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bladesparkor How To Stop Worrying Even If You Hate The Bomb.
On Tuesday night nearly everybody I know (even those outside the USA) was either glued to various news streams, or desperately avoiding said news streams via video games, "don't mention You Know What" streams, and other such distractions. It was a very stressful time when minds were inevitably fixed on the tossup between shit as usual or much worse shit...and I don't think it crossed my mind for more than ten seconds total the entire night.
That's because my eight year old had gotten sick enough that I'd taken her first to Urgent Care and then to the Emergency Room, where she was admitted relatively quickly (an hour and a half, sigh) and eventually diagnosed with viral pancreatitis.
I think that the moment when the election was called by the first major news outlet I was holding her hand and explaining how an IV line works and why she had to be brave and let them put one in her arm. Although it might have also been during the time when I was cleaning up after another bout of diarrhea, which is thematically appropriate. (The ER nurses are very busy, and I was already hella exposed to whatever nasty little pathogen the kiddo had, so I was more than happy to volunteer to clean up after her and spare them the biohazard as much as possible.)
The next morning I took a few minutes to log into discord, update friends and family on how things were going, and check in on how they were. Nobody was good. Everybody seemed to be in numb, helpless shock. I offered sympathy and understanding as much as I could, of course. I'm a queer trans pagan, the only way I could be further down the new order's pecking order is if I were POC or disabled too, but I didn't have time to be depressed about that, I needed to help the nurse get the kiddo upright so she could try to drink a little water, since if she could take things orally we'd be that much closer to her being able to get the IV out and go home.
"Helpless" by the way, is the word that's key to why I think I'm in a better mental place now than other people I know. It's not just that having a family emergency distracted me from world events. Plenty of my friends had excellent distractions. Good video games, interesting movies to watch, conversations to have, projects to work on, whatever. What they didn't have that I did was a way to make the world a little better.
Because that's what I did, Tuesday night and Wednesday morning and last night when I tucked my kiddo into bed at home at last and right now, when I'm running her a bath to get her all cleaned up now that she's feeling up to it. I took care of another human being who needed it, making her life and thus the world at large, a little bit better.
There are people around me making things better for me, too. The tumblr blogger who's running the Dinovember art event, and reblogs everybody's dinos so I can see them there without getting sucked into doomscrolling, for example. The friend of mine who got me into doing Dinovember after barely drawing anything for years, and who geeks out with me about each day's species and how cool they are. The folks at my UU church who have an e-mail thread for LGBTQ+ folks to share resources across state lines and make action plans to protect the most vulnerable in their congregations. I'm not reading the thread, I'm not up to that sort of thing right now, but I get a little glow every time I see a new notification for it, to know that it exists, that "my" people are stepping up.
The people doing those things aren't helpless.
There's the whole Mr. Rogers bit about looking for the helpers. I'm pretty misanthropic these days, I look, and I see more people doing harm than helping. But you know what? I get to be a helper if I want to, and that can't be taken from me by other people's shitty choices. I can't make all those right-wingers who probably watched Mr. Rogers as kids be the people he'd want them to be. I can't move that mountain even a nanometer.
That sucks.
But I also can't sit around thinking about how much that sucks, about how much faith in humanity I've lost, I just had to help my kiddo out of her shirt so she could get into the bath and get clean after spending days spewing out both ends. Right here and right now, that's more important.
You're not helpless either. You can't move that goddamn mountain, but somewhere right where you are, right there, right in the moment you're reading this, there's something you can move.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's starting up some event like Dinovember so other people can have something nice. Maybe it's trapping a feral cat and getting it fixed so there's fewer feral kittens, if you'd rather care for animals than humans right now. Maybe it's making sure your partner or roommate our cousin who's super depressed right now has something to eat by dropping by groceries or cooking a meal. Maybe it's joining that activist committee and tackling something bigger. Or maybe it's just opening up that folder of curated silly memes you've long collected and posting them somewhere for other people to laugh at.
