Don’t Worry Darling: Being Chaos, Part One

 

***Spoilers ahead!***

***Content warning—gaslighting, immobilization, all things patriarchy***

When the masterminds of Victory are training their housewives, they hypnotize and re-hypnotize them with images of women in synchronized movement, they even, inside the cute prison cul-de-sac of the mind they’ve created, require dance classes to teach them to move together in frictionless harmony. Instead of overtly espousing red pill/incel grievance, the leader talks about order. The Don’t Worry Darling vision of order helps me understand some things, both political and personal.

The Victory men aim to attain this order by literally immobilizing and silencing women and by convincing them they are happy in a pretty, refined, and regressive reality, looking beautiful (My KINGDOM for Florence Pugh’s floral housedress!) and serving the men. The simulation is classic Stepford Wives, where men go off to “important jobs” and women stay home and make perfect roasts. No one really eats or (At least I really hope!) physically fucks. It’s a (nonconsensual for women) happiness machine for a specific, shallow kind of happiness, one that gives helpless- and worthless-feeling men a sense of control and worth.

There’s a scene toward the end. Shortly before Florence breaks though and wakes up, where we flash back to her alone in her living room, just kind of singing and dancing around and being herself. She’s moving her body the way she likes, a moment of privacy and inner joy.

That moment helps me understand what feels so threatening to the real-life gender-policing white supremacist patriarchy—joy that THEY don’t specifically provide or oversee makes them feel like some levee has broken, like some force has overflowed and become a threat.

I still don’t understand why us having our own thoughts, rhythms, choices feels so threatening to them, but I’ve read On Tyranny a couple times and I think it’s just that: creeping, defensive tyranny. It feels us waking up, breaking free, and it wants nothing more than for us to shut up, be still, settle down into a reality they alone create.

The “they” here is I don’t know who. Tyranny and patriarchy steal everyone’s freedom, but I guess not everybody believes that. I guess maybe they (again, I’m only sort of sure who that is) think that if they can silence us (and who, also, is us?) make us be still and obey, then they’ll have a thing they’ll call freedom? No one would tell them that they said the wrong words or bother them with the pesky fact that democracy is in danger.

Oh, I see. Democracy is the opposite of being frozen in someone else’s reality. It’s agency, however vexingly slight. It’s movement and progress and disagreement and struggle, the furthest thing from being still. It’s not a synchronized dance routine, it’s kind of a mosh pit. Or a march. Or a Philadelphia victory parade.

Guest Writer! Doxxed by Bernie Supporters

I first met the young woman who honored my with her story when she was a campaign organizer for Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016. From the outside, she was powerful, self-assured, and hopeful in ways that put my Gen X when-I-was-her-age self to shame. I wouldn't have guessed, even with my election year + anxiety mind, how much she was going through for us. I'm really grateful to her and so angry that all of this happened to her--it's my hope that this story will spread far and wide, and that it will help folks understand why it's still and always important to speak out against the misogyny of our own side, no matter what threats we face from the right.

Doxxed

Written by an Anonymous Hillary Campaign Organizer

TW: Doxxing, Racism, Threats of Violence and Rape, Gaslighting

It’s no secret among people that know me that I worked for Clinton in 2016. My wall is still decorated in posters, my car is covered in bumper stickers, I even have a tattoo that reminds me of the good times on that campaign. However, the worst parts of the 2016 campaign still haunt me wherever and whenever I meet new people working in politics. It’s no secret among people I’m friends with that I was doxxed by Sanders supporters in 2016, but it’s something I’m not “supposed” to talk about. 

I joined the Clinton campaign while I was still a student. Originally it wasn’t because I liked Hillary any more than Bernie, as a woman I just wanted to know more about women running for higher office. My facebook was full of friends that supported Bernie, but were happy for me on the campaign. Until Caucus night in Iowa. 

The lucky part for Iowa was the Caucuses were so close and went so long that most people were asleep by the time the results came out and most people had to work the next morning, so I was left alone. By the time Super Tuesday rolled around, I had already been doxxed for the first time. 

