Beneath the Fear Is Love

this leaf-rubbing is on the back of a voter registration form. He named it "Ms. Jane in Autumn" because the colors reminded him of me. It's the one piece of his artwork that I didn't give back. 

I don’t mind saying that I am a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy champion. After eighty-bajillion years of therapy, I can argue down almost any distorted negative thought that depression and anxiety send my way. (I often think our political system could use a course in CBT. ALSO, all of our other systems.) But there’s one negative idea I just can’t get away from: The conviction that I will never again find love.

I understand that I have no way of knowing. I would never tell a friend they were too ugly, too fat, too old to be loved, but this is what my brain thinks, particularly when it comes to my (main) attraction to masculine-presenting people. I don’t even believe in those standards, but they are so, so hard to refute. It’s sort of the core of my belief system that everyone deserves love, and I know it gets found in a million different ways by everyone, including by me.

There’s no real reason to assume that the romantic part of life is over for me, but in some ways, it would feel like a relief to let it go. Mostly, I go along buoyed by gratitude, goal-setting, and Prozac, but the yearning, well, lets go ahead and call it loneliness, is still there, stubborn and ardent as life. Sometimes, a flash, a mini-panic that SOMETHING IS MISSING AND I’LL NEVER FIND IT.

The last time I really-and-truly fell for someone in a (briefly) requited way was in fall of 2016. It’s startling to realize that that was THREE ENTIRE YEARS AGO. In my brain and heart, it feels like not very much time has passed at all. The love is thorough, the pain is fresh, and it makes me SO MAD AT MYSELF. I would never stand over a grief-struck friend and yell GET OVER IT ALREADY but that’s exactly what I feel like doing to myself.

We met at my old, dear library afterschool program job—he was the cutest security guard. He’d take frequent shifts in the children’s department and draw or play Legos with me and the kids. One day, we painted galaxies, I forget why. Okay, so neither of us was being particularly amazing at our jobs in those moments, but the kids made more art that school year than I’ve ever facilitated before or since. So that’s something.

One Friday, we played Monopoly—I forget why, usually I banned it because it stresses the kids out and who wants to play a game about rent, anyway? But that early-evening, it was like we were all counting money and being play-tough in a bubble of peace. His knee was touching mine under the table and it was maybe the deepest sense of belonging I’ve ever felt—like he and I and the students and the library and the city and the WHOLE world were a family for a few minutes.

On the day after Daylight Savings Time ended, we were supposed to have a Pokémon walk but he had to cancel.  He texted, though, that he really did like me back and we decided to plan a date. It all felt so settled and hopeful: I would canvass my ass off, Hillary would win, and then we’d snuggle. (That is maybe the saddest sentence I’ve ever typed in a lifetime of sad sentences.)

The day after Hillary lost, I walked into the library, where the podium for our kid-election was still decorated with red, white, and blue stars, and started sobbing. He was summoned from upstairs to come and comfort me. Holy Jesus, that hug. That love, that man, that end-of-the-world day.

Our date was that Friday—I remember that it was Veteran’s Day because he was off from the library and could come visit me on the Rosemont campus, the bookstore being one of my three jobs at the time. (Oh bookstore, another lost love.) As soon as I took his hand though, he changed his mind, or maybe he’d come to let me down easy? Either way, he did nothing wrong, it was just dating, just life. We spent a few hours chatting, shivering, and half-cuddling under a beautiful yellow tree, bright with cold sun. Nobody did anything wrong, just a shift that couldn’t be unshifted.

Logically, (ha) there was no need for a broken heart. A bad match isn’t personal, I know, I know. But after the election, I needed a win so much, TOO MUCH. (It wasn’t really registering yet how important Kamala Harris’s win would be to me.) I needed the pre-election hope to somehow come back, and I needed that hope to be him. Now that I type it, that’s a lot to have put on one human being, and on myself as well.

Now, whenever a cute guy starts to seem even a little possible, I’m petrified. I’m like a spooked horse who wants to kick down every barn wall and escape to a meadow of infinite Gilmore Girls episodes.  The littlest hope from a blushing handsome face makes my unhelpful brain want to convince me that IT WILL ALL COME CRASHING DOWN, that love or even just a little spark of attraction with somehow make it 2016 again, with the panics and the sobbing and the rage-driving and the Thanksgiving ruining.

By some miracle, I’ve made a happy, angry, protest-filled life in the past three years, but it feels like the slightest loss of control, the smallest step towards vulnerability, would take it all way. When I was little, I used to wish so hard for anyone (besides, so amazingly, my mom and my three closest friends) to protest with, and now, though the world is so full of suffering and fear, I, by some crazy grace,  have a version of the life I’ve always wanted, connected to ALL of my fellow humans in a way I would have never thought possible, with every march, every sign, every letter to congress. For the last three years, my love has been the whole world, which is wonderful but not conductive to snuggles. Still, I don’t want risk anything taking that connection away.

As I wrote this out, I could feel my heart loosening a little, letting out a little of that vast reservoir of love I had in fall of 2016. I’m grateful to have reached the point of honoring that love. I would like him, the beauty and trauma and tragedy and silliness of loving him, not to take up so much space in my heart, but he does. Maybe I’m a little bit trapped in the amber of that week because it was so important, because he was so important. That’s good. Maybe I’ll just love him as long as I need to, which is probably forever, and then maybe I’ll love someone else. Maybe even that someone else’s someone else too, who knows?

