The Longest Climb is Still Ahead

we need to get on board with what we are up against

First things first: I tolerate no abuse of any kind in my comments section, this is not a space for MAGA, and I will delete comments at will. I will not engage. I will block. Immediately. My newsletter is not a democracy.

Secondly: If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. If you like my work, please share it.

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Photo by Margo Brodowicz on Unsplash

A big welcome to the many new subscribers I gained over the past week or so! Shooting off my big mouth did something good for once? Sweet. Sucks about the harassment and trolls though. That’s the price of writing stuff I guess. A toss-off comment blows up and then you are besieged upon by angry men without your consent. But that’s what these guys do best, amirite?

HA HA HA. I HAVE JOKES.

SOMEONE HELP US AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think a lot of us sound a little unhinged at the moment. I am one unmarked van away from being an outlaw. It’s in my blood, partially from being a teenage girl in the 1990s. You’ll soon understand that some people have religion, but I have Tori Amos (who is in the pantheon of Women Who Tried to Tell Us). But weirdly, I feel saner than I have in a long time.

Clear eyes, full hearts, god help us.

A little bit of what I am about On Here: I started this Substack primarily to talk about being a late diagnosed woman with ADHD, but somewhere in the past month I decided to get all Towanda about politics. But let’s be real, we are facing something that goes way beyond regular politics, and having just grappled with my diagnosis in the wake of this, it is intense.

As you have probably gleaned, I have no chill. I now embrace that part of myself, because it comes in handy at times like these, because when I care about something I really commit.

And, somewhere in the past 48 hours, my fucks have all left.

Normally, it may have bothered me that wanting to skip a holiday got me painted as a BIG MEAN HATER. Now IDGAF. I’m sorry that I don’t want to be having a quiet anxiety attack in the bathroom while I do hours of work preparing an entire meal! How terrible of me. If you think that you deserve a good holiday on the back of a woman who is drinking in the bathroom to tamp down her rage and her sorrow, you deserve nothing from that woman at all.

This does not mean I will never ever speak to anyone who voted for That Guy ever again for any reason and those sort of absolutist declarations help no one right now. Everything at the moment is in the “for now” category. We are not on solid enough ground to say “forever” about anything.

But for the rest of this Year of our Lord 2024, I am not stuffing it down with a smile. There’s no way I could. And if you can’t either, there is nothing wrong with you.

Anger is a reasonable response to this bullshit and don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.

I will continue talking about ADHD and recovery in this space, but I am also going to be talking about abuse, specifically narcissistic abuse. This will be mostly from my lived experience - I am not a doctor or an expert, and I will not use this for grift. I can’t cure anyone, I can only share what I’ve gone through.

One thing we need to remember that abusers are not science fiction creations. They are just people. There are no monsters or heroes, although I will say some folks are doing their VERY best to test that theory of mine. We have not figured out how to stop the cycles yet, because we have all fed the cycle, and we think that abusers are Other People and couldn’t be us. The problem is we started to figure out way too late that we were lavishing attention on a narcissist which is quite literally their fuel, and then let them have the narrative that WE’RE the crazy ones. I should know. I lived in a house with a narcissist who convinced everyone that I was the crazy one.

The people who voted for That Guy are also just as human as we are. They have pain and hope and struggle and sorrow like everyone else. This is why people are telling us not to be hateful - and they are right, we shouldn’t. But if we continue to say that accepting what they have done with zero consequences is the better response, that is at our peril.

People say that cancelling a holiday because of “politics” is petty. Imagine hearing your own father say the equivalent of “well, I know you’re pregnant right now, but I still voted yes to letting women go septic in parking lots” and then being told not to take that personally. Fuck that. This is personal.

So, where do we start with all of this?

We need to stop playing the Blame Game with each other now¹, whatever ragged and worn coalition we form. For real. I’ve been guilty of it, we all have, but we have to stop. We do not have time. We have a lot of work to do.

I respectfully offer that it may be easier to figure out where to start if we are not subjecting ourselves to more abuse. If there’s a situation where we can protect ourselves and protect our spirit, we need to chose that. If that means the holidays are cancelled, that’s what it means. With quiet comes clarity. And we need some clarity.

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We’re Not Having a Hard Conversation About the Hard Conversations

There is a lot of (justified) anger that we - white people especially - aren’t talking to our relatives and having hard conversations. That instead of not going to their house for Christmas, we should be confronting them directly on their racism, misogyny, etc.

The time for that was 2016 (like so many things!) and its absolutely true that we should have done. I do not offer this as defense, but a reason: we endured four years of chaos topped off by a global pandemic. Now it’s too late, and we fucked up. I know I did, and shame on me. I will forgive myself for my trespasses because I have to. If I wallow in guilt and shame I won’t get anything done, and I can’t live there anymore.

The thing that sucks is that some people did try. And lately, people have been more confrontational with the relatives and friends who were going to vote for That Guy. I think what people take away from it when those conversations fail is that their family doesn’t give a shit about them, which is an understandable conclusion.

