bosierosie: america as we knew it is falling to shit as we watch this president-elect create a…
america as we knew it is falling to shit as we watch this president-elect create a reality in which many of us do not exist.
how do I explain my grief to people like my parents who don’t share my reality?
they share the presidents’ reality, in which the things I mourn are not worthy of human jurisdiction, thus unworthy of grief when they are gone.
There’s a division happening. Being low-key and quietly going about our lives is becoming harder to do. Some people are able to wrap themselves in an illusion that things are better now, and will soon be better still. Others are grief-stricken and horrified.
The illusion is a lot more attractive some ways, and it probably shouldn’t be surprising that many are opting for it. But I’m not willing to do that, and I’m pretty sure that anyone who is perceptive and honest enough to be someone I follow is going to have real problems with it too.
So we’re left with this alternative, which sucks, and a lot of us are struggling with it. We don’t know how bad things will get, but we have a huge sense of foreboding that’s hard to live with.
There are a few things I’ve seen floating through my social media streams in the last couple of days that offer advice on self care and not burning out on too much outrage about too many things in too short a time; picking some smaller, more-specific aspects of the larger problem to focus on; and giving oneself the leeway to tune out the ugly and dip back into it according to one’s own schedule and capacity. I think that advice is worth following.
@sylvia-morris talked about having separate hardware/locations (computer in workspace vs. mobile device in the other room, I think she said) to allow her to get things done. I made a decision shortly after Election Day to consciously limit how much outrage I was going to amplify on Tumblr specifically, keeping Twitter as a place where I focus on those concerns, which allows me to exercise some control by choosing which platform to go on. And so on; I’m sure everyone is different.
I feel for you. The amount of support you’re going to get from people living in a bubble of alternate facts in which everything’s going great is likely to be quite small. I don’t know how you change that. That gulf is real, and widening. Maybe there will be bridges across it some day.
In the meantime, we’ll sing about the dark times.
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