Maybe time isn’t frozen in my heart. Maybe it’s just going at its own pace. Speaking of time, this took forever to type because I’ve been texting two cuties on Bumble, so it’ll probably be okay.

2016 Fucking Happened

The idea behind this quote was also super-racist:
 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/21/sanders-identity-politics/94221972/

"There is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton," Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications and one of the researchers who worked on the study, told The Post. 

Linvill said the tweets analyzed as part of the study "give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought."

Sanders was "just a tool" to the Russians, Linvill added, and "a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html

Painting the painting above was meant to bring me relief, but it made my blood boil over and over again. It brought back all of the physical sensations of fear and abandonment and shame, tensing up as the notifications rolled in, as stranger friends-of-friends lined up to tell me how stupid I was, what a liar, how if we lost the election, it would be Hillary supporters’ fault for wanting representation—Oh, sure, a woman, just not THIS woman. The horror and sadness and moved-to-loudness I felt when my friends and then even Roxane Gay said they’d been afraid to speak up for Hillary. All this was before it had really sunk in that Trump could be our rapist-in-chief. Before the regrettable, inarticulate fury with which I ruined Thanksgiving and then rage-drove five hours, only able to find comfort in the new Gilmore Girls episodes.

Since then, I’ve learned to use my anger mostly-constructively. I’ve been so heartened and lucky to be in a city with progressive values and frequent marches, so glad that it’s only a day trip to yell directly at the White House or the Supreme Court. I’ve come to rely on visits to the Hope Diamond or long stretches of phone-games-in bed to calm down after protests. I have written every strongly worded letter that came to mind. I made a chart in case I can’t pick what to write to congress about on any given day:

And I’m very happy to be going as Rose Quartz for Halloween, because it means I’ll be ready with a DON’T MAKE ME GET MY PLANT ARMY sign come the Women’s March.

 Over the summer this year, my BFF and I listened to the Lawfare Blog’s Mueller Report podcast (https://www.lawfareblog.com/introducing-report-podcast-series-lawfare) on family trips and on dreamy drives home from the beach. The jazzy music that plays to indicate direct quotes was our song of the summer. It was a weird comfort to listen because so much of the time we’re gaslit into forgetting our election was stolen, but it was. As paranoid, panicked, as fight-flight-or-freeze as I’ve always been, even my anxious imagination could not have come up with THE SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

As outlined in the epigraph, a tyrannical enemy leader was able to exploit Bernie supporters’ misogyny to commit an act of warfare, to steal our election, and somehow this contingency still thinks they have the moral high ground. And it’s not just bigoted white men on his side—plenty of badass women who have NO ACTUAL NEED of obedience have joined the #BernieSquad rather than supporting any of the wildly qualified women who are running. AND YET I STILL FEEL BAD FOR NOT BEING NICE ABOUT THIS.

Sometimes Bernie/Russia rage comes out when I don’t necessarily want it to, especially when it comes to my better-behaved straight white lady friends. They do plenty of activism in their own ways, but I’m honestly sick of them guarding their social capital by outsourcing their anger to less-gender-conforming women like me. I found myself on a tear during a lovely Longwood Gardens brunch, during a beautiful walk in the autumn woods that is supposed to be abut other things.  I want to ask them to stop being so obedient, so diplomatic, to stop hiding in the shelter of their agreeableness and appeasing the men and the institutions they serve. I seriously hate it when people blame women for Trump, but I also seriously need these ladies to be braver, to close their empathy gaps, honestly to be just better friends to me and to America.

As these conversations progress/dissolve, I become conscious of the other lady’s “civil” moral high ground. Why does everybody have to argue, they ask. Why couldn’t you have been more diplomatic? Just be in community and everything will be okay. Perceiving their assurance of the innate superiority to my unhinged self, I feel more unhinged. I apologize a thousand times for being so mean. I don’t want to apologize any more.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Five

Back to last Sunday in a minute, but this morning in church, we had a guest speaker, an organizer and woman of color who said we should push outside our liberal boundaries and realize that those who hate might do so because they don’t have enough love. She wanted white folks to use our identity as a way in, to go back to where we’ve left and try again.

Disarm, she said, and listen.

Unitarians are like that.

Though I generally prefer to spend my energy on targeted communities rather than their/our attackers, the speaker did give me a chance to reflect on the compassion I DO feel for white nationalists and others who don’t have the benefit of diverse lives. Amy always scoffs/admires when I talk about how sad I am for racists, but I am. Anyone can empathize with the feeling of being trapped inside what one already knows, with being afraid of those unlike us. I do feel sad for those 25-or-so men on the other side of the fence last week in Lafayette Park. It would be lonely and sad to rely on superiority for a sense of worth, to be so scared they turn to hate. But I’ll probably always be the one to yell, fight, and turn away while others with more people skills reach out to those in hate groups. I think both approaches are necessary and okay.

Back to the wonderful yelling. Craning our necks. Chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Police on horses lined up facing us. The crowd startled and seemed to retreat about something and I smelled something bad. The nightmare sequence activated in my already-altered brain. The smell might have been a confederate flag burning, or just a funky cigar, but my brain read it as tear gas, which to my knowledge I have never smelled. I grabbed Amy amidst the (she said later it was very mild, if any) chaos and said “I have to get you out of here.” By the time we found a friendly tree a few feet away from the crowd, I’d started to return to normal. I breathed. I ate peanut butter and jelly and hoped no one nearby had a nut allergy—back to regular everyday protest thoughts.

