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A series of poems based on a single line I had stuck in my head

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too many feelings lately

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The Cost of Daily Reporting

When I was a kid, I thought that I was good at

picking my battles, because, I’d ignore my gut reactions

to their demands, force myself through doing anything

they asked of me, as long as it didn’t directly hurt people.

In retrospect, however, while

I lived through it, I didn’t directly defy

my mother until I had turned 19, and by then,

I hated myself for times when I’d incorrectly identified

whether a choice could cause damage, and others,

when I’d thrown someone I cared about under a bus

because I couldn’t think of a better answer quickly.

It seems that any energy

I’d previously conserved while staying silent

must have been bound by expiration date, because

most of my memories of the years after that

are of fighting exhaustion.

I’ve been tired again, lately,

and I think it’s because, ever since

Trump was elected president,

I’ve been experiencing déjà vu,

or, because it takes energy to prevent yourself

from dissociating while seeing civil servants

experience your childhood, but either way,

I’m reminded of my first year in high school, and

being asked how my day went, and

the process of learning that this question had a

metastasizing grading system.

You see, silence was far from the only failure method,

one could also be punished for answers that contained

too few details or too much vague speech, those

that didn’t sufficiently criticize people from outside groups,

or those without enthusiastic body language, 

and as time elapsed,

these at first innocuous daily reports grew additional requirements,

like smiling, making eye contact, reciting what I ate

for lunch so it could be compared with an online receipt, and

naming all of the people I spoke to along with

a timestamped conversation summary,

and I’m lucky, that I love learning, because,

though much of my time at school was spent drafting

invisible timelines, my performance there under stress

wasn’t wielded as a weapon against me, 

like it was some of my siblings.

Though, maybe that internal script repetition is actually

the reason I was so good at last minute studying in the first place,

like, I had learned how to observe and restrategize

instead of how to relate, so I was essentially using the scientific method

to get through entire days while at the same time,

never learning how to trust the people around me.

I was often afraid to write down my own notes,

which, by the way, is a quality that I share with Da Vinci, so, 

basically, I’d already become a scientist, though, maybe

that’s what this method of child-rearing was designed for:

raising kids who are unbiased by emotional attachments,

who can find beauty in the mathematical elegance

of surveillance software because it’s calming

to have something make sense for once,

and who are practiced at tuning out discomfort, so they

don’t notice the downsides of working overtime.

What I’m saying is,

be careful, out there,

because we’re still

in the beginning stages. 

What I’m saying is,

they will mock you for lacking discernment

while gradually restricting your choices,

using every mistake you make as a reason to justify

their having taken control in the first place,

hoping to capitalize on a moment of your shame and 

drag it out across a lifetime, and

what I’m saying is, that maybe

it’s possible to prepare for that, as an adult,

hold onto yourself through it,

but remember, that method acting without regular pauses

might have killed an actor that played one of our batmen villains,

and that being forced to do something against your will 

can still be internalized as trauma even when

you’ve been handed the illusion of choice in it,

and that going into shock can happen anytime in that process

after which, you’ll be asked to violate another boundary, so,

what I’m saying is, 

learn to have as much compassion for yourself as you do for others,

and, when you experience shame, remember, that

once you identify a trauma reaction as something that lessens your worth

instead of an appropriate physical response to being victimized,

their accusations can start sounding more true even as you try to fight them, 

and one day, when you’ve spiraled far enough downward,

you might be frustrated enough at yourself that you’ve let their actions affect you,

that you start feeling like a hypocrite for being angry, and, stop fighting for a minute,

and, that’s all it takes to become truly complicit, my friends,

and from there, the guilt only exponentiates

without a chance to extricate yourself, so practice, now,

holding the space for yourself and neighbors that they won’t, because

they’re shouting that we’re somewhere between Scylla and Charibdis,

but the captain is not Odysseus or even a hero,

and we’ve been circling the whirlpool only as a reason to justify

feeding crew members to the hydra so we can downsize,

because rations shared with half the people go double the distance,

and when the population drops faster than the economy,

gdp per capita increases, so one

can eventually, irrefutably, claim that they

raised the country’s standard of living

through genocide.

I don’t know, what the answer is,

but I do know, I want whoever survives to remember

some level of dissonance, in their reality, a brainworm

so persistent, that eventually when they’re back

on solid ground, they do their own research, figure out

it was all cgi, except the killings, and right now,

I don’t know how to do that except to show kindness.

Although, to be honest?

People are kind of overwhelming

at the moment, so mostly, my ritual has been

wandering the ship at night, composing songs of our history

to the rhythm of its descent,

or carving our stories into its woodwork,

but lately, something strange has been happening, in that

when I sing, the spinning pauses, and, while

I might be reading too far into it being replaced

by a rhythmic rocking that reminds me of a strategy to self-soothe,

I’ve begun to wonder whether all of these monsters

are actually unhealed traumas, and if so, whether

with compassion, the black hole of Charybdis’s pull could be

reverse engineered, converted into a force field that’s

large enough to hold Atlantis,

and some days, I wonder if it already does,

and if its violent reactions are simply warnings screamed

at those who would destroy it to stay away,

which, would probably explain why the captain is so desperate

to convince us that this haphazard collection of creatures

are the real villains, here:

because the only things he fears, really, are

his crew finding safety without him,

and facing his own consequences.

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Defund ICE

The most recent executive order directs the Secretary of State to "ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization". If this were actually enforced equally, ICE would no longer receive funding (more info here), and neither would prisons (more info here). Instead, this effort will likely be used to withdraw funding for people seeking (consensual) medical care, while making a show out of closing down a handful of cases they find that are not the "always have been government sponsored" kinds. This is how eugenic policies function - making a big show of claiming to "not hurt people" while hurting people that have been socially defined as sub-human (immigrants, prisoners, women, queer people, etc.). Their lies are supposed to have just enough element of truth and "looking good on the surface" to suppress any arguments against them. Meanwhile, pro-birth practices will become even more coercive than before (more info here).

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I'm going to add some to this (I attended medical school and my dad is a trump-supporting evangelical ob/gyn).

THE LONGEST TERM OPTION YOU CAN GET IS PARAGARD!!

ADDED BENEFIT (for trans folks) IS THAT IT IS NON-HORMONAL!

More info here.

If you have not carried a pregnancy to term before, your doctor WILL try to talk you out of it. This is because it is physically larger than the hormonal versions like Mirena. I'm not gonna lie, the insertion does hurt pretty bad. But:

Cons:

larger/painful insertion

continue to have periods

Pros:

lasts for 10 years rather than 5

has been known to last up to 30 years

I'm sharing this because, I currently have the Paragard and am due to get it replaced soon, but my doctor flat out told me that if the laws change by that time, that she would recommend I go ahead and leave it in for another 20 years because she has seen patients with such "and they didn't get pregnant".

(Mirena on the other hand would stop releasing enough hormones to be effective more quickly)

And another thing: if you have vagina, and ESPECIALLY if you tend to fuck dicks, please PLEASE consider getting an IUD if you don’t want kids. We all know they want to ban abortion, but some people don’t know they’re also going after contraceptives. Rn access to contraceptives is protected by only a Supreme Court case (you know like what protected abortion), so that can go away. Contraceptives can be regulated to be in accessible or prohibitively expensive, but they can’t take an IUD out of your body (at least not in the foreseeable future). It’s good for sometimes 5 years.

I want to say this now because I was on the phone with a gyno for like 20 minutes on hold and only got a consultation today (which you sometimes need before they can schedule an appointment) because someone cancelled last minute.

I know people have had bad experiences with the IUD I know people have had excellent experiences. I’m going to document mine step by step so you know some things you can expect, if you’re thinking about it.

For context: i’m 25, have insurance through my job and live in a blue state, so my experience might be different/faster/easier etc. than yours.

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It's weird to live through this election having grown up evangelical...

I'm not shocked that people think like this. In fact, I'm struggling not to say "I told you so" to those who treated me like I was paranoid beforehand. Meanwhile, the agenda in 2025 looks familiar to me. What they want, is to have the level of control over all adults in this country, that my parents had over me growing up. I am laying low for a minute, because my body is tired, processing. It's not processing a "new apocalyptic" fear, it's processing that we have the chance of returning to experiencing the oldest fears I carry, the things I have spent my life working to get away from. As a queer elder in my community now, at age 30, I want to share knowledge I have to those experiencing these things, these fears, for the first time. Right now though, that knowledge is about "how to survive a crisis", and I've been writing poetry to process, because a lot of what I know looks like "how to lay low", and I have complex feelings about whether that information is "useful" to share since there are definite downsides to navigating through in this manner. No matter what strategy you use to get through this though, at the end of the day, we're not going to survive it unchanged. I'll continue to write about this, but today what I want to ask is that we focus on maintaining our kindness. Let us be people, communities, who convert strife to creativity, predation to evolution, and hate to love.

Let us be the filter on all this toxicity, to keep the air around us a little cleaner for those struggling to breathe.

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Psst... Queer American fam...

A lot of us are in survival mode right now, and who knows how long that is going to last. An onslaught could begin the first day, or it could be relatively quiet until a storm breaks, so our background stress/anxiety levels are going to be high, and some of the effects of excess circulating cortisol include anxiety, depression, trouble sleeping, headaches, digestive problems, and problems with memory and focus.

It’s normal to be struggling right now.

It means you’re human.

I know this sounds bad, but I’m restating a thing I think many people already know, because the thing is, a common tactic of the Right is to put people in a stressful situation and then blame them for their response to it (I’ve seen this referred to in other contexts as “reactive trauma”). As queer folks and people being targeted, we might think we are immune to this, but it works more insidiously than that. It can tear us apart, and it plays out like the following:

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As violence towards our community escalates, they will start publically pointing at things “we are doing” that are “causing” the escalation. 

They will use this term “we”, because they don’t understand that we are not homogeneous.

Sometimes we ourselves, as individuals, will not be part of that “we”. 

It will be terrifying, in that moment, to have rights stripped away (or worse) without having any perceived control, and that lack of control will feel like it is due to the actions of another being blamed on you. 

DON’T FALL FOR IT THOUGH!

This is misdirection. They do not have to hurt us, even if we are loudly gay, even if we protest the ways they are hurting us already.

Please, please don’t let yourself get to a safe place and wonder why others aren’t hiding. You are allowed to keep yourself safe. In fact, I encourage it, but please remember that those of us fighting this thing publicly are not the enemy. We need your support and solidarity.

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We are a big family with many different survival strategies:

We don't all have to utilize the same one

We don't have to stick with our original choice over time

We are not bound to only using one at a time

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I’m going to end this with a list of some survival strategies found in nature, because I'm definitely rambling and this was the thought I actually started typing this post with:

Do you recognize any of your own strategies in the list below?

Do you recognize any that are the opposite?

Can you hold that we are all in this together coping in our own ways, that we are not each others’ enemies?

Can you remember that "health" is a social construct, and that a strategy doesn't have to be the "best" one for it to be functional for the time being to keep someone alive?

I hope you can, because we will need each other to get through the coming years.

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STRATEGIES:

Becoming a spore (more info) - Shutting down completely for a bit - Sleeping more - Building mental walls

Playing dead (more info) - Retreating from social life  - Retreating from social media - Missing work

Camouflage (more info) - Going back in the closet - Codeswitching - Becoming extremely quiet

Mimicry of a more dangerous creature (more info) - Being argumentative/loud - Being assertive - Presenting even more queerly

Nocturnality (more info) - Nocturnality - Avoiding people - Staying in a social bubble

Distraction (more info) - Drag - Hacking - Certain forms of protest

Pursuit-Deterrent Signals (more info) - Making oneself needed - Feigning compliance - Presenting in “stealth” mode

Mobbing (more info) - Protests - Taking down websites - Coworker solidarity to create workspace change

Staying in the middle of a group (more info) - Being in community support networks - Going to therapy - Getting to know your neighbors

Sounding an alarm (more info) - Being loud on social media - Being loud in the workplace - Naming the quiet parts out loud

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These seem like they could be useful.

(While these seem like disparate topics, being a street medic rather necessitated learning how to take care of my mental health.)

I'm currently making a survival book, its going to inclue everything you need to run, how to cross borders (only if necessary), the safest states right now, the unsafest states, how to protect yourself in a red area, what places to stay at if your running, nearby jobs and other ways to get money, what foods are best to get, how to make certain foods, electronic related advice, the safest messaging apps, what not to say in messages, guide to doctors if you have a uterus or are a women, what plants are safe to eat, various poisons, how to deal with cops, a map of the local area and where cops hang out, how to survive in the woods, clothes you should bring, what to do about your period if your on the run, methods of birth control and what's the best, how to legally change your name and the amount of money it costs, how to a car if your in a non walkable area, first aid tips, how to get and use a burner phone, what type of weapons you might need and how to use them, a guide on how to use most commonplace guns, chargers to use for any devices you might bring.

All of it, I've got multiple notebooks to I'm spreading it across them.

I'm looking for other things to add too it, or if you see one or more subjects in here that you know a lot about/ can help with, feel free to reply or reblog with it, and if you don't want it attached to your profile, my asks are open and free to use. Anything is helpful, anything at all.

I'll be deleting this by January, you have until then to send.

Please, please please please, reblog this. don't just 'like' it

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Just so everyone knows, trans people are checking in on each other to see how many people we personally know who died today.

That’s how bad it is.