Relief and Exhaustion
Just before 9am this morning CK shrieked with joy as I was playing a computer game (Animal Crossing New Horizons) in the yoga room.
She came in a few moments later to tell me that the numbers for Pennsylvania and Arizona had come in. The dreaded Electoral College had called the states for Joe Biden. Nevada came in shortly after that, also for Biden.
While there's still plentiful ghouls out there saying that the election isn't over until all the "legal votes" are counted. This is another dog whistle since there aren't illegal votes, there isn't voter fraud. The more outstanding votes that are counted, the more certain a Biden/Harris win becomes.
T* hasn't made a concession speech yet.
This morning my art group met online and it felt good to share the joy with everyone. Fittingly the topic today was "Gratitude Cards" and it led to a lot of good discussions. I'm making some bookmarks to give as gifts for my cards.
The rest of the day I just dragged. CK took a nap. I thought about it, but didn't. I mostly played my game, read the latest ebook from the library (The City We Became), and tried to convince myself to eat a real meal. I eventually had a larger meal when I got takeout sushi for us.
We did have a celebratory adult beverage. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have more energy to feel some pleasure.
The thing is, this doesn't change our plans. Yes, it will make our planning far easier and we'll be able to accomplish our goal more quickly. There is a tremendous feeling of relief and definite joy felt at seeing the positive outcome of countless grassroots organizers who got out the vote of so many disenfranchised communities.
I'm just not ready to put up an American flag again. I'm not sure I'll ever return to that kind of nationalism. I'll put up the new Pride flag or an Iron Front flag, even an Earth flag or the Thorns FC flag. But the sudden outpouring of "reclaim the flag" rhetoric I'm seeing just doesn't connect to my heart.
We're still a broken country that had to pull out all the stops to beat back fascism. We're still nearly half full of people who were just fine with the "Make the liberals cry again!" line. People who quite happily supported the cruelty of the T* regime, if not explicitly than complicity.
People who happily politicized wearing masks and following precautions during a pandemic, thus contributing to the 234,264 deaths from COVID19, as of today.
While there is a need for bridge building and rebuilding. There's also a need to put down our collective foot and say that we're done with tolerating the kind of viciousness we've seen. I'm not making peace with some of these people, nor am I wasting my empathy on them.
They aren't stupid or crazy, they're willfully cruel and need to be treated as such.
Shame Monster Again
I tried to get 5 houses worth of hazardous materials to the transfer station today and missed the cutoff by a few minutes. The minutes I spent visiting our kitten at our friend's.
Then I got home to an IRS letter.
I know how to handle it and we agree getting closer to being caught up, but it still left me feeling like a failure and a burden.
It didn't matter what I did during the day or how grateful our made our friends, our family of choice. The Shame Monster could only focus on my not getting there on time.
The whole evening just saw my anxiety build and the Shame Monster stomping around telling me I suck.
Then I stopped my phone and it bounced across the floor and into the water bowl! It is just fine, the OtterBox helped and I was damn fast to grab it and wrap it in a towel!
I finally gave up on cleaning the kitchen, worked on art, then took as long shower. As I got ready for the shower it finally got me that I forgot to take my bedtime pills!
I'm wondering if I worker need more of the medication for my brain, particularly the part of CPTSD that creates the Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or if I might benefit from taking it at dinner with my antidepressant.
This might help with Shame Monster's nightly rampaging.
Postponing Joy
I have several articles of clothing I never wear at home. I put them on to leave. I avoid wearing them at home because they’d get dog or cat hair on them, would start to show wear, etc.
These are mostly things I wore to teach. Some things for fancy occasions. My “nice” clothes as opposed to my “play” clothes.
I started wearing a sweater I would wear while teaching to keep me warm at the end and between classes. It finally hit me that I really don’t need to save them, I don’t know when I’ll teach in person again, so I might as well enjoy my clothing now!
It’s made me wonder just how often, and in how many different ways, I postpone joy for dubious reasons. What undercurrent of shame believes I don’t deserve joy in the present moment?
It’s been a tough few weeks with my Shame Monster, “Whinnie”, telling me what a loser I am, what a drain on resources, etc. It’a exhausting, tedious, and driven by the election anxiety.
Maybe tomorrow will have hope.
I’m grateful for an unexpected urban ungulate feasting on windfall apples I saw when I took our leftover pumpkin curry over to AF’s.
The Waiting
We still don't know. It's looking more and more like it will be Biden/Harris, but it isn't done.
There are T* supporters with guns at election offices demanding that they be allowed to count ballots (Arizona) or that counting be stopped (Michigan). Like the supporters running the Biden/Harris bus off the road in Texas last week, these are the newest incarnation of the Nazi Brownshirts who intimidated people to push their political agenda.
I have felt exhausted today. As usual, teaching at 10am online helped anchor me into the day. I enjoyed chatting with a favorite student afterward, one of those people who's become a friend as well, and that helped me feel a little less hopeless.
I ended up napping after lunch for a little while with Obie. He's been wanting to lay on the bed so I've been turning on the electric blanket to warm up his bones. He reached out his paws and chirped at me, which is pretty impossible to resist. Having got to bed close to 2am, a nap with Obie and Bertie was a good choice.
I felt really unmotivated by food, aside from wanting to turn several ripe apples and pears into a crisp. CK suggested that we have takeout, we picked pizza which I really enjoyed, despite feeling unmotivated. I kept searching for recipes and ended up just making it up; I needed more salt! I also just realized I forgot the cinnamon!
