I wish I could say I was hopeful for a better election outcome but I wasn’t. Not optimistic, no pessimistic, just vacant. My mind’s been racing, but I am more destroyed by the many checks and balances that turned red, that are supposed to be in place to prevent fascism. I watched a cousin celebrate the win when I logged into Facebook to deactivate (I should’ve never gone back anyway) and then watched my father do the same “Fabulous!”. I knew he was voting for that guy but it still hurts to see people you love (and that love(?) you) vote for someone who is a has said and done awful things to people like me, like us, and about circumstances that many of us face. That is vague, I know, but you know the attacks. You’ve seen enough of the Project 2025. It doesn’t matter is you have special needs, if you are aged, if you are in the LGBTQ2S+ community, an immigrant, a person of color or are a woman. They are coming for your schools, your schools, your libraries, the dissenters. Our freedoms. We’ve all been attacked and it’s cute that we were taught that whole “sticks and stones” bullshit as kids, but words have consequences. And I’ve been trying to look for words to explain this feeling and I just don’t know how to do it despite deciding to write on this blog after a four year absence.
Everything seems like it’s been said before. It’s rote. It feels vapid. Like bullshit.
This morning, I got a letter this morning from a person in Alaska who had a meaningful time with me in the store back in early October. I gave her and her child advanced, signed reading copies of books they were going to buy anyway. It was a small kindness, one you get to do when you see someone’s excitement and you have just the perfect thing. Her letter was also a kindness – she took the time to send a note from the North to thank us for a day in our store and to say we were in her thoughts on this shit day. When I see an opportunity to enhance the life of others, a moment for another, I try to take it. It’s an opportunity, a signal from the universe asking me to give and to remember that small things fortify us when I need to show up on shit days, days like this.
Yesterday I held so many people in my arms. I looked into their eyes. I remained through many conversations.
A woman and a fella came out of the forest from hunting just to be in a space where they could be among others that felt the same grief and confusion. She talked about fighting fires and the things she heard from others – particularly men – while working fire line, how she sometimes says something about the misogyny or racism, but how she’d never again stay silent. I looked at him and asked if he’d also like a hug, that this wasn’t just about the two of us women holding space for one another. “I guess” he said, but then he couldn’t stop the tears, as quiet and statuesque as he tried to maintain. Then, two friends who work in counseling took the day off and brought their dog in. My friend and I shook our heads at each other, eyes brimming with tears. Her husband, someone who also isn’t one quickly brought to tears, also wept. Then let the dogs wrestle and chase each other in the store and allowed them to bring us smiles. A newly transitioning person came in and paced the fiction section while we chatted. I told them to put the suicide and trans lifeline phone numbers in their phone just in case, that I had called the suicide line once or twice, myself.
“There are tools,” I said, “we just have to remember what they are and we have to share them, use them.”
I told some people we have to time to strategize and gather community, to focus inward, to take great care of what’s directly in front of us. I said we need to read how others who came before us did the work: the people who helped others safely (to the best of their ability) terminate pregnancies, the Underground Railroad and the ways in which they moved people out of danger, the Civil Rights community in the 60s and the ways in which they put themselves in danger and were actually harmed over and over again to demonstrate the violence they experienced regularly. There are people who went before us and there are things we need to study to be ready for whatever is next, and if whatever is next never manifests well, we have the skills.
I said there are no words but there are a lot of words.
The letter from Alaska, from the North made me wish I was in the rainforest today – feet on soft ground, mushrooms receding back into the dirt, ferns wet from rain days ago, dew collection from the gash of sunlight cutting through the trees. The rainforest is a special place of solace for me and always has been. It’s a dark hug when this world is just too fucking much.
And it is.
There Will Be Mistakes 