November 11, 2024

(First: I was reminded that today is 11/11 and thus National Corduroy Appreciation Day and although I may not get out of my pajamas today, I wish you all corduroy joy.)

Hello everyone. This is a personal and not a political post. I learned during the intense years of COVID that when we’re all hurting and in distress, sometimes we are not our best selves. And I want to explain how I feel (which may not be different from how you feel) and why I may act certain ways now and in the near (maybe longer than near) future. 

Also, although I may mention things that I’ve experienced with some of you in the past week, truly this post is not meant to be a passive aggressive missive aimed at any one particular person or group of people. If, as a result of this piece of writing—or something I have said or done, or something I will say or do—I need to make repair with any one of you and haven’t already, I ask you to please let me know privately that I need to make repair with you.

I am having a really hard time holding my own feelings, which seem to shift by the minute. The way I generally feel about spending time with other people is that I have a high expectation of my own behavior. And if I don’t feel up to behaving in a way that I think will be pleasing to other people, then I don’t want to be around people. I strive to be pleasant and fun to be around, smart, funny, and lovable at all times. This is a lot to expect of myself, and it’s something that I have worked on in therapy to little avail. Through my writing in particular I have tried to become more honest about who I really am as a person, but it’s really, really hard for me to be around people when I just feel devastated and angry and terrible and apocalyptic. I am an extrovert when I’m doing well and an introvert when I’m not, and since COVID I also have a need for more and more solitude and rest.

I’m feeling unbelievably sensitive and tender. I am mostly having a really hard time holding other peoples feelings, opinions, and thoughts. I know that what’s probably best right now is to reach for you all and for us to come together and for me to be compassionate and loving and that’s what I want to do. But right now my inclination is to isolate. 

My current job is as faculty in a social justice PhD program and I have a lot of very freaked out advisees and students who are relying on me to try to help them carry on in their brave social justice work. This is already feeling like it’s depleting me of the ability to do this for anyone else in my life. I am sorry for this, but because I need to make money to survive, I think I may need to conserve my energy for my students and for keeping abreast of my work.

Since Wednesday morning, every time anyone says anything about “the next four years” or talked about “four years from now,” all I want to say is that I believed him when he said that there’s never going to be another election in this country. I don’t feel love for this country. I don’t trust anyone in either party to save us. I don’t have faith in our constitution or our county's ability to uphold it. In my opinion, the people who have been elected or appointed to uphold the constitution or interpret the constitution are part of the problems that got us here. I have no faith in any of our government agencies because I think they will all be either transformed, eliminated, or staffed with fascists in the coming months. I have no faith in the founding principles of this country because the people who founded this country and wrote our constitution were religious fanatics, capitalists, White Supremacists, slaveholders, men who sought to control and essentially enslave women, and people who perpetrated genocide. I think this country is a failed experiment. I’m feeling really done and I just want to get the fuck out of here. 

I have been trying to reach out via text to many of the people I am closest with. But if I have not been reaching out to you or did not attend something you invited me to, or if you’re not hearing from me, or if I don’t accept your invitations in the near future, it’s because I am feeling like I want to isolate and curl up and it’s because I’m not capable of behaving the way I think people will like. I’m sorry. I’m generally feeling like the only people I want to talk with about the election and the future are other Jews or people who also have genocide trauma and having-prepared-all-our-lives-to-need-to-escape trauma. For example, one of the most nourishing conversations I’ve had over the past few days was at a conference I just attended in Chicago, with a colleague of mine who is Russian and had to escape Russia and she can never go back. I feel these folks are the ones who will most understand how I feel right now and will most listen to me without judgement or argument. I may be wrong, and for that I apologize, but that is how I feel.

I am really afraid of becoming someone that people dread hearing from because all I have to say is something negative. Like all of you, I am grieving to the core of my being. I’m unfortunately not surprised at the election’s outcome because I was doing a lot of calling for the Harris campaign and for SURJ in the days before the election and I spoke with women and people of color and people speaking English with accents who told me they were voting for Trump. But being unsurprised doesn’t mean I’m not devastated. 

One thing I’ve learned from some internal and peer counseling work I’ve been doing for the last few years is—and this is true for most of my friends and loved ones—that I am historically not supposed to exist. People have been trying to wipe me/us out for millennia. Women. Queers. Jews. BIPOC people. Witches. To me, the best revenge is to survive. That’s what I intend to do and it’s possible I may do some things that you think are selfish in order to do so. My response to this may be try to live outside this country, and I feel both exhausted and guilty about that. This is unkind, but true: I also at this moment don’t want to deal with arguments against pulling up stakes and moving to another country. So I ask you to have some compassion and give me some forgiveness for where I am right now. If I have been argumentative, I apologize. If I have been sending you missives of doom and gloom, I apologize. if I disappear for a while, I apologize. If I do move away, and if this hurts you, I apologize in advance. 

I would very much like to work on being silently compassionate and loving for my friends and loved ones while you are also working through your own feelings. Some of you may, just by saying how you feel or what you think, say things that upset me without meaning to. Like I said, I am sensitive and reactionary and tender right now. 

I am also seriously considering deleting my Facebook account because I think social media has contributed to where this country is right now. I deleted Twitter after Musk took it over and I don’t have Tik Tok. It makes me sad because Facebook is a way I keep up with a lot of you, although I’ve barely been on social media at all since October 7, 2023. 

I think the take-home message here is—as my ex-partner Mike used to say—I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch. I ask for your compassion and forgiveness now and into the near (maybe far) future. With love.