We sat last night around the rinky-dink dining table in my apartment. My friend and I, carefully cutting and gluing IRLC Red Cards. Double sided, English and Spanish, detailing a person’s rights if you’re approached by ICE. We joke without laughing about the potential collapse of the United States over cheap Costco wine that comes in a comically sized bottle. My nervous system hasn’t been proper in days. I’ve cried, raged, held down meals and hidden under my bed covers. And last night, standing in the scalding shower water waiting for the heat to unbind my shoulders, it hit that this isn’t something any of us are going to wake up from. I never understood that cliché until this very moment, when your conscious and subconscious collide and you realize there is no emotional or physical horizon.
December was the brief respite it always is, bursting at the seams and moving too fast. Donald Trump’s inauguration was only a few weeks and yet years away. There was family and music and food, and the nauseating thread of anticipation that ran through all of it. And I could hang it up for just a moment. For the day my only anxiety was the familiar one, where I try not to be too obvious about my snack consumption; I, the love-handled black sheep, in a family of annoyingly slender women—that seem to be getting even smaller lately. I constantly replay that quote in my head, the one about society wanting to keep women hungry because women on diets are less likely to be worried about revolutions. It’s true, but it doesn’t help—I still yank my shirt away from my body every ten minutes.
And then its January, and I’ve just watched a tech oligarch do the nazi salute on live TV behind the presidential podium on inauguration day. Elon Musk is an apartheid nepo-baby fuck shaped like a broken airpod, who will now be forever known in the american memory as the medically uncharismatic harbinger of fascism. And now everything is moving at the pace of a black hole suspended in molasses (I don’t care if that’s a batshit metaphor, I don’t know how else to articulate it). I’m rushing to finish the data privacy fact sheet I started in November to share with friends and family who won’t even open it. I’m begging people to start encrypted messaging. I’m making sure I know where I’ve stashed my books on emergency preparedness and guerilla gardening and mutual aid. I’m pre-gaming week night sleep with a glass of wine and an edible, praying this doesn’t become a habit that spirals. I’m practicing phrases in Spanish and checking ICE sighting updates. I go shooting for only the second time in my life and realize I’m actually a great fucking shot, with or without a scope—when it all goes to hell, put me on the roof I guess.
It's by design, the constant barrage of horrific executive orders and breaking headlines. And even though I recognize it as a classic tactic, I can’t help but be paralyzed in the chaotic wake of it, just like everyone else. My parents say I’m overreacting when I tell them about my scheduled surgery, and I don’t care. And just when I think my nervous system might be somewhat adjusted to its new rhythm, the white house announces a federal funding freeze. Victims of this latest assault on sanity include, but are not limited to; housing assistance, childcare, school lunches, clean water infrastructure, and my fucking job. I work for a federally funded Indigenous healthcare non-profit that serves Tribes across three states. I sit through an emergency meeting with our executive director and entire staff. No one knows what’s going to happen other than we might be out of our jobs in a year and the tribes we serve would lose the services we provide.
That was Tuesday.
Wednesday I force myself off the couch and into the gym by telling myself nazis don’t punch themselves.
Yesterday morning I wake up to a video of a trans women detailing her experience trying to renew her passport; she leaves without any of her legal documents under threat of having the cops called.
This morning the first thing I see is that the new leader of the FCC will be using some bullshit claim about commercials to go after NPR and PBS. What is it they say about journalists being the canary in the coal mine?
My body has always been subject to my extreme emotions. My happiness is never just that, its joy. My sadness isn’t just melancholy, its despair. And most potently, my anger is never anything short of rage. I wonder how my heart will acclimate to the constant pace of its new beat, now fast enough to rival a hummingbird’s. I’ve said this in other places of late, but I’ll say it here again.
People will tell you you’re paranoid, that you’re dramatic. They’ll judge you for what seems like tin-hat thinking until it’s not, when the last eight years have been made of nothing but broken declarations of “that’ll never happen.” If nothing happens, and they’re right, who gives a fuck. If they’re wrong, and you let peer pressure shame you into silence and gaslight you into apathy, you won’t get over what’s brought by your complicity.