Right here, right now, you are helpless on a worldwide scale. The depressing truth is, you probably always have been, and probably always will be. But you are never helpless on your local scale, and what you can do there does matter. That goddamn story about the boy throwing starfish back into the sea is obnoxious, but it's not wrong. The friend who got me into Dinovember is, for me, a bigger influence on my mental health moment to moment than Kamala would have been even if she'd won. That matters.
Me being there for my kid in the hospital matters. My husband bringing her clean underwear from home so she could have her own and not the hospital ones matters. The things we can do for each other, in our chosen villages matter.
It's not wrong to be full of fear and worry and even despair right now. I'm not trying to do the toxic positivity "it'll all be okay!" bullshit. Sometimes it's not okay. Sometimes there are things we just can't fix, and feeling awful about that isn't wrong at all.
But I do think it's wrong to let it paralyze you. And I also think that it's better for you if you find a local crisis to fix! Really! I'll say again I think I'm in a better place mentally than most people I know right now, and it's because something went very, very, very wrong, but it was a something I could do something about!
Find something wrong. Do something about it. You'll feel better, I promise.
P.S. The other thing I'm doing right now is offering refuge. My faith centers on the concept of Xenia, "hospitality to strangers." I cannot offer escape from the USA, alas, I'm stuck here myself. But I live in a blue state where my existence as a human being doesn't depend solely on the US government, luckily. If anybody reading this needs to flee a red state, permanently or temporarily to get reproductive health care, etc. I am offering a couch to crash on, (actually a very nice camping cot) with food and amenities entirely covered by me for at least a few weeks, no questions asked. I can't afford to get you here, but if you can get here, I will take care of you once you arrive. If you need that, you can reach out via e-mail, to spark.costumes@gmail.com and arrange things.
P.P.S. here's Dinovember day 6, Dreadnaughtus. I drew it in cheap off-brand crayons on the back of a hospital form, while the kiddo was using my phone to watch videos and keep distracted. Enjoy.
On Tuesday night nearly everybody I know (even those outside the USA) was either glued to various news streams, or desperately avoiding said news streams via video games, "don't mention You Know What" streams, and other such distractions. It was a very stressful time when minds were inevitably fixed on the tossup between shit as usual or much worse shit...and I don't think it crossed my mind for more than ten seconds total the entire night.
That's because my eight year old had gotten sick enough that I'd taken her first to Urgent Care and then to the Emergency Room, where she was admitted relatively quickly (an hour and a half, sigh) and eventually diagnosed with viral pancreatitis.
I think that the moment when the election was called by the first major news outlet I was holding her hand and explaining how an IV line works and why she had to be brave and let them put one in her arm. Although it might have also been during the time when I was cleaning up after another bout of diarrhea, which is thematically appropriate. (The ER nurses are very busy, and I was already hella exposed to whatever nasty little pathogen the kiddo had, so I was more than happy to volunteer to clean up after her and spare them the biohazard as much as possible.)
The next morning I took a few minutes to log into discord, update friends and family on how things were going, and check in on how they were. Nobody was good. Everybody seemed to be in numb, helpless shock. I offered sympathy and understanding as much as I could, of course. I'm a queer trans pagan, the only way I could be further down the new order's pecking order is if I were POC or disabled too, but I didn't have time to be depressed about that, I needed to help the nurse get the kiddo upright so she could try to drink a little water, since if she could take things orally we'd be that much closer to her being able to get the IV out and go home.
"Helpless" by the way, is the word that's key to why I think I'm in a better mental place now than other people I know. It's not just that having a family emergency distracted me from world events. Plenty of my friends had excellent distractions. Good video games, interesting movies to watch, conversations to have, projects to work on, whatever. What they didn't have that I did was a way to make the world a little better.
Because that's what I did, Tuesday night and Wednesday morning and last night when I tucked my kiddo into bed at home at last and right now, when I'm running her a bath to get her all cleaned up now that she's feeling up to it. I took care of another human being who needed it, making her life and thus the world at large, a little bit better.