What's weighing on me is how we're just barely holding back fascism. Some small part of me hoped for an outright repudiation, instead T* supporters doubled-down, recruiting more hateful people. Voter suppression has also been so successful, redistricting and gutting the Voting Rights Act continues to disenfranchise people.
There are millions of Americans who are so opposed to everyone sharing a piece of the pie, where everyone gets a smaller piece but everyone gets pie, that they would prefer to just burn down all the pie shops rather than allow the "others" to have some pie.
I see rounds of social media posts about educating "T* voting friend, now's the time!", and I'm furious. This is not about education, we cannot educate people who are willfully ignorant, truth denying, and cruelty seeking!
Also, quit putting work on those of use who are already exhausted and afraid of losing rights we've only been celebrating a few years!
How do we engage with people who don't care if they get hurt so long as they get to see the "other" hurting? How do we just shut it down? How do we say to them, "We don't really care about how you feel about it, this is what is happening."
Limbo
As expected, the American people are failing to hand T* a decisive walloping. It's still too close to call and the results will take days.
Put Zoom on and essentially had "Office Hours" ask evening. Spoke with several friends and got to see the adorable kitten.
The house is well stocked, really shouldn't need to leave for days. Tomorrow I'm going to set up the bins in the van to facilitate hauling hazardous materials to the transfer station after picking them up from friends.
I can't shake the fear that the Electoral College will fuck us again. Who cares about the popular vote?!
Trying to hold hope in my heart.
Dread not Optimism
CK asked me this evening what I think will happen tomorrow. I had to reply that I really didn't know.
2016 taught us not to trust polls. We know that people were misleading them intentionally. We know not to trust our broken Electoral College.
We know that we're one of the hotbeds of militia activity. We know T* supporters are behaving like Brownshirts and cops nationwide are enabling it.
My discussion group for the "Seeing White" podcast had some folks who are feeling optimistic. I'm not one of them, I'm just feeling so much dread.
It wasn't helped by the Governor declaring a preemptive state of emergency starting at 5pm this evening. There's all kinds of businesses boarded up.
Clearly everything will be done to protect property, not people, not our votes.
I'm wrapping up the last grocery pickup and getting fuel in the vehicles tomorrow. Then we're hunkering down. I'm going to open up a Zoom in the afternoon and invite folks to just come hangout online with us.
I'm already exhausted.
On the positive side of today. I was approved for 13 more weeks of pandemic unemployment assistance! I also delighted myself making a cover comic for my new journal, that I'll add to periodically, just for comics!
November
Here we are, firmly in autumn and working on eight months of COVID life. I see people taking about a "second lockdown" and here we've never left the first one. It feels naive to have ever hoped that we'd share Thanksgiving with our chosen family.
Tonight we checked in on tasks we want done before Tuesday evening. CK ordered more first aid supplies; we still can't easily find isopropyl alcohol, even the 70% type. I ordered groceries to pick up Tuesday afternoon.
We're making plans for kitten arrival, ordering litter boxes to replace the ones downstairs. It will be easier for Obie ultimately and we'll train the kitten to use them upstairs. This will let us close the downstairs and use the space for sorting, cleaning, etc.
Using one of my new journals from an earlier Maido subscription box to continue making comics. The square shape is perfect!
Hallowasn’t
We really don't do much anyway, but it felt extra sad this year turning out the porch light just in case anyone thought we might be offering treats
We got an invite over to a socially distant gathering, bit it came as I was making dinner. We both have been low energy today too, so we stuck with our plan to watch The Exorcist. CK has never seen it and it had been years since I'd seen it.
Today I'm extra grateful Obie wanted to take a nap with me.
Waiting
I asked students this morning what they were grateful for. When silence greeted me, again, I asked if there was anything anyone needed held in community.
A student spoke up about how uncertain and terrible everything feels to them. I noted that everyone was nodding along. I reminded them that what we're experiencing in the United States is unique and we're months into living in this state of heightened stress response, which is to say, trauma.
Tomorrow I'll be working on a new video, possibly two. One detailing the "legs-up-the-wall" restorative yoga pose and another where I talk about what a Self-Care Plan is.
I'm going to look for stuff around the house for the kitten and make a list of what to get. I'm also going to spend some quality time in the garage sorting all the stocking up I've been doing. I want to see if there's any last bits I want to get before Tuesday.
I want to be wrong about all this preparation. I really do.
CK read me news reports of armed Trump supporters harassing a bus of Biden supporters in Texas and cops refusing to help. There are armed people harassing the folks protesting another Black man who was killed in Vancouver, Washington, yesterday and the cops aren't helping.
I better make a list of what to check in on before Tuesday.
Could Have Been
I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. My brain just wanted to keep on going. Thankfully I stayed asleep until Obie woke me up at 6:45.
I went back to bed after making up some food for him, but felt not only tired when I woke up, but down too. The down mood has persisted all day.
I'm sad friends are leaving. I'm more sad that I can't hug them goodbye. I'm sad that inviting people over for Thanksgiving is reckless.
Is saw a tweet today that noted that what what we're feeling right now, the anxiety in the country right now, is as if, "All of America is waiting on biopsy results."
CK was watching something about the fight to exonerate an innocent, Black man on death row. At the end, seeing statistics for how many innocent people are killed, she said, "We could have been such a different country."
That sums it up so well. The dread/hope cycle around the election combined with a grief for what might have been, an America that might have been.
Then again, the deeper I go into the history of the founding of this country, perhaps this is the only place we could have ended up.