I had gone to bed around midnight Central Time, but a few people I knew on the West Coast were still awake. I woke up to dozens of notifications on my Facebook. A friend-of-a-friend had made a post asking for people to tag the people they knew who were “sHillary sellouts” in the comments. I got tagged by someone I had worked on a class project with right before I left for the campaign. People started by replying with the generic “corporate cunt” or accused me of “voting with my vagina” until one of them decided to click onto my profile and things got a lot more personal. Whatever public info on me they could find, they commented about. In my messenger were people who screenshotted my parents and siblings profiles. They called my dad a “banana” or “coconut” and called him uneducated. I got messages that said my mom, my sisters and I deserved to be beaten and raped. 

I’m not sure if they actually sent anything to my family. If so, I never heard about it. But I spent the whole day with my supervisor reporting accounts and trying to lock my Facebook. Some of the threads I couldn’t mute or take down because the doxxers knew that Facebook hadn’t yet figured out a way to let people report comments and my name wasn’t in the original post. 

The most common comments and messages in between the threats and slurs were “you’re just too stupid to know Bernie is who is best for you.” 

We searched my name on Reddit and tried to get a few posts taken down. I didn’t have a Reddit so it wasn’t worth taking down more than the posts of my personal phone number, email, and address. Taking a look at the account, it appeared to be the same “friend” who tagged me in the first place. Luckily, it didn’t seem to have spread beyond Facebook and Reddit.

After locking down my account, I made a post about my experience. It was a little vague since I wasn’t ready to talk about the specifics, but mentioning “Bernie Bros” rained even more hell I wasn’t ready for. This time from actual friends. Comments talked about how the “Bernie Bros” didn’t exist, how I must be overreacting, how both sides had violent supporters and I was contributing to the violence by mentioning it when I couldn’t provide proof. 

The thing is, I was young and dumb. So was my manager. We didn’t know to screenshot the hate and report it up the chain, nobody told us that’s what we were supposed to do until we were trained again a week later. I couldn’t access the hate anymore, I’d already blocked the accounts. People were riled up in support of their candidates so the hate shifted from an anonymous barrage of insults to comments from friends denying my experience. I blocked more people. 

As I shifted around in the campaign and my role shifted, so did the hate. Since I was making calls from my personal phone, obviously my personal number got out. Prank calls, hate texts, my number was even scrawled in a men’s bathroom somewhere in Colorado. “A Monica Lewinsky hoe- one of Clinton’s bitches. Call for a good time.” Someone texted it, curious why my non-Colorado area code was in a Colorado bathroom. He was nice enough to scratch my number out, but not without a dick pic first.

From there the barrage of messages decreased significantly. Hate sent to my work email had to be saved in a folder, no deleting anything on the Clinton campaign, and flagged up the chain. I didn’t hear much back, there wasn’t much they could do. After the primaries were over, I did digital organizing for a state’s Democratic Party. Those messages weren’t nearly as personal, they didn’t know who I was, but my work email had 2 folders for the 2 different kinds of hate I was receiving- death threats, mostly directed towards the candidates and superdelegates from that state, and dick pics. 

I felt fairly safe and rather confident again, except my new state party was all former Bernie staffers. The email about Hillary “riding a rocket-sized dildo of corporate cash” that made me feel uncomfortable was laughed off by my coworkers and called well deserved. Cheap shots were made at the Clinton campaign’s expense on the Slack channel. The candidates and party chair had all supported Hillary, but the rest of the staff took shots at them too. As a “worker” people didn’t insult me personally or directly, but they insulted where I’d come from to get there. 

I sobbed on election night. My coworkers told me to suck it up. It was my fault for supporting the wrong candidate in the primaries. There were a lot of “I told you so’s” as I cried. 