There are people around me making things better for me, too. The tumblr blogger who's running the Dinovember art event, and reblogs everybody's dinos so I can see them there without getting sucked into doomscrolling, for example. The friend of mine who got me into doing Dinovember after barely drawing anything for years, and who geeks out with me about each day's species and how cool they are. The folks at my UU church who have an e-mail thread for LGBTQ+ folks to share resources across state lines and make action plans to protect the most vulnerable in their congregations. I'm not reading the thread, I'm not up to that sort of thing right now, but I get a little glow every time I see a new notification for it, to know that it exists, that "my" people are stepping up.
The people doing those things aren't helpless.
There's the whole Mr. Rogers bit about looking for the helpers. I'm pretty misanthropic these days, I look, and I see more people doing harm than helping. But you know what? I get to be a helper if I want to, and that can't be taken from me by other people's shitty choices. I can't make all those right-wingers who probably watched Mr. Rogers as kids be the people he'd want them to be. I can't move that mountain even a nanometer.
That sucks.
But I also can't sit around thinking about how much that sucks, about how much faith in humanity I've lost, I just had to help my kiddo out of her shirt so she could get into the bath and get clean after spending days spewing out both ends. Right here and right now, that's more important.
You're not helpless either. You can't move that goddamn mountain, but somewhere right where you are, right there, right in the moment you're reading this, there's something you can move.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's starting up some event like Dinovember so other people can have something nice. Maybe it's trapping a feral cat and getting it fixed so there's fewer feral kittens, if you'd rather care for animals than humans right now. Maybe it's making sure your partner or roommate our cousin who's super depressed right now has something to eat by dropping by groceries or cooking a meal. Maybe it's joining that activist committee and tackling something bigger. Or maybe it's just opening up that folder of curated silly memes you've long collected and posting them somewhere for other people to laugh at.
Right here, right now, you are helpless on a worldwide scale. The depressing truth is, you probably always have been, and probably always will be. But you are never helpless on your local scale, and what you can do there does matter. That goddamn story about the boy throwing starfish back into the sea is obnoxious, but it's not wrong. The friend who got me into Dinovember is, for me, a bigger influence on my mental health moment to moment than Kamala would have been even if she'd won. That matters.
Me being there for my kid in the hospital matters. My husband bringing her clean underwear from home so she could have her own and not the hospital ones matters. The things we can do for each other, in our chosen villages matter.
It's not wrong to be full of fear and worry and even despair right now. I'm not trying to do the toxic positivity "it'll all be okay!" bullshit. Sometimes it's not okay. Sometimes there are things we just can't fix, and feeling awful about that isn't wrong at all.
But I do think it's wrong to let it paralyze you. And I also think that it's better for you if you find a local crisis to fix! Really! I'll say again I think I'm in a better place mentally than most people I know right now, and it's because something went very, very, very wrong, but it was a something I could do something about!
Find something wrong. Do something about it. You'll feel better, I promise.
P.S. The other thing I'm doing right now is offering refuge. My faith centers on the concept of Xenia, "hospitality to strangers." I cannot offer escape from the USA, alas, I'm stuck here myself. But I live in a blue state where my existence as a human being doesn't depend solely on the US government, luckily. If anybody reading this needs to flee a red state, permanently or temporarily to get reproductive health care, etc. I am offering a couch to crash on, (actually a very nice camping cot) with food and amenities entirely covered by me for at least a few weeks, no questions asked. I can't afford to get you here, but if you can get here, I will take care of you once you arrive. If you need that, you can reach out via e-mail, to spark.costumes@gmail.com and arrange things.
P.P.S. here's Dinovember day 6, Dreadnaughtus. I drew it in cheap off-brand crayons on the back of a hospital form, while the kiddo was using my phone to watch videos and keep distracted. Enjoy.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-07 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-08 03:59 pm (UTC)There's certainly plenty to do at this moment, and it will almost always be local, relatively speaking.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-09 03:56 pm (UTC)This is a beautiful post, and I believe what you say so much.
I was born in 1963. I grew up in the midst of societal chaos and negative stereotypes (not to mention jailings) of people like me.
And yet I was also surrounded by kindness and compassion from many people, starting with my parents. That made an enormous difference.
The least I can is try to make a bit of positive difference in others' lives.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-10 04:28 am (UTC)