renouncingtoska

[renouncingtoska]

My 20-month-old has always watched the same cartoon songs before bedtime to wind down, but lately he has made it very clear that he wants to watch Sesame Street instead.

It’s to the point where he will completely melt down in sad tears if I even suggest anything other than Sesame Street before bed. Even if I assure him immediately after my faux pas that we can watch Sesame Street, he will still be all worked up, as if he is upset that I would even suggest such a thing.

Ben pointed out that he must have inherited this from me: he just wants to be understood, and it upsets him greatly to feel like he isn’t. 🥺

[renouncingtoska]

I’ve been experiencing some complex thoughts and emotions over the past few days, and have found myself more emotional than I expected to be. I think part of the reason is that my cynicism and anxiety has run so deep that I really never expected Trump to lose. After four years of living in this nightmare, I almost don’t even know what to do with this sensation of relief, as if I’m internally poking it with a stick, afraid to get too close.

Acknowledging and allowing myself to feel joy and hope has itself been strange. I have a complicated relationship with unfettered happiness. But beyond that, I am struggling through the cognitive dissonance of the immediate joy that I feel coupled with the dread of knowing that nothing is going to fundamentally change. That isn’t to say that there won’t be concrete changes for the net positive of humanity, particularly for the minorities that have been directly targeted by Trump. I am in no way trying to minimize that. However, the reality is that we will continue living in a status quo oligarchy under a moderate president who doesn’t see a need for revolutionary change. For many of us who struggle, our lives will not materially improve in many ways. The crushing boot of neoliberalism , capitalism and austerity will continue to prevent the majority of us from thriving.

Then, of course, there are my complicated feelings about Joe Biden himself. In spite of my cynicism, my default is to give people the benefit of the doubt and to feel empathy and affinity for them. I see Biden as a person who is uninspiring and problematic, but also fundamentally decent. Parts of his record over the years have been extremely concerning. And yet it’s hard not to be moved by his poignant life story and his love for his family. Ultimately, my hope would be to see the deep love and grace and magnanimity that he clearly exhibits for his loved ones applied in his political ideology and policies, but that simply hasn’t been the case.

The fact is that Biden wasn’t my first or second or even my fifth choice for president. His ideology and vision simply do not align with mine fundamentally, and in many ways I view his presidency as an inevitable trajectory of a Democratic Party that has moved increasingly right and abandoned its core principles and base.

I think about the excitement I felt at the prospect of a Bernie Sanders presidency, and all the hard work and genuine passion I put into electing him. And I can’t help but think about just how much better it would feel to be celebrating President-Elect Sanders right now.

It’s bittersweet. It’s hard not to feel extremely disappointed. And yet here I am, at the same time, feeling all this joy and relief. It’s a frustrating position to be in. There is a futility to it. A sense that I should just suck it up and allow myself to be present with whatever positive feelings I have wrung out of this for as long they last. Don’t I deserve that—don’t we all deserve that—after four whole years of being held hostage by a cruel demagogue? Maybe the only answer is to hold space for all these conflicting feelings and choose to be at peace with them. To allow ourselves celebrate, with the knowledge that it will be temporary and the conviction not to become complacent.

What I do know is this: the struggle continues. Biden will give us a better world than Trump did, or that any Republican would, but that’s a low fucking bar. We all deserve better than simply not living in a nightmare ruled by a ruthless tyrant, and I won’t stop hoping and fighting for that. I hope you won’t, either.

[renouncingtoska]

I’m trying to find a way to articulate just how deep my anxiety is as America enters another spike in Covid cases that I fear has no forseeable end in sight.

This is one of the starkest, bleakest reminders that we live in a country where a significant portion of the population (i.e. conservatives) are living in a completely different reality: one that not only denies science, but revels in their “right” to behave however they please as individuals, no matter how reckless or negligent that is to their family, friends and community.