“I’m DONE WITH THIS,” I said, but as the food entered my system and I could see that  everyone around me was doing okay, I knew I could stay a little longer.

Possibly it was thunder that had startled the crowd. The sky opened up and poured rain into the humidity, onto everyone’s signs. Watercolor colors dripped down onto my Disarm Hate shirt.

Amy wanted to see the other side of the fence and my curiosity took over from my fear, so we waded all the way into the crowd, trying not to poke or be poked with umbrellas or dripping signs. We sang:

“Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.”

We sang “We Shall Over Come.” We sang “This Little Light of Mine” Then more na na na nas. I decided that all this singing meant that it qualified as church.

The police horses were so beautiful. I stood there feeling outraged on their behalf. Why should they be wearing riot helmets? They never did a thing to anybody, why should they be dragged into our mess? I guess it’s too late in human history to be mad about the domestication of animals, but sheesh!

I didn’t stand there fuming about the horses for much longer. A police leader came out with a bullhorn and told us that Unite the Right had gone home, and now we needed to go home too. It was the first time I’d ever felt like we’d won a protest.  Dance parties broke out! Whoops of joy came up from the crowd. It was right around the time I’d told my check-in person that we would hit the road. I put my waterlogged sign into an overflowing recycling bin and felt free without it. We did it. We won.

On the way home, Amy drove and I scrolled though news story after news story. While most of them acknowledged that the counter-protest had far outmatched the hate rally, they didn’t show the images of the march the way I saw it. News videos showed the most armored Antifa members and they showed Jason Kessler draped in the American flag.

On our neighborhood thread, one guy told me that my personal experience of the day was “fake news” and a lady told me that I was wrong because my perspective didn’t match those of the mainstream news.

Part of the reason I’ve written this down in so much detail is that people are already trying to convince me that it didn’t happen. The way so many on our team tried to erase Hillary’s primary win. Tried to erase the fact that she won the popular vote and so would seem to be, on some level, likable. Like people try to erase pretty much all of the work that women do. Ever. Like I teach my tutoring students—we’ve got to give ourselves credit for every step of the way. It’s the only reliable way to get it.

Speaking of 2016, amidst this liberal love-fest, this celebration of (momentary but no less important) unity, it’s important to remember that we on the left have our OWN white supremacy problem. (I mean, in addition to Mass Incarceration. Please watch 13^th) There’s still a small but loud minority of people (mostly white men) on the left what say that “Identity Politics” don’t matter (please listen to Kamala Harris lambaste them for this on Call Your Girlfriend: https://www.callyourgirlfriend.com/sen-kamala-harris/) and who undermine the work and contributions of not just Hillary Clinton but of her supporters, which means women, especially women of color, LGBTQ folks, disabled people—there are those in our party who want to silence us/them. (Amy just explained to me that the silencers are known as the alt-left. I had no idea that was a real thing!)

THERE ARE PEOPLE ON THE LEFT WHO BOOED JOHN LEWIS! NOT IN THE SIXTIES! TWO SUMMERS AGO!

So I’m glad we teamed up against the nazis on the right and won this round. But we still have to keep pushing back against the sexism and racism of our own party if we want last Sunday (AND THE BLUE WAVE) to have the lasting effect that we want.

Thank you for listening and being on my team. Love you a bunch.

This Election Year, Leave Your Troll Farm Training Behind

In 2016, Russian Troll Farms helped Americans hone our unfortunate skills of hating women and people of color (and our/their pesky “identity politics”) to undermine our election and support straight white male supremacy on both the right and the left, including efforts to suppress the African American vote overall. (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/22/587921536/how-a-russian-troll-factory-waged-an-aggressive-campaign-to-disrupt-the-u-s-elec) I’ll stop writing about 2016 someday, but not until its influence is over.

Here in 2018, we’re seeing a lot of progress despite the ongoing fascism at the top. We have so many more female candidates, LGBT candidates, and candidates of color to root and cheer and canvass for. But as much as those candidates will have our support, as much as I believe in the Blue Wave and the Rainbow Wave and all of the other against-evil signs that I see in our near future, it saddens and angers me that all of the inspired candidates entering into or persisting in our political sphere will face the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and white male entitlement of Trump’s/Sanders’s/Putin’s well-trained army of commenters.

As Bernie’s adherents turn their Hillary-hatred toward Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, heaping them with comment-contempt and demonizing all Democrats as shills, will that hurt the Blue Wave and end up (maybe unintentionally) supporting Trump’s agenda? Will the Left’s version of white male supremacy end up supporting the Right’s? I hope not. I know the White Male Supremacist Left is louder than it is pervasive (That’s why they don’t get, you know, THE VOTES.) but I still think reclaiming the government in November is going to take extra badass efforts on the part of all intersectional feminists and our allies.

While the misogynist Troll Farm mentality is concentrated in the MAGA/Our Revolution camps, our training in abusive commenting bleeds into everything. Last year when the Al Franken story broke, my misery at being triggered by that gross picture was made worse by the fact that many of the members of the Marching Onward Facebook Group (Which has previously felt like a marvelously comforting group of Hillary supporters to me.) refused to acknowledge Franken’s misconduct, preferring to gaslight, debase, and undermine his victims. I hear that they have since moved on to trashing Kirsten Gillibrand for daring to speak out about Bill Clinton’s abuse of power.

Misogyny, abuse, voter suppression, racism, and cultural gaslighting are not just the product of some right-wing “other”—they are everyone’s problem, everyone’s fault, and EVERYONE’S responsibility to change.

