boats against the current
I'm currently trying and failing to do