There is no comfortable way to exist in a world where fascism has risen again and is viciously eating as many people as possible as quickly as possible. There is no way to stop seeing it without fully disconnecting from the rest of the world. And I doubt that anyone who’s here reading this has done that, or even truly wants to. I want a break from suffering, but not at the expense of compassion and anger on behalf of everyone caught in the beast’s jaws.
if we knew then what we know now, would we have made different choices?
I think it’s easy to assume that if we had more information, more knowledge, more wisdom, that when the choices were made that led us to this place, we would have done something different. But the different thing is probably the harder thing, and even though we all know that sometimes the better thing is the harder one, we don’t naturally choose the hard way.
All the choices that led us here would probably be made the same way again.
And even if that isn’t true, we can’t go back and do it differently. Maybe, hopefully, there is another timeline where this is not what happened. In another timeline, you and I and the people we love are safe. In another timeline, trans people were not continuously erased with violence. In another timeline, nobody was deported. In another timeline, perhaps there was more kindness.
I am afraid.
I have an idea of how all of this might play out, but seeing it happening might break me. I don’t know if I am strong enough to survive simply witnessing all of this. I don’t know if I am strong enough to stay alive and stay here and take care of my family and love everyone who has passed and everyone who is still here. I want to be, but wanting something to be true doesn’t mean that it’s true.
we are together but separate.
I am in our Thailand house. I can hear the cats downstairs, I can feel the heat radiating through the walls of the building, I can smell the shampoo from someone’s shower. I washed my laundry and dried it earlier and put it away just a little while ago. I had some lunch. I drank some coffee. I added things to the household shopping list.
And I read the comments on the thread I posted yesterday afternoon (which is the middle of the night in the part of the US that I’m from), and I am achingly aware of all the things I cannot do.
hey y’all — if you’re trans and you haven’t updated any of your documentation but you plan on doing that, DON’T
it’s too late for that. you probably won’t be able to keep your identity documents if you submit them for any reason. a deadname is awful but it’s literally not worse than a concentration camp.
I can’t help anyone with the very real very terrifying fact that some trans people have already been denied identity documentation, that some of them have had their documentation confiscated, that some of them are stuck in a limbo between having some documents changed but not all of them. I can’t help anyone who is now unable to leave the US legally if they want to. I can’t help anyone who might be deported or harmed or killed or disappeared. I can’t do ANYTHING but speak words into the chaos of everyone screaming in anger and fear, just in case it helps one person. Just one person. Please let me help just one person more.
Most of the rest of my family is safely in Australia, where the fascism can’t directly hurt them. But I’m not with them because I’m here with other family. I can’t smell their shampoo or wet hair right out of the shower. I can’t hear our five year old giggling. I can’t feel the hot wind or see the red dirt of a land I only recently met. I can’t cry on the shoulders of my partners or hold them when they need to do the same. I feel the distance and the uncertainty because nothing is ever completely immune from a sudden change.
I miss them and right now in this moment I am afraid, although I know that feeling ebbs and flows just like grief and just like any other kind of pain. Sometimes it feels like too much to bear, and sometimes I can be the person who speaks words of love and hope to my beloveds.
I don’t know what to say, really, except that this is so incredibly hard and none of us know how to get through it, not really.
All we have is who we are and what we give. Right? Even in a crumbling empire those words are true.
Who I am is an amalgamation of all the choices I’ve made and before that, the choices my parents and other adults in my life made, and even before that there were choices made by the people who wrote and published the christofascist curriculum that I was eventually taught while I was homeschooled, and the awful thing about that is I had no idea that’s what it was until decades later. As a kid I was unimpressed with it and took nothing from it except that it didn’t make sense to me, but that was as far as my thoughts about it went. I had no idea it would lead to a place like this.
What I give, I want to believe, is sometimes hope, sometimes truthfulness, sometimes really good jokes, sometimes meaningful insight, sometimes wisdom. And I also bring with me my trauma and my trust issues and my need for love and my fear of not being enough, and the behaviors that stem from those things.
If you were hoping I knew how to end this post I’m very sorry to be disappointing to everyone including myself. I don’t know how. I don’t think there is a way to end a conversation about these things, because the things don’t stop happening so that there can be a break for a while.
All I can do is cry and dry my tears and drink some water and remember to eat some food and do the little things that keep the cats and other people here safe and healthy, including myself. All I can do right now is try to make sure I said what I meant to say here, and then stop gnawing on my own soul and just publish it and hope, once again, please let me help just one person more.
Please try to take comfort in whatever non-harmful thing can bring it to you today. Please try not to carry the weight of this brokenness on your own back. Please take one deep breath. Please stay.
xox,
Nix
epilogue:
weep not for roads untraveled
weep not for paths left alone
’cause beyond every bend is a long blinding end
it’s the worst kind of pain I’ve known
weep not for roads untraveled
weep not for sights unseen
may your love never end, and if you need a friend
there’s a seat here, alongside me
— opening verse from Talking to Myself — One More Light Live by Linkin Park
featured images is a photo by Dewang Gupta on Unsplash