I live in a very liberal neighborhood, but since 2016 I’ve been learning more and more about its general Get Outness. I’ve learned over and over that the label of “liberal” does not translate to “not-misogynist” or “not white supremacist.” But still, it usually seems like things are getting better. As we gear up for the primary election, we are lucky enough to have a choice between two Democrats of color for State Representative; an incumbent guy with lots of charisma and all the best endorsements, and a lady challenger who is very vocal in opposing the NRA but about whom it can be hard to find other information. I’m likely to vote for the incumbent because he seems more vocally supportive of LGBT rights, but I feel protective of the female candidate, for good reason.

The other day, on our neighborhood Facebook group, a neighbor asked a perfectly straightforward question about the female candidate’s endorsements. Her question seemed to trip some sort of Manchurian Candidate wire in many neighbors’’ heads. They saw this innocuous question as a chance to show contempt for the female candidate, dismiss her accomplishments, and denigrate Democrats in general. I just Googled the male candidate to make sure and yep, he’s a Democrat too, but for ladies, it’s for some reason a sin to have the benefit of belonging to a party.  It was a thread of very low-key misogyny, but it let me know that Troll Farm mentality is still in effect, and I pushed back and then turned off notifications.

I’ve been suspicious of calls for civility ever since I realized they most often come from conservative white people, so I won’t ask for civility here. But since I can’t go back in the political TARDIS to 2016 and get my Bernieful neighbors to respect women’s accomplishments and help us save America from Trump, I can ask them for that respect now. Stop erasing women’s accomplishments, and stop pretending that misogyny is anybody’s revolution, that it does anything but support the status quo. For America to prosper, to get all of the freedom and inclusiveness our country is supposed to stand for, you have to stop using the comment section as a way to put women in our place. Nobody signed up for Troll Farm Hate Training, it was forced upon us. It is way past time to let that training go.

Woke Misogyny Is Hard to Write About

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, online violence

***PLEASE NOTE: I’m writing as a white cisgendered women, and every oppression that happens to me happens so much more often to women of color, trans people, disabled people, etc. My point of view is extraordinarily privileged in so many ways. As I write about the ways in which misogyny and rape-victim-blaming can intersect with the callout culture approach to social justice work, it’s likely it will seem like I’m forgetting that privilege. I am not. I’m interested here in what the identity of rape survivor really feels like in a body, and how misogyny and victim-blaming still exists even in the most well-intentioned circles. A disclaimer can’t assure that I won’t get it wrong, but this is the space where I get to get it wrong so I can learn. ***

A few weeks ago, I read the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL book The Body Is Not an Apology (https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/) by Sonya Renee Taylor. The book came into my life at a time when I was feeling stuck, and it felt like a lifeboat. The theme of the book, to wildly over-simplify, is that radical self-love is a starting point for making the world a less-terrorized place for bodies. Not just an I-love-my-curves kind of love, well that too but also a deeper love that celebrates even the difficult, ESPECIALLY the difficult, parts of the process each of us is going through. The book gave me space to truly love myself, even to forgive myself, and I felt ready to grow and serve the world better.

I LOVED The Body Is Not an Apology, I still do. I evangelized it all over town, I couldn’t help myself. My neighborhood even has a body-positive book club, and I joined even though I am super wary of groups. The problem is, Sonya Renee Taylor is a friend of some former friends of mine, and the IRL side of the life-saving book knocked me off of my radical-self-love square almost as soon as I got on there. The world, like depression-brain, will always find a way to remind me to live in self-criticism, to remind me that nothing I ever do will be good enough. The depression-brain part is on me, but I didn’t get this way in a vacuum.

While I was going on a kickass self-love adventure with TBINAA, the book club’s Facilitator was having a spoken word journey. This is where things went awry. A few days before the group was meeting for the second time, Facilitator posted a video of a poem to her facebook group. Not Sonya, that would have been lovely, but Mean “Body Positive” White Lady. M “BP” WL was a sort-of-friend of mine until she wrote a blustery post attacking Hillary voters (There may come a day when I’m over the 2016 primary, but this is not that day.) and, when I pushed back, called me a “vagina voter.” How can you call yourself body positive if my anatomy rules out my enfranchisement? Anyway, the usual things happened after that, some people pressed like, some people collected cultural capital by piling on and saying GOD KNOWS WHAT, I blocked the thread and moved on. Mean “Body Positive” White Lady, through very little fault of her own, became a figure of fear in the trauma-soup that is my once-beloved National Poetry Slam community.

For almost a decade, the thing that has made it hardest for me to hear and be heard in online interactions with the NPS community is the pile-on. In fairness, in about 2010 when I secondhand-witnessed my first NPS pile-on, social networking was fairly new. Troll farms, 4chan, revenge porn, etc, weren’t part of the public lexicon, and there wasn’t as deep an understanding of the violence that the online world can perpetrate on women, particularly queer women and women of color. Because of my magic/annoying PTSD brain, the mob-mentality aspect of the pile-on jumped right out at me.

The First Big Pile-On (meaning, the FBPO that entered my consciousness, not the first they had) didn’t happen to me, but also it sort of feels like it did. The details are fuzzy to me, but I’ll do my best. A White Lady Slam Leader was sort of live-facebooking the finals of a national slam competition in…2010? She was making the point that the options for how to be a woman and get slam points are very limited, and in making that point, she said something racist—NOT OKAY. I’m glad people spoke up about her misstep, but the response was wildly disproportionate, with everyone weighing in, comment after comment. To her credit, WLSL saw the whole thing as a learning opportunity, and I learned a lot too, but alongside our progress toward awakening came a clear message: You don’t get to comment on poetry culture, and if you do, you are eligible to be ripped to shreds. At the same time that the mass-pushback was helping us make progress and learn, at the same time that it was helping marginalized voices be heard, it was also sending women a clear message to stay in our place, to keep ourselves small and stop trying to comment on the culture as a whole.

Not too long after that, my own work with the Philadelphia Poetry Slam started to feel like I was being used and like my work (We’d call it emotional labor now—YAY TERMS!) was being taken for granted, for only-sort-of-related reasons. For good and ill, the NPS community stayed with me through my friend feeds. That’s how, in that benighted spring of 2016, I got tangled in the tail-end of a much more upsetting pile-on.

A queer white woman had written a performance poem about her rape. Some of the language in the poem implied that her rapist was Mexican, when he was, in fact, white. THAT’S BAD! It’s upsetting and definitely a problem but also IT’S A POEM SHE WROTE ABOUT HER OWN RAPE. Even though she was a very privileged rape survivor, she was still a rape survivor, and I felt like a PUBLIC PILE-ON was maybe not the best way to address it. I’m a super-lucky rape survivor too, but I don’t think I could’ve made it through the NATIONAL TRIAL BY FACEBOOK that this woman survived. I’m sorry, but no one deserves that.

Like the WLSL, this poet was willing to learn from her mistake. The Woman Who’d Written Her Rape Poem Wrong wrote a public apology on facebook, including an apology for taking private time to heal. By now you’re yelling JANE! DON’T COMMENT ON THAT THREAD! Because I never learn, I commented. I told her she’s still a person, still entitled to self-care, and that taking time for herself was not going to make there be more racism. Then I blocked the thread, vaguebooked about how the NPS community can be shitty and misogynist and went to bed.

What I didn’t know was that the Queen Bully of Poetry Land, who used to be a friend of mine, was at the center of this pile-on. My phone buzzed around 3 AM, QBPL letting me know she thinks I’m as racist as Susan B. Anthony (There’s a certain line of thinking that suggests feminism can never be a thing because of Susan B. Anthony’s poor choices. If this same standard were applied to men, there would NEVER BE ANYTHING EVER.) She told me that I had failed at teaching not because I’d lacked self-care, but because of my own weakness and entitlement. Accurate, but not helpful. After I blocked her and went back to sleep, she texted my ex-wife/BFF to yell at her for having #blacklivesmatter on her facebook page, since clearly we both must be unredeemably racist for thinking a white rape victim is still a person.

No matter how much I distance myself from that NPS scene in my heart and mind and feeds, it still hangs like a tattooed ghost over my creative life. I was surprised when my jangledness about those years-ago pile-ons knocked me out of The Body Is Not an Apology Book Club, but I’m glad to give the Facilitator the chance to go on her spoken word journey without worrying about my weird residual triggers. Today, for me, radical self-love means admitting that this stuff still matters, that there’s still so much fear and un-worked-out pain, so much letting go of the ten-to-twenty-years-ago NPS community that still sometimes knocks me off balance. Mostly, that off-balance is good. Mostly, I’m getting somewhere.

What America Owes Hillary Supporters (Besides an Apology)

This story starts with a #janeworldproblem that would surely make Roseanne Barr think I deserve whatever abuse I’ve gotten, but nonetheless: On my way to my monthly get-the-Trump-out massage appointment on Saturday, I got triggered by one of my favorite and usually-most-comforting podcasts, Pop Culture Happy Hour. Without any kind of disclaimer or warning, they lead off a review of the (fascist propaganda) reboot of Roseanne with a quote from the show’s rotten-to-the-core title character. The line was a contemptuously delivered slur against Hillary Clinton, calling our rightful president a “liar, lair pantsuit on fire.” I’ve been writing a lot lately about feeling the chill of real evil, and the horror of it hit my spine before I banged on the button to turn off the car stereo.

And so, I drove the rest of the way to my appointment steaming with frustration, feeling hurt and betrayed that a trusted podcast would inject something that awful into my afternoon. Remember when John Oliver told everyone to write a sticky note that said “NOT NORMAL” to help keep us from getting sucked into a moral cesspool after Trump’s (stolen) election? DID POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR LOSE THEIR STICKY NOTE? Is that why they were reviewing Roseanne as if it were a regular sitcom and not a love letter to the fictional “white working class” whom we’ve somehow excused for voting for a racist, misogynist monster because being poor somehow entitled them to their hatred? (Please read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The First White President for the history of the “white working class” as it is used to support racism throughout American history. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/)

The Roseanne line triggered physical fear and anxiety because of the abuse that I and my friends took when we were working our asses off to get Hillary Clinton elected. Unfortunately, as I’ve written about many times, that abuse did not just come from the right. In fact, the worst hatred I encountered during the 2016 election was during the primary, in the form of the (We now know it’s Russian troll farm fueled https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/bernie-sanders-russia-2016-election-interference-415691) openly misogynist, fanatic zeal of Bernie Sanders supporters.

Primary flashbacks had resurfaced a few days before when a local feminist educator and spoken word leader I’ve admired for a decade posted a “Bernie 2020” themed article on her facebook page. In the conversation that followed, I learned that she hadn’t known about the Russian interference or about the misogyny. https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2016/05/being-woman-in-time-of-hillary-haters.html (Admittedly, the troll farms part doesn’t prove he was a bad candidate, just that Russia saw him as destabilizing. I can’t really see destabilizing as an inherently bad thing.)