The “I told you so’s” and “you just didn’t get that Bernie was what was best for you’s” followed me into a campaign in 2017. My full year of experience with Clinton wasn’t as good as the experience from the guy who volunteered on the weekends for Bernie during the primary. The insults followed me to a campaign in 2018 when one of my coworkers called me a “centrist pussy,” called me an “elitist rich bitch” on my birthday, and laughed in my face about how she drove across 3 states to Michigan just to vote for Jill Stein so the Hillary shills could “get what they deserved.” The gaslighting followed me into 2019 as the same thing started happening again to Warren staffers. I tried to come forward again with my new friends and instead was told “well we hear all these things about ‘Bernie Bros’ harassing people but I’ve never seen it. Hillary staffers don’t share screenshots because it was all made up.”

The thing is, it’s been years at this point. The email accounts I had for work are long gone. The phone that had all the screenshots broke after the primaries in 2016. The Facebook messages and tagged posts are long lost, and the list of blocked names on my Facebook has dwindled as people have deleted their accounts amidst Facebook’s many scandals. The internet has not lasted as long as my memories, especially as I’m continually reminded. 

“You just don’t understand that Bernie is who is best for you” has followed me into 2020 as I’ve watched Warren’s staff get caught in the same kinds of hate. 

It’s no secret that I experienced hell from Sanders supporters in 2016, but I’m not sure people knew to what extent. I’m watching the same things happen to the Warren campaign, often fueled by the same people as last time. I’ve been told that years have passed and my experiences don’t matter anymore and I should take down the posters and stickers that reminded me of the best year of my life. I’ve tried to move on and respect the best parts, but the worst parts of 2016 still haunt me as I look at the snakes spammed at Warren staffers on Twitter. It’s no secret that Bernie Bros harass people online, right?

The Grief and Artifacts of Russian Interference (Or: What Did I Ever Do to You, Barbara Kingsolver?)

A few nights ago, I got to officially sign up for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. (https://action.kamalaharris.org/signup/volunteer-website/?source=homepage) I’ve had her bumper sticker on my car for weeks (First primary sticker I’ve seen in my neighborhood!) and I feel so lucky and happy to have her as a choice, but before I can get truly excited about 2020 (Or even the awesome election work I have slated for 2019!) I need to process some stuff. My thanks if you’re kind enough to read it!

I hate to even type the name, but I really, really wish that Bernie Sanders were not in the primary race. Right after he joined, I could see that a few friends (Who I guess have less-curated feeds than I do) were already annoyed/beleaguered by Bernie Bro/Becky posts and comments. I felt the bullying fear and loss wash over me even as I declined to engage with those threads. After a few days of NOT TODAY, PUTIN-ing (https://www.vpr.org/post/how-russian-social-media-effort-boosted-bernie#stream/0) I broke down and cried. Suddenly, it felt like the Blue Wave was over, like the most diverse primary in U.S. history had been irrevocably colonized by Russian troll farms and a racist, dead-hearted, misogynist hate monger. And the worst thing about it is that that hatemonger is our own.

Even as I mourned the lost of that brief and wonderful Bernie-free race, I knew that friends and family members were getting excited about him (or that other, dreamier, but equally white guy), not even reading the women’s platforms. I knew that the quest not to engage about Bernie, not to explode about him at family gatherings, would be intense and long-lasting, and that the assumption of “reasonableness” would be placed only on the males in the conversation. I knew that the burden to “behave” and “be civil” would be on me, and that foreknowledge made me want to be preemptively shrill, unhinged, and hysterical. (I’m reclaiming all of those terms, thanks.) All of the 2016-to-present election PTSD made me feel crazy, trapped, and hopeless, even as I should still be enjoying the progress of the last three years and the promise of 2020.

The cult of Bernie Sanders has done unspeakable amounts of damage to America. This week, my feelings of fear and pain found a new level in, of all things, the new Barbara Kingsolver book. I HATE the practice of accusing powerful women of betraying women (while dudes get off scot free), but abandonment and betrayal are the emotions I feel. Until she hurt my heart in Unsheltered, I hadn’t realized she was one of my heroes, one of the brain-mentors out there in the world looking out for us, with her ecology and her love of nature. It stings that she turned on the kind of woman I am, so forcefully and blindly. Maybe she never would have thought of me as a worthy person, who knows?

