This Is Why We Fight

Everything is terrible, isn't it? I didn't think I was going to manage a newsletter this week because I couldn't think of anything else to say besides that. My brain is just a constant wordless howl of misery right now and that doesn't make for good writing. The personal and the political have combined to form an awful and inescapable miasma and I want to scream and scream about it and never stop screaming.

What else is there to do when every day there's a new horror to confront? When I'm trapped in one of the top 10 worst states for quality of life with no way out on the horizon? When election season looms enormous and terrifying in front of me and the country is collectively losing its mind in so many varied and horrible ways? When people I've become invested in are disappointing in ways that are so predictable that it's almost boring, but it still manages to hurt my feelings like I knew them personally? When people I do know personally also hurt my feelings, but in ways that are harder to quantify and in ways I can't hold against them?

Everything happens so much, as that one iconic Horse_ebooks tweet says. It never stops happening. There's never time to rest and regroup, to take a breath and grapple with the grief and the fear and the bottomless exhaustion. We just have to keep pushing forward and hoping that somehow, eventually, we'll be okay.

And I guess that's what I can give you today. I don't feel okay right now and probably neither do you, but I can offer you hope for that eventual future where we might.