My friend kindly asked for some articles to send her in the direction of my viewpoint, and I sent them. (Remember how Roxane Gay at one point felt afraid to endorse Hillary?! ROXANE GAY! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/hate-that-doesnt-hide.html ) But honestly, I was a little frustrated, because so many of us have been telling this story for TWO YEARS and my friend had somehow missed it. Algorithms, probably, but still. I kinda wish that instead of sending articles, I had just asked her to believe me.

Hillary-trolling abusiveness has a much more important effect than bumming me out on the way to my massage appointment or making me misogyny-splain on facebook. Though I’m with the Women’s March for life and I believe we’re much bigger than our (often hateful-dude-admiring) leadership, many of us were inspired to fight the patriarchy off of our march last year when they tried to make Bernie Sanders one of the lead speakers of our conference. http://time.com/4981357/bernie-sanders-womens-march-convention/ This week, the Women’s March partnered with Bernie voters’ “Our Revolution” group, which is the opposite of intersectional in that it views economic injustice as the only valid form of injustice.

To me, Hillary-bashing is partly “identity politics”--both Trump supporters and Bernie Bros seek to erase the importance of identity in the struggle for justice, while Hillary’s campaign was built upon acknowledging ALL forms of disparity. Many of her speeches include some variation on this sentiment:

“And we Democrats agree on defending all of our rights – civil rights and voting rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights, LGBT rights and rights for people with disabilities.” (PA primary victory speech, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjjPDHAQxLU)

When people on the right and left dismiss “identity politics,” they’re trying to erase one of the few political candidates who made me feel fully included in her speeches, who cared about the struggles of the children I teach and the children in my family.

            In addition to the all-identities-but-straight-white-male-erasing ethos of Bernie and Trump, the horror my body feels about that Roseanne quote comes from the good old fashioned gaslighting of it all. Because of the erasure that comes from the right and from the (mostly white male) far-left, I’ve had to check the numbers many times to remind myself that we won. We chose her. We voted. We won. And then I watched formerly peace-loving friends go off the rails entirely, accusing us of theft, defending the chair-throwing, doxing, vicious homes-of-delegates-calling entitled white voters in the name of being “progressive.”

            Other than the physical toll that it took to watch Bernie and then Trump gaslight Hillary/America in rallies and on debate stages, other than the troll-trauma that still lives in my body, why is this still important? Why not just let it go in the name of unity?

            Mostly, I do. I’ll defend the Women’s March to anyone who questions them, even as their leaders make misogynist alliances. I’ll canvas alongside neighbors who would have called me a stupid shill if they’d known me in 2016, I’ll join marches with local justice groups who have carried “Killary” signs in the past. I continue to participate in a political system that defaults to punishing women who get involved, because the only way it’ll get better is if people like me stay involved. But the compromise costs me, it takes a physical toll no matter how much I prioritize self-care.

            To Pop Culture Happy Hour, I would say, for those of us deep in the struggle, you weren’t just sharing a quote from a mean lady saying a stupid thing. You were placing into my otherwise pleasant afternoon one of the most poisonous, vicious, damaging ideas to ever hit the American airwaves: that women, especially ambitious women, cannot be trusted. We are not liars. It’s past time to believe us. To America, I would say, hear us and take our side. It’s time for you to stop punishing us for trying to save your asses from Trump.

We Did an Incredibly Badass Thing, and We’re Still Doing It!

“Of all the men and women running for president, I found her to be the most qualified, comprehensive in her understanding of domestic and foreign policy, progressive and charismatic. I wanted to write about her and engage rigorously with her ideas far more than I did. But I didn’t. In part, I did not have the energy to deal with the inevitable backlash, from corners right and left. In part, I was trying to understand the popularity of Bernie Sanders because so many people I respect supported him and his ideas. And of course, there was that overconfidence, which, in hindsight, I am ashamed of. Nothing should be taken for granted in a democracy.”

--Roxane Gay, Hate That Doesn’t Hide, August 18,2017

Roxane Gay is not in the top billion people I would blame for Trump’s election. She is one of the most powerful voices of the Resistance, and I tend to think of her as President of the Survivors. Though I’ve never met her, (she did write me a kind and thoughtful rejection letter back when she was editing Pank) she has been with me in my survivor’s fight. If Hillary Clinton is my psyche’s political mom, then Roxane Gay is a big sister, fighting off bullies with her grace, honesty, and self-reflection.

But the fact that this incredible hero of mine felt afraid to voice her Hillary support helps me understand what all of us, including/especially Roxane Gay, have accomplished in these last three years.

A few nights ago, I was driving home at the end of a yucky, crampy, stressful-for-really-no-reason kind of day. I had the window open to stave off some stress-nausea.  A big white SUV pulled up next to me at a stoplight, and the young white man in the passenger seat started screaming at me:

“Did you really vote for Hillary?! Fuck you!”

He threw a just-lit cigarette at me (Thank goodness it didn’t come in the window.) and kept screaming as they drove away. I got home and called my best friend, jangled and afraid, sitting on the bathroom floor in case I threw up. At first I asked Amy to come over and sit with me, but an eerie calm came over me all at once. A voice in my head (or heart?), the voice that has taken me bravely though all these years as a trauma and abuse survivor:

He's mad because he has already lost. He knows he can’t make us go away.

I thought of my bumper stickers and all of the wonderful momentary connections they’ve allowed me to make—the happy and sad waves, the curious expressions, the kids who eagerly turned to see who was driving. I forget which anti-tyranny expert said it, but the signs of Resistance aren’t there to convince the other side, they’re to let the oppressed know they’re not alone.

By supporting Hillary Clinton, no matter how, we changed the cultural and political landscape forever, and we did it in a constant minefield of triggers, under threats,  condescension, and shaming from both Trump’s party and our own. We may not have won the election, but we’re still here, and we are coming together in ways I would never have dared to dream of.

I’m not just writing this to shore up optimism, but to honor the constant daily achievement of survivors. Like many other women, I struggled to feel safe and sane during and after the election. Like so many other women, I flashed back to my own rape and abuse every time I passed a TV with the news on (WHY ARE THERE SO MANY TVS ON EVERYWHERE?!) or scrolled through my feeds.

Making it worse were the feelings of abandonment and betrayal, the sense that I could never stop being at war with men. Almost every male person I considered a friend supported Hillary begrudgingly or passively, if at all. Whether by apathy or antipathy, almost every male person I know chose his own supremacy over the health and safety of women. To me, it really felt like almost everyone I knew was ready to embrace rape as long as it didn’t mean giving up the social capital that vocally supporting Hillary Clinton costs.

AND YET, to paraphrase the words of Mitch McConnell which I am bizzarely about to have tattooed on my arm, nevertheless, we persisted. SOMEHOW there was an opening at Women Organized AgainstRape and I entered weekly trauma therapy at the beginning of March. My therapist is an absolute champion of letting me weave my personal story in and out of politics, never asking me to tone down my anger or not take things personally—she knows, maybe we all know, that politics is always personal.

Yesterday I made the decision to phase out weekly therapy and dedicate my  Monday afternoons to things that are not trauma, and that 100% feels like Reclaiming My Time.

SO I want to step back and marvel. The night of the election, in addition to the terror and heartbreak, a deep warm, powerful sensation pulsed through my body. I guess it could have been panic, but it felt more like resolve, like my soul rising to the occasion and reaching out to join all of the other souls that were doing the same.

Women who support Hillary, I can never thank you enough. Thank you for every Bro you’ve faced down or blocked, every time you’ve had to head the word shill (or shrill, for that matter), for every danger and trigger you’ve faced and still managed to wake up the next day. Whether you fight an inward battle, an outward battle, or a combination of both, thank you so, so much. I’m with you forever and I will never, ever back down.

Keep going, I love you, keep going.

What I Hear When They Say “Bernie would’ve won.”

This is a hard post to write—the voices of depression, self-erasure, and totalitarian-times pre-obedience all tell me to knock it off, that I’m just being annoying and trying to sabotage my remaining friendships out of grief. Outside influences including the bullying team of socialist mostly-white-dudes formed post-election call for “unity, but I’m pretty sure what they’re asking for is obedience.

There’s a little volcano in my gut made out of the b-word, and every once in a while, it explodes, and there’s yelling. I’m embarrassed by my yelling, but I take comfort in knowing that if I were Bernie, my occasional blustering incoherence would be seen as “authentic” and “revolutionary” rather than unhinged and shrill. Stupid gender.

So here’s an attempt to be coherent, to put into words what I hear when someone says “Bernie would’ve won.”

1.     Trump is your/Hillary’s/women’s fault. As a rape survivor, I’m used to carrying blame in my body that isn’t mine. Health and healing demand that I rebel against it, but trauma has placed an “If I wouldn’t have…” deep in my psyche. So when people blame Hillary supporters for the election of Trump, the nausea and pain of false blame bubbles to the surface and I hiss and flail and panic to get it off me.

Through all of human history, women have absorbed blame that isn’t ours and have been rewarded with social capital when we are willing to take the side of the oppressor. As the Rapist-in-Chief’s decisions prove to be just as hateful and apocalyptic as we thought they would be, the blame feels ever more damaging. I don’t want to hear it any more than I wanted to hear “You shouldn’t have been wearing that dress.” at 16 when I told a policemen that a guy jerked off at me in the park. The connection feels like an anxiety-leap, but that doesn’t make it not true.

2.      You/she/women should have stayed in your place. I hear, when people call for unity around Bernie, that same rock-stupid sentiment that bigots use when they blamed President Obama for racism. Instead of acknowledging the tide of misogynist mob-mentality (on both/all sides) that lifted Trump into office, (mostly, but not exclusively, straight white male) Bernie supporters try to make it the fault of those of us who saw Hillary as a way to fight oppression.

“There wouldn’t be all of this tension if people would just stay in their place” is among the most evil and ignorant American ideas, and it is one of the central themes of all hate movements, but ordinary “nice” people revert to it all the time, especially in the context of Hillary-hate.

3.     You don’t deserve representation.

4.    Your/Hillary’s/women’s/people of color’s work doesn’t count. I’ve already written extensively about how irked I am that people tend to discount Hillary’s lifetime of trying to do as much good as she can, largely on behalf of the poor. This national blindspot has given me a clear view of how often women’s work goes unseen. The women (at the headquarters I worked in, it was mostly women, mostly queer women and women of color, in fact) who donated our/their time deserve better than to be dismissed or concern-trolled by those who threw dollar bills at our first major party female candidate from president or sat on the sidelines basking in their white male entitlement, patting themselves on the back for their “progressiveness” even as they harassed and belittled women and people of color for our/their choice of candidate.