(Before I get to my main point, I want to cover the fat-phobia in the book: Kingsolver indulges in the trope of using fatness as a symbol for hateful, brainwashed, selfish, Trumpish capitalism. She accuses fat passengers of “oozing” into a character’s airline seat and suggests that thin, small people are the next phase of human evolution because they fit more neatly into airline seats. All of that stung, but what she did historically and politically was way, WAY worse.)

Unsheltered is novel about climate change, late capitalism, frightened Americans’ eternal battle against science, and the erasure from history of a real-life female scientist. I like all of those themes, that’s why I finished the book even though it vilified my fat body and erased my own place in history.

The book is set in 2015-2016, and the rise of Trump (Whom she refers to as “The Bullhorn,” the use of which nickname seems like its own form of protest-shaming and civility-policing.) punctuates the story. We see hopeful, peaceloving Bernie supporters, whom Kingsolver calls simply “The Revolution.” (Relatedly, in the novel we see present day Cuba as a utopia, which I guess it might be, I’ve never been. Kingsolver apparently missed One Day at a Time episode that explained to white people why Cuban Americans don’t necessarily love seeing Che Guevara on a t-shirt. Here’s an old article that explains:  https://www.seattletimes.com/life/lifestyle/cubans-enraged-at-che-as-t-shirt-icon/)

What we DON’T see in the book is Hillary Clinton or her supporters. The closest Kingsolver comes to mentioning Hillary is when the protagonist sadly realizes that Trump “or someone like him” seemed bound to win the election.

I know it’s a novel and not a history book, but still. I knew that the erasing of women (particularly women of color, which many of Hillary’s supporters were/are) from history happened, but its horrifying to see it happen almost in real time! It is maddening and creepy to see Hillary and her supporters written out of this 2015-2016 story that I know so many people will read and love.

The erasing of women’s work makes me apoplectic, whether it’s past, present, or future. Not only does Kingsolver (like everyone who equates Hillary to Trump) erase a former Secretary of State’s lifetime of service AND HER ACTUAL POLITICAL PLATFORM from the author’s version of history, she is erasing the majority of Americans as well. She is dismissing the women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, disabled people, and ALL of the other Americans who worked, sacrificed, fretted, and took near-constant online abuse from all sides in order to try and move America’s future leftward, heartward, equailityward.

Where is the payoff from erasing the majority of Americans from history? Is it worth this much disinformation to continue to convince herself she’s right, to continue hoping that all of us who don’t present as socialist enough will be headed for the firing squads, to keep propping up the white-supremacy-serving idea that “identity politics” (i.e. the concerns of every group that isn’t white, straight, cis, able-bodied men) should be silenced in public debate?

I’m supposed to be giving out more benefit-of-the-doubt this year, so maybe she made the book so lady-erasing on purpose. Maybe her characters were monstrous fat-phobes to show how bad that kind of prejudice is. But three years of election traumaand 30 years of regular PTSD means I know how to spot gaslighting when I see it. I’m almost certain that one of the authors I love can’t be trusted anymore. I hate when things get all Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my brain, but I think Bernie and the troll farms (NOT a good name for a band) only teased out a misogyny, a Stockholm Syndrome, a gentle white supremacy that was there in all of us. Still, it’s a loss. It hurts to unfriend and unfollow, but maybe this loss will free my eyeballs for more humane books.

Open Letter: Medical Fat-phobia

To the Management Team at Mount Airy Family Practice;

When I first started coming to Mount Airy Family Practice, I found Vincent Tyson to be a very helpful caregiver. He gave me great advice for navigating my way out of Acute Stress Disorder and helped me find a lifesaving treatment for my depression—I will never stop being grateful for his help.

However, some things were just not right. During exams where a second person was required to be in the room, he would joke that “They just don’t trust us to be alone together.” What’s the joke there? That harassment precautions are silly?

And then there were the reports: Although I have never been treated for anything weight/heart/blood sugar related, I always had to read the phrase “morbidly obese” on my reports. (I understand that that may be a requirement of the insurance companies, but it still reads as a reminder to feel “less than.”) Though I’ve never visited Mount Airy Family Practice for vein trouble, “varicose veins” were always listed on the reports as well. Those two factors combined gave me the feeling that I was being assessed aesthetically rather than (or, I guess, as well as) medically.

Then, a few months ago, I did have a question about weight. I had gained a bunch of weight without significantly changing my exercise or diet routine, and I just wanted to make sure that all of my other vitals were okay. Weight gain is a common side-effect of Prozac, and it seems like a small price to pay for mental health. I did not ask Vincent for any help with dieting or losing weight.

Nonetheless, my report said that I had “weight gain from excessive calorie consumption” even though I had just finished explaining to him that my diet and exercise had not changed.

This is a common problem, often discussed in the body positive community worldwide. Physicians often dismiss and ignore true symptoms, data, and information from patients, listening instead to their own biases about fat people being lazy, gluttonous, and stupid.

I wrote to him on the Patient Portal to inform him that this was not okay, suggested some reading sources on the consequences of medical fat-phobia, and reiterated that I was not interested in dieting, citing the fact that the workup he had just done pointed to health. I told him what I still believe, which is that ignoring my actual data in favor of preconceived biases is just bad science.

Vincent then ignored the boundary I had just set and wrote back to again suggest that I go on a diet.

I then called my insurance provider to switch to a different PCP within Mount Airy Family Practice, but was informed by the practice that I would no longer be allowed treatment there.

After that, I received a letter from Vincent (whom I had told in no uncertain terms not to contact me again) gaslighting me, calling me a liar, and saying that I had been “unfair.” It seems that he felt it was unfair that I expected him to hear and respond to information that I gave him (and that medical tests gave him) about my body.

Though I have found a kinder and more humane doctor, it still makes me so angry and sad that your practice refused me medical care because I expected to be treated like a human being, because I didn’t want to be shamed for my size anymore, because I refused to accept Vincent’s skewed version over what I knew to be true. I was afraid, after that, that I wouldn’t find a doctor, that I couldn’t be treated medically without learning to apologize for taking up space in the world.

Your team put me in a dangerous, unfair place, but it seems I am one of the luckier of Vincent’s patients. When I reached out to neighbors about my experience, one woman wrote to me that he ignored her symptoms for months, and because she was losing weight, he “even joked that feeling crummy sure was a great diet.” This woman turned out to have ovarian cancer—due to Vincent’s dehumanizing refusal to hear her symptoms, this neighbor of mine could have died.

Not all forms of harassment are shocking and Weinstein-esque. Some forms of harassment are more mundane, the everyday reminders that we are expected to feel less-than, to apologize to our size, that we must reach a culturally acceptable weight in order to have our symptoms treated at all. They are dangerous and deadly habits that most medical practitioners accept and most insurance companies require.

Everyone can do something about this problem I want to urge you to find ways to remember to treat fat patients with the same dignity and respect that you give to normatively-sized people. The book The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor is a wonderful place to start.

Best,

Sharon Wiedmann

2018 in Protest Art (For Heather Heyer)

HOPEFUL was my word for 2018 and I definitely honored it every day.

Philly Women's March!

First art after Parkland.

More for Parkland, now and forever.

Seriously read this book, it will save your life!

(Except staple guns!)

The kids made me feel so honored when they used my posters for their walkout! I felt like a mini Shepherd Fairey but more importantly I was awed by their power and dignity. 

March for Our Lives, Washington, DC

This little girl was the best thing that ever happened to my art. 

Mourning Stephon Clark.

People will always be trying to convince Hillary supporters that she was (and we are)  no good, but we will always know better.

Remember Kesha at the Grammys?!

My love for Taylor Swift abides. 

Work epiphany!

My Say Her Name series helped me learn a lot about women of color who were murdered by the police. Committing to always learn more. 

 The absolute best thing that happened all year--protesting for Immigration Rights with my sister and nephew!!! (and my bff of course) 

We yelled at Mike Pence when he came to town,

Trans people continue to be targeted and terrorized by I.C.E.

