I’m ready to get out and fight until I’m bloody. Sometimes I even feel optimism, like John Lewis openly questioned Donald Trump’s legitimacy the other day. The worst thing that any of us can feel right now is that we’re alone with our anger and fear, and every time someone like John Lewis speaks up, I know that’s not true.
I’ve wanted to write ever since the election, but I’ve been too depressed or overwhelmed to write. I can’t get the words out, and sometimes the issues just seem far too big to take on. Even under normal circumstances, I often find myself struggling to prioritize what I should write about. That’s one of the reasons for the long silences on my blog: for every one of those long stretches, I have a dozen partly-written essays. The ridiculous, venal game of whack-a-mole that Trump and the GOP have set in motion is making it even harder. Focusing on one of the horrors of the oncoming Trump regime feels like I’m neglecting the others.
But I have to write, for my mental health as well as for activism’s sake. Just as Greta Christina and Alex Gabriel have done before me, I’m going to make a focused effort to put a lot more writing up here in the next month, although I’m not making a specific target like they did. Maybe that’s a mistake, but my brain isn’t quite to the stage where I can make that firm a commitment.
Here’s hoping that we all survive, whatever that means.
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