During the spring, we at least had enforced shutdowns and quarantines of sorts, and a set of guidlelines that even many conservatives were at least willing to follow to some degree. Now, months in, the leader of their cult, who happens to be the president of the United States, has signaled to them that they have nothing to fear, and that they are in fact weak betas for even thinking about living their precious lives in fear of a virus whose severity they have deliberately downplayed.

I doubt we’ll have another shutdown—even though we should—for a variety of reasons: chief among them being pandemic fatigue and the reality that we live in a capitalist hellhole that values arbitrary notions of The Economy over peoples lives.

And so where do we find ourselves now? Entering another series of spikes where we cannot rely on anyone but ourselves and each other to keep us safe. And that means relying on insane community members who spout QAnon theories, share Plandemic videos and think they’re lions among sheep for refusing to wear a mask.

We’re leaving it all to “personal responsibility” in a country notorious for its individualistic selfishness, warped notions of liberty and obsession with “owning the libs” at all costs—perhaps even the cost of their loved ones’ lives.

This is a dark time, and we haven’t seen the worst of it.

[renouncingtoska]

In the deepest part of my soul I reside eternally in a remote Norwegian fishing village enveloped by mountains in the dead of winter.

[renouncingtoska]

mary oliver, from the deer

[renouncingtoska]

Medford Mail Tribune, Oregon, August 30, 1954

[renouncingtoska]

vulnerability is clumsy but it’s the only thing worth anything

[renouncingtoska]

Teddie’s Apple Cake courtesy of NYT Cooking 😋

[renouncingtoska]

I want the first pair so bad.

[renouncingtoska]

“The nights are long enough to lie awake, remembering. During the day we adapt and hold on.”

— Mark Jarman, from “From Another Planet,” Poetry (May 1974 (via memoryslandscape)

[renouncingtoska]

[renouncingtoska]

I cut my finger pretty badly a couple weeks ago while chopping spinach. I was having a rough day and my mind was elsewhere and I chopped my finger as if it were just another small bunch of greens.

Whenever something like that happens, some type of trauma or injury, I have this stark moment of realization that I have done something harmful to myself from which there is no coming back. Such a fine sliver of time separates the before from the after, and I am overcome with helplessness knowing that I have initiated this particular path forward and I am stuck here seeing it through, no matter how unpleasant it may be.

In those moments I feel angry at myself, at my own inevitable fallibility as a human. If only I had positioned my finger just a half an inch to the left or paid just enough attention to prevent this from happening.

But life doesn’t work like that. There is no taking it back. There is no eternal return, as Nietzsche posits, no second and third chance to get it right. We are on this journey, barreling ahead, clumsy and flawed beings that we are.



[renouncingtoska]

hello, fall in NH 🍂

[renouncingtoska]

eventyr: Tromsø, Norway. Yesterday was good for nightphotography, still this moment captured exactly one year ago is one of my favorite nights

[renouncingtoska]

I notice a huge difference in myself when I’m with my toddler for half a day vs. a full day. I am a part-time freelance worker, so for four afternoons a week, someone watches him so that I can get my work done. It also gives me a chance to run errands and get work done around the house. I am essentially a part-time SAHM.

I am trying not to feel guilty about recognizing that my personal ideal is spending half a day with him and not a full day with him. I think about how there are many mothers who choose to work full-time because they absolutely do NOT want to be a SAHM. I don’t judge them at all! And yet, of course, I find a way to judge myself for something similar.

I think part of the problem is that as a part-time worker and a part-time SAHM, I don’t really fit into either category of “SAHM” or “working mom.” I shouldn’t need to, but it can feel isolating not being able to align myself with either binary identity.

One of my eternal struggles is parsing the difference between genuine self-judgment and self-judgment derived from internalized societal expectations.

[renouncingtoska]

Look, we are not unspectacular things.     We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.       No, to the rising tides.

— Ada Limón, from “Dead Stars,” published in The Cortland Review

[renouncingtoska]

david mitchell / ada limón / danusha laméris