5.   . The votes of women and people of color don’t count. This claws its angry way through the system every time someone talks about how the primary was “rigged” or the DNC simply anointed Hillary. There was voting! The gaslighting insistence of their version is so strong that I sometimes have to look up the statistics just to remember it-she just won! The fact that the male candidate with a weaker social justice platform lost doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the system. There are plenty of things wrong with the system, of course, this just isn’t one of them.

6.       White people should get to decide. But we fucking DON’T!

From the Wall Street Journal. I think that anyone who cares about social justice needs to make the opinions of people of color into account, and I hear white people dismiss these numbers all the time.

And take a look at the Trump regime if you want to see what white people’s vision of the county can be!

To me, the continued wistfulness about Bernie Sanders is a socially acceptable analog of Trump-sympathizing. In my opinion, it’s still driven by white male entitlement and white female betrayal/Stockholm syndrome, a desperate clinging to the past, tangled with the denial that race and gender bias exist at all.

It sucks, and it better be fucking taken care of by the time Kamala Harris runs for president.

Birthday Heart Inventory: Thanks 42!

Surprisingly, 42 was one of my happiest years yet. Last year around this time, I wrote about depression as a weed killer and this year, my garden is thriving, both literally and figuratively. There’s a lot of pain in my heart and so much battle still ahead, but my goal of cultivating a life has been met and exceeded.

Mental Health: Like for a lot of women, particularly trauma survivors, the 2016 election season was wildly triggering. In my case, those triggers got me to an amazing place: Women Organized Against Rape. Not only did my (FREE!) therapist there stem the tide of sobbing and panicking to a manageable level, she has also steered me towards a calmer, warmer, more productive, and loving self—she is truly a brain artist. It’s hard work to focus on the trauma part of life every Monday, and it usually results in at least a day of catharsis hangover, but it’s 100% worth it. This year is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling truly worthy of love, especially my own.

Love: Every day I feel the gorgeous, generous, and powerful love of friends, family, and cats, but I could copy and paste the longing for romantic love that I’ve written nearly every year. Though I’ve finally attained the goal of self-containment to a level that seems magical, I dream about boyfriends nearly every night. I try to take loneliness as a sign of health, my heart telling me that it’s ready to open up again.

            This is a good place to confess that there are a couple of guys I haven’t gotten over. I still wish I could hear from them, even though I know they aren’t the right ones. I keep their nice notes and artwork in the Box of Things to Be Worked Out by Unseen Forces. They don’t read this, I don’t think, but I’ll tell them anyway:

Dear _______ and ________,

Thank you for being in my life, for loving me the best you could, for the snuggles, the music, the kindness. Thank you for your face, your kindness, your humor, your support. I’m sorry for the ways that I hurt you. You’ll always be a sparkly gem in my heart because you changed me for the better. I’ll always a little bit belong to you, and I hope that you remember the best parts.

Love, Jane

(With that, I hope I made a little room for some snuggle-able treasures to come aboard.)

Work: I love my tutoring work so, so much. Getting to work with kids one-on-one, getting to know their families, using my teaching skills organically and flexibly, I CAN’T BELIEVE I made it here from where I was three years ago. Even on my lost-est days, a tutoring session brings me back to myself, frees me to live in love and in the present.

            I have one more semester of grad school (I HATE being back in grad school!) and then my teacher certification will be permanent. I hope to build up to a full-time tutoring business—I LOVE being my own boss, and the joy of going to the bank to deposit cash has not diminished since my waitress years.

            Creative coaching is going beyond-well: Coachees tend to transform into friends who guide my creativity just as much as I cheerlead theirs.

Art: At an organizing meeting last November, I introduced myself as a “street artist” for the first time, and that title really does ring true. I love being able to share my work with the neighborhood, watching how well the paintings I staple to phone poles get curated—some of the pieces have been up for more than a year! It’s a way to give and get love every time I take a walk, and fulfills what I think are the deepest purposes of art: to give, to love, to connect. Sometimes a neighbor even thanks me, and it’s the warmest, most fulfilling, most enriching feeling.

Activism: Remember when we thought it was sometimes not an election year? Transitioning from activism being a once-once-in-a-while pursuit to being a Daily Action feels healthy and sane. I’m so inspired by those who stay engaged and also by the way that we’ve committed to self-care as part of the resistance.

Plus, it’s always a good time to remind myself that this happened:

Grief: Although the Rapist-in-Chief causes the most horror in my heart and worldwide, it’s the misogyny of the 2016 Democratic primary that has caused me the most personal day-to-day grief, including making me wonder if I can ever date a man again. I’m working on a separate post about the ongoing soul-rash that is The Bern, so I won’t spend any more of my birthday typing about him.

Family:  My family of origin seems to have forgiven me for my Thanksgiving-ruining, welcoming me back like a prodigal daughter. My poetry family is mostly not connected to me anymore, largely a casualty of the misogyny-storm of the primaries. My immediate family is my ex-wife/bff and my two cats, and that’s a really, really nice life.

Spirituality: I’m addicted to Insight Timer, going to yoga weekly, and I’m even getting monthly massages. Sometimes I think I might just float up off the earth.

It’s been, in many ways, a year of luxury, of radical self-care, and I hope I can continue that spirit through age 43 and beyond. Thank you for helping make my life so rich, complex, and loving—wishing you all of the healing and happiness.