But, there’s another problem besides selfishness or apathy.

A sizable number of them literally do not believe anything we say.

Some people genuinely think that Democrats created a hurricane. We just go “that’s insane”, and yes it IS insane, but the bigger problem is its inarguable. You can’t argue with delusions brought on by a staggering dose of misinformation - which is a massive weapon that’s only getting stronger - and the chance to meaningfully counter disinformation through “tough conversations” is long gone. Who’s fault that is or why is besides the point. The horse is out of the barn.

It is a waste of your time and energy to get a person who believes absolute nonsense to disabuse themselves of it. In fact, it may be a direct threat to their psyche for them to do so. It has become part of their identity. If Trump is bad and wrong, they are bad and wrong, and they can’t be bad and wrong, because all day every day they are being validated and rewarded with sweet, sweet dopamine. Social media is a dopamine casino. And the house always wins.

Jess Piper just wrote a great piece about the right wing media ecosystem, and its a very big and very real problem and we got out-teched. HARD. This is beyond Fox News. Way beyond.

I am giving serious thought to tossing my phone into the sea.

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So…now what?

I started writing here because my diagnosis changed my life, I wish someone had figured it out because it would have made my life much easier, and I wanted to help others navigate it if I could. My desire to help people continues. I am still figuring out the best way to do that. I know that I will get there, even though it feels so overwhelming right now. And I don’t want to burn out. I can’t figure this out in a weekend.

The only thing I can do to counter this at the moment is to be loud and annoying, and to do that as honestly at possible. And loud and annoying is something I am real good at. I am not good with violence or in person conflict at all, for the record, and I hope I don’t need to learn how to be. For the moment, I’d prefer for my words to be my weapons, and this time I’m pretty sure where to aim them.

I am not a hateful person. I will not intentionally cause harm to anyone if I can avoid it. Anger is not hatred. I am angry because I give a shit. But I am not going to waste my time on things I cannot change. And that might mean some people aren’t in my life for a while.

I am focusing my love and my care on the people closest to me who have my back, and on people who are going to need my help. I have privilege others don’t, and I’m reserving my energy to help in those instances rather than wasting it on starting a fight or faking a smile. I lose either way.

I know it’s really much easier to decide that a person who refuses to accept abuse is hateful, that we must be better than them, but we’re so far past the high road that you can’t even SEE the high road.

I look at it like this: I am choosing to temporarily distance myself from people who are enmeshed in an abusive relationship with a narcissist. This also means we must not amplify the narcissist himself. I will talk about that more later, but if you are giving a narcissist attention, you are giving them exactly what they want and you are stuck in the cycle.

Let’s figure out how to get unstuck.

Thanks for being here.

*****

PS:

A note to my fellow ADHDers:

Whew, what a week. Anyone else’s meds not working for shit? Anyone else work real hard to get off the social media teat finding themselves up at 2 am stuck in the good ol’ Infinite Scroll? Anyone else lying awake all night with their brain in a death spiral, powerless to stop it? Anyone else experiencing nuclear levels of emotional dysregulation? Anyone else googling “how to survive in a fascist oligarchy” and then somehow reading about how to build a rabbit hutch for 45 entire minutes? Yeah me too.

I don’t even own a rabbit, let alone many rabbits that would necessitate an entire hutch.²

These idiots would try to kill them.

Some moments, I feel like I have completely regressed. I haven’t even looked at my planner in two weeks. I was killing it with habit tracking and goals and all that shit, but America looked at my lil’ planner and went HOLD MY BEER. Flossing was the first thing to go, as usual.

But - there are signs that the work is sticking. I’m not chugging a bottle of gin. I am eating BADLY, but I am not binge eating. And somehow, I did not buy a pack of Marlboro Lights and smoke them all. God I miss smoking. Being this pissed off looks way cooler with a cigarette.

The work you did is still there. This is a big setback and its gonna take a minute. This was crazy destabilizing, and just because you have no executive function at the moment doesn’t mean that your brain finally went ahead and broke for good. I am feeling much more solid now that the shock has worn off. I was shocked by this, but not surprised, if that makes sense. Like when I knew Roe would fall, but still felt stunned when it actually did.

On the bright side…my brain LOVES worst case scenario! This is where I shine! When you’ve gone through some shit in your life, you are always preparing for the other shoe to drop. Welp. Shoe dropped! THIS IS MY MOMENT.

My coping food right now is bagels. With loads of cream cheese. Lox, if I’m feeling fancy. Nothing beats a good NYC bagel with cream cheese and lox.

Keep drinking water and eat some protein. We’re somehow going to keep going. We still have to put pants on and go to the store. If we could only find our keys.

1. This DOES NOT APPLY TO BLACK WOMEN. They get to be mad at us forever, blame whoever they want, and be as petty as they want to for as long as they want to. They more than earned that right and I will not entertain notions to the contrary.

2. That one is for my Elder Millennials. Pour one out for us, for we have arrived at yet another Unprecedented Disaster.