Inspired by the Dietland show, I give my silhouette some love!

Counter protesting Unite the Right in D.C. We 100% WON this protest.

Ohhey remember how the Blue Wave turned out to be a thing?!

Hope she declares her candidacy for 2020 soooooon! 

Dirty Computer is the boss of my life forever. 

Two seconds away from being unhinged at the Capitol the day of Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Sobbing on the Capitol lawn but not giving up.

She survived Hitler but not Trump.

For the Proud Boys counterprotest in Philly--another time we  100% won.

Pausing on the Philadelphia Art Museum steps to listen to the Women's March rally,
I heard the crowd singing this to the tune of "We Will, We Will Rock You." It seems like a manifesto for the entire year.

I started off the year wanting to lose 40 lbs, but I got Fat Liberation instead. Thanks "She's All Fat" Podcast, "The Body is Not an Apology", and "Dietland." I hope to never again regret taking up space.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Three (Singing and Seething)

Not long after I started trying Restoration monthly, they welcomed a new minister. I’d been a fan of McKinley Sims (Okay, full disclosure: He’s super-dreamy. I had a crush. Sometimes the body leads the soul places, what can I say?) since about six years ago when he did some of his seminary work through the Unitarian Society of Germantown. He was always someone I felt like I could learn from, maybe because (as I later learned) he’s from Lubbock, Texas just like my ex-wife/BFF is. Something about that accent just makes explaining go down easy, I guess.

Still, I wondered why a congregation that had a stated goal of inclusivity and a Black Lives Matter banner out front would choose, in 2018, a white, cisgender straight man, albeit a presumably progressive one.

Encouragingly, McKinley’s first sermon as Restoration’s new minister gave me lots of hope. He said “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters,” which suggested that he might be trained in the ways of the gender spectrum. He made it clear that he is committed to immigrants’ rights and his first month’s theme was “sanctuary.” He talked about how building sanctuary takes work, takes facing problems rather than sweeping them under the rug. He even acknowledged those harmed by church-enabled sexual abuse, which I have NEVER EVER heard a preaching minister of any denomination so. NEVER. I’ve been alive for 44 years. That’s a big deal.

One Sunday a few weeks ago, McKinley went out of town. The Substitute Minister, the layperson leading the service, was a slight, middle-aged white guy. He seemed nice enough, so I felt safe to settle in.

Ever in organizing/canvassing/yelling-at-Nazis mode, the Joy I wanted to share that week was a mini book review. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister had saved my life and fired up my soul in the trigger-laden weeks following the Kavanaugh hearings, and I admit I was feeling quite evangelistic about it. I’d brought the book for McKinley because I thought he’d like it, and even though he wasn’t there, I carried it up through the Joys and Sorrows line anyway.

“Joys and Sorrows,” announced the Substitute Minister, “Are for matters of the heart, not for political announcements.”

I was SHOCKED! I had never heard them mention politics during that admonition before—one of the reasons I felt safe at Restoration was because it felt like a break from the politics-shaming of my family and of the world at large. Everyone there seemed political, I hadn’t yet had to feel like I was badly-behaved or a freak.

I SEETHED when it was my turn to share. The Substitute Minister shrugged and rolled his eyes as I said:

“I deeply resent being told that politics are not a matter of the heart so…NO…to that.”

(If I had it to do over, I would 100% say “FUCK that.” Live it, learn it.)

I gave my teensy book review, and the women of the congregation smiled and nodded.

As I sat back down in my pew, nearly shaking with anger, a tall and warmly hippie-ish white man, one of the congregation’s regular musicians, that “Thank you for saying that.”

The next person in the Joys and Sorrows line, an African American man who looked to be in his early twenties, made (YAY!) an announcement about the vigil for immigrants’ rights that his committee was hosting the following Tuesday.

Stoplight Guy wasn’t there that week. I missed him.

