I find myself posting outrageous Trump stories (most of them connected directly to a jaw-dropping denial that COVID-19 even exists), then feeling bad about just passing all that negative energy along. But there are times I honestly do not know what else to do.
I keep vowing I'll learn to ignore all this, but if you're a sentient being who cares at all about the world, you can't just tune it all out. You can't "process" it, as the expression goes, because nobody wants to swallow toxic shit. It just runneth over, kind of, and though I do try to deal with one day at a time, and though PART of today was really good (sandhill cranes on Burnaby Lake, a blackbird eating out of my hand), my day can take a hairpin turn towards incredulous dismay and even depression. And I keep saying to myself, my God, why are you getting depressed about THIS?
I have no control over it, except, as the trite saying goes, "my attitude towards it". So am I supposed to be optimistic, neutral, or what? I don't know how to feel about it. I am not at all surprised liquor consumption is through the roof now, especially with people who do not usually drink heavily. I stopped drinking in 1990 (darn it all), so that rather self-defeating avenue is closed to me. I want to stop posting Trump stories, but I feel like I have to share them to take some of the crushing load off. I try to not post long blurts, and at least part of today was great, but one thing does not cancel out another. The evening news is now so breathtakingly grotesque that I sometimes flee the room halfway through.
We cannot escape the primitive workings of the reptilian brain which is supposedly in charge of the free world. I also realize with dismay how heavily satirized and sent up Trump has been for more than four years, and how it has done nothing at all to change an astonishingly dangerous situation. In fact, satire and laughter is a way to escape and make things LESS awful. Humor is a distancing tool and a survival mechanism, but it's also a way to put unpleasant things away from you. I always used to think: yes, Alec Baldwin is brilliant in this role, but it just ain't funny, folks. It's making a completely unacceptable situation palatable through the endorphin-burst of a good laugh. Not that much different from taking a few stiff shots.
I have bipolar disorder and have started writing about it more lately, thinking, well, what have I got to lose? I'm not protecting anything, and (as the kid in the playground said long ago) nobody likes me anyway. But if this revelation affects how people feel about me, either way, well, that's not why I'm doing it. Right now, I'm doing it because some days, like today, I am trying to hang on to a rope bare-handed that is coated in a particularly deadly, slick oil, and though my desperate hand-over-hand is now so fast it's a blur, I feel I'm losing ground a lot of the time because there is nothing but an abyss below me. At present, I have NO medical support whatsoever, NO avenue for counselling, and basically have to keep my problems to myself. So the hackneyed exhortation to "reach out for help" isn't very helpful right now, as it doesn't seem to apply to me.
Will I get through this? I really don't know. Everyone is doing an awful lot of whistling in the dark - again, as a survival mechanism, and as a way to put the unpleasantness away from us so we can get on with some kind of a day. I have never known the world to have this many overwhelming problems on this scale, all at once, and even with the best President in the world, things would still be harrowing, a long and heavy grind for everyone, and downright catastrophic for some.
I tell myself: OK then, I'm a Canadian, I might have this mental condition but I'm not quite hospital material (yet!), my husband and I are well and have a roof over our heads, our kids are employed and doing well and so are THEIR kids. I tell myself all this, many, many times a day, but the dismay still pours over me and creeps into every crevice like a thick and very toxic fog.
So. . . I keep getting up in the morning like everyone else, with no safety net medically or mentally (and it's ironic that during my long years of stability, I had more "help" than I ever needed, even if it was the wrong kind). Now there's just nothing, and many times a day I say, OK then, I'm being thrown back on my own resources, and might this not be a test of my ability to - to - oh fuck, I give up! It's not like that at all. I want my Mum, and even when she was alive she was indifferent to me, to the point that I was not even mentioned in her obituary, a fact which most people find hard to believe. But I want SOMEBODY'S Mum, and I am tired of trying to reflexively "mother myself" when I just don't have anything left in me to nurture anyone at all.
