A selfie of me tonight in my robe, which I did not intend to look just like Hugh Hefner’s robe but, c’est la vie
I’m going to come really clean. On Saturday, when I wrote the blog post that I’m still really proud of, I was feeling strong, emboldened, and ready to get back into the fight. Then Sunday came around, and I went into a somewhat weird mode that had me thinking thoughts like, “If there is a universal force for good (call it ‘God’ if you want), how can this have happened?” Monday I started feeling some dread again, and by Wednesday I was so worked up that I was flat out dissociating. I wasn’t aware of things like hunger, thirst, tiredness, how warm or cold I was, etc.. I knew I was falling asleep earlier than normal all week (which is saying something for me, as I tend to fall asleep by 8:15-ish anyways), but the exhaustion wasn’t registering.
I did know, however, that I was getting bombarded with just about as much “wisdom” as you could possibly receive. “Don’t tune out”, “they want us to feel overwhelmed, don’t burn out”, “stay engaged”; but then also things like “you can’t pour from an empty glass”, and “rest and recover”, and “joy is an act of resistance”. I knew I had to take care of myself (or so the influencers on the internet were telling me), but I also knew that people kept saying that “the point” was to make us feel overwhelmed and flooded so that we would disengage. “Don’t let them win!” So which one was it? I told myself that I wasn’t going to “let them win”, that I was going to stay engaged, that I was going to stay informed.
The thing is, even if their “point” was to make us feel so overwhelmed that we’d be tempted to disengage, the fact of the matter is that it IS overwhelming. And even if it is “letting them win” to disengage, I was quickly discovering that I couldn’t stay as engaged as I was.
Even just looking outside of social media and paying attention to the people I love is intense. I have one family member who is a single mom of two kids in an employment situation that will be impacted, and another family member who is worried about what’s happening as a non-white person and a mother to a daughter. I love and care about those people so much, and even just how much my heart is aching for them feels enough to knock me on my ass sometimes.
And then there’s me. On Saturday, the idea of what could happen to just my family unit of Russ and me seemed survivable. That confidence in our survival started to wane as the week continued. The constant things I was seeing about gender non-conforming and transgender people being targeted by this administration made me question what I could even say or think or do anymore. I became shakier and shakier as the week went on.
On Tuesday evening, I texted my therapist - again - to see if she had availability - again. Hopefully I won’t need twice weekly appointments for the entire length of this administration, but I’m giving myself grace that I needed it again. Miranda (my therapist) said she had time on Thursday, so I scheduled another virtual appointment with her.
This morning I had the strong urge to disengage, and so I removed Facebook and Instagram from my home screen on my phone. I didn’t remove the apps altogether, I just took them off my home screen. I am one of those people who is unable to leave notifications unread. I even have a reminder notification twice a day to either turn on or turn off the notifications on my work apps so that I’m not tempted to check the work apps outside of work hours, because that reminder notification means I’ll do the things just so that I can clear the notifications. Because of this, I was constantly checking the notifications on Facebook and Instagram, which would then lead me to doom-scroll on those platforms, which would then amp my feelings of anxiety and upset exponentially higher. I also found myself just compulsively opening the apps any time I had my phone in my hand for any other reason. Taking those two apps off my home screen meant that I would have to scroll to find them, and would also mean I wouldn’t see those little unignorable red circles. And the familiar spots where I unthinkingly go on my phone to open those apps no longer have those apps there. Just the act of taking them away from that familiar spot meant I would have to actually think, “Do I want to go to Facebook/Instagram?” instead of opening them without thought.
This seemingly insignificant change had a GIGANTIC impact on my day. At lunch time, I realized I was hungry, which may seem like common sense, but I had gotten so dysregulated that I hadn’t even been noticing hunger. I drank a ton more water than I did yesterday. I got a lot more work done at my job. The tightness in my chest and the buzzing fog in my head wasn’t there. The app I kept in the familiar spot - Bluesky - became the only social media app I opened all day, and most of my feed was either posts by the incredible Gail Simone, responses to her posts, or posts from others about the world we’re in and the fight that’s already started to make the world better on the other side.
I met with Miranda at 1:30. I talked about all this stuff. I talked about how there’s a common misconception that autistic people have no empathy, but that my intense empathy - both for the people I love and for the literally MILLIONS of other people who are being impacted - was threatening to burn me out harder than I could recover from. About halfway through, I said something to her about how I would really like to use the rest of our time today to focus on what specific fights I was going to fight.
I talked about this reel I saw on Instagram, in which the person speaking talks about the various roles the characters in The Lord of the Rings played in defeating Sauron. Russ and I just so happened to just finish rewatching the extended editions of the LotR movies, and so the timing of seeing this reel (which was sent to me by my amazing cousin Jenn, who I’ve recently started getting really close to) was kind of perfect, and sparked a great conversation with Miranda today. I talked about how knowing something like the fact that Merry and Pippin played a role in defeating the evil in Middle Earth by talking to the trees (Ents) for a while was a powerful thing to think about. I wanted to spend my time with Miranda figuring out what my “talking to the Ents” thing is going to be, at least for now.
At one point, Miranda talked about this blog. I’ve sent her links to some posts that I have felt would be relevant to the work we do, and we’ve discussed some of what I’ve written here, because sometimes the processing I need to do actually happens in the act of writing these posts. She talked about how just writing here is an action I can keep taking to feel like I’m engaged with the world and playing a part in contributing to the greater good. (By the way, this is not to say that Miranda and I talk much politics - we don’t - but she’s been paying attention to my feeling like I need to DO something in the face of all this.)
But most of what we talked about was just the act of being alive. I am almost 40 years old, and I am an openly queer, non-binary person. There are a lot of young queer and trans people in this country who are terrified right now. My just continuing to live openly and proudly, to continue to experience joy in my life and in my queerness, to continue to live long enough to even further understand and embrace my gender identity - that is an act of resistance. And maybe my “talking to the Ents” is just continuing to live my life and love who I love and be who I am as an example that it’s possible to do these things. At one point I said “existence is resistance”, which I know I’ve heard before, but I actually felt the truth of it when I said it.
I know myself well enough to know that I am not going to call my Congress-people every day. I know that we can’t afford to donate all of our money to the tons of amazing causes that deserve it. I know that it’s unlikely for me to join a protest. And this week taught me that I can’t continue to engage with all of the posts online about the outrage and the fear that everyone is understandably experiencing right now. But I do know that I can keep writing here. And I also know that I can keep living my queer, non-binary life. And maybe living fully into those two things will start to empower me to do more, to move on to the next things I can do in the struggle for good and decency in the world.
So while I’ll be sharing the link to this post on both Facebook and Instagram, it’s a lot less likely that I’ll immediately see the reactions or comments to it. I will turn on the comments on this post here on the blog, and I’ll get a notification if you comment here, but I might not see every comment on social media. I’d love for you to message me if you read this post and tell me what your “talking to the Ents” is. Thank you, as always, for reading.