I tried to listen to the rest of the Joys and Sorrows of the congregation, but I was seething so badly I felt like I was hovering off my pew. I did the bad-habit thing of planning what I was going to write on the minister’s facebook page after the service. I wanted to start typing then and there, but that seemed beyond the pale. I tried joining in the singing, but everything felt dissonant and out of whack.

SURELY once McKinley knew about this, he would fix it, right? SURELY he would understand what the problem was?

Spoilers:

1.      He SORT OF understood.

2.      The service was about to get even more egregiously fucked up.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Two (Stoplight Guy Forever)

The week that the Unitarian Society of Germantown put “Welcome Pope Francis” on their sign, the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration’s sign said something that made way more sense to me: “Beloved Community.” I also noticed that their minister was a woman, so it seemed like it would be a safe place to be while the rest of the city (and my now-former church friends) fell in love with the pope. They put stones in water for their Joys and Sorrows just like USG did, but the congregation shared aloud if they chose to. One member shared his post-Catholic pain during that time, and that was the ONLY mention of the pope. The sermon, given by a layperson who was a woman of color, was explicitly in favor of LGBT rights (The Q hadn’t been widely added yet.) and ended with something like “Someday maybe I’ll be ready to sit down with Kim Davis and try to understand her. But not. Today.”

Still, for all of Restoration’s wokeness-before-that-was-a-mainstream-thing, it was hard to get past the architecture. Just like all of those cathedrals I’d studied in Art History, it was shaped like a cross. All of the characters on the stain glass were white people. Unitarianism, for an anti-racist post-Catholic, is like trying to break the cycle of abuse and then realizing you’re still abusing and being abused, but gently. It’s like one of those dreams where you know a place is your home, but you also know it isn’t.

But still, this spring when the voice in my Kirtan-blissed mind told me to sing in church, Restoration seemed like a good bet.

There’s a flaw in my personality wherein I’m still sort of looking for a perfectly welcoming, perfectly approving community/family. It probably comes from not having been particularly welcomed as a child, from inherited ancestor-grief in my XX chromosomes, or both. It’s a flaw that has caused me unending sorrow as an adult, to the point where if some group seems perfectly kind and safe, I should probably run for my life before I get too attached/expectant/hurt.

When I went back to try Restoration again, my child-brain started to spin its fantasy of perfect welcome. Here’s why my mistake was both understandable and irresistible:

When it was my turn in the Joys and Sorrows, I told the congregation I was feeling scared because the following weekend I would be headed to D.C. to counterprotest the (DELICIOUSLY FAILED! https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/08/my-wonderful-magical-day-of-yelling-at.html) Unite the Right rally. I said I wanted to honor Heather Heyer’s name. And then, the most intoxicating thing happened: the congregation applauded.

As activists, we are trained not to expect rewards or thanks (derisively called “cookies”) for simply doing the right thing. This is in spite of the fact that doing the right thing takes hundreds of hours of unpaid labor and is often physically and emotionally dangerous. Women are especially policed for this (we especially police EACH OTHER for this) and I think the phrase “performative ally” was one of the phrases most successfully weaponized by Russian trolls in 2016. Though I wouldn’t criticize another activist for being praised, I live in (misogynist) fear of being deemed too proud of myself, of being too happy to be in the struggle.

So when the Restoration congregation applauded my efforts, I felt a deep sense of relief and belonging, of sanctuary. As I sat down, I felt briefly free from the family alienation, the Bernie Bro concern-trolling, the microaggressions, the weaponized phrases. I just felt appreciated for a second—a very wholesome drug.

EVEN BETTER: A few Joys and Sorrows behind me in line, there was Stoplight Guy. Stoplight Guy is everything that is right with democracy, with spirituality, with the world. He was a tall African American man with caring-dad energy. He explained that he lived across the street and was there to update the congregation about the very dangerous intersection the church shares with him. He told us about his efforts to get the city to understand the need for a light. There were SO many accidents, he said. It really needed to stop.

If this church had a place for Stoplight Guy, it had a place for me. We sand “When Your Heart Is in a Holy Place,” one of my favorite hymns. I felt refreshed and energized, ready to let my guard down.