I honestly don’t think I believed that we would be here, but here we are.

There’s a thousand words and thoughts I could put down (and who knows, maybe that’s how long the post will end up being) about how wretched I feel. The misogyny is real, folks, as is the racism, and it fucking hurts. I feel less valuable than I did yesterday, less valid, less, less less. I’m afraid for people I love. I’m afraid for people I’ve never met that will suffer now.. in Ghaza and Ukraine and Taiwan and Korea. It hurts to know that over 50% of the population has had the opportunity to look at the blueprints for this presidency and all of the chaos and pain in store and… you know… voted for it anyway.

Today there’s calls to ban abortion, repeal the 19th, get rid of no fault divorce, mass deportation… all of it, all over the place. And my family? It doesn’t meet the criteria of being a valid family per Project 2025. As I was told many years ago, I don’t meet the criteria for being a woman since I gave up my uterus. And that’s exactly how I feel, like a thing. And it scares me to think of what thinghood will mean in a year. Two years. However long this goes on.

Here’s what I know… this horrible numb shock will pass. Maybe anger will follow, maybe just more sadness, I don’t know. What I’m holding on to right now are the individual people I care about, and I’m hanging on tight, cause it’s not just me that isn’t okay. In dealing with this, I’m trying hard to let go of that fear of being rejected and just being open to the people that I know are hurting. I’m drawing lines in the sand of my mind and saying, no, you don’t get to lie and create an alternate reality with your alternate facts. I’m promising myself that I will not let myself become hard and cold and cruel. I will not let them make me hate.

To paraphrase the crawler himself… They will not break me.

To close out and maintain my love of brevity, I’m going to give you words that keep going through my head today.

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”

― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself