I Have No Title and I Must Scream
I don't know what to say today. It feels like the height of arrogance to think there's anything I could say that would make a difference, and I'm so tired and defeated and scared and angry and I have nothing left to give right now. Tomorrow I'll wake up and find new ways to fight, new ways to love people and move forward and try, in whatever minuscule ways are available to me, to keep resisting, but today I don't have it in me. Today I need to grieve and breathe and try to prepare myself for the years ahead.
Maybe I suck it up and find the soul-crushing, brain-destroying job that will allow me to save enough money to get out of here. Whether here is this town or this state or this country. I would prefer it to be this country, and fuck everybody who scolds marginalized people for wanting to leave, as though we owe something to a place that demonstrates again and again that it would love to see us dead. Some of us are built for war and some are not and I am not. So maybe I get the job and save the money and find another place that won't necessarily be ideal, but at least won't be the United States. Or maybe I at least get out of Oklahoma and go somewhere with more support networks, more spaces for community and growth, more people who make me feel like existing isn't the most pointless endeavor. Or maybe I keep my head down and get through it, find whatever small pockets of joy I can find in the hellscape where I live. Maybe my mom is right that this is my life and I had better figure out how to not hate it.
I don't know. I don't know. The "I want to die" klaxons haven't gone off this loudly in my brain in years and I'm no longer used to enduring it and living anyway, and I don't know how to do it in isolation. Everyone I love is miles away and electronic communication doesn't feel like enough right now. I hate it here. I don't want to have to think about this or live through it again.
This newsletter is supposed to be about hope, and I want to be able to give that to you now more than ever, but I gotta be honest with you that hoping machine is real fuckin' broken down and I haven't figured out how to recharge it yet. I wish I had words that could galvanize us all into productive action, words that could remind us what we're here for and what we have to do and how we should do it, but I'm just a person. I'm just a person and all the words are ash in my mouth and pinpricked blood on my fingertips, and I don't get to sleep the hundred-year sleep and wake up in a new world. I still have to be here, and so do you, and I guess that's the work for now. Just be here and keep being here, even though again and again we learn the same lessons and fail to take them in or do anything differently.
What I can offer you are other people's words, stronger and brighter and more productive than mine. Here's an article about how to stay grounded and prepare for another Trump presidency, which I found calming and hopeful despite not being ready for optimism or organizing yet. And here's another about hope as an active practice with tangible examples, which isn't directly about this current moment but does feel relevant to it. And here is a Candice Jordan poem with the incandescently wonderful title of I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.
That's it. Become a menace to your enemies, and while you're doing that, remember to keep showing up for your communities and loving your people and nourishing yourselves and others in whatever ways you can. Remeber your humanity. They don't get to strip us of that, as hard as they try and as much as they want to. They might take everything else, but we still have ourselves and we still have each other, and even though I feel absolutely crushed and hopeless, that matters. That's what will ultimately save us.
I'm sorry this is so short. I didn't want to skip a week because you're all contributing to me staying alive and I love you for that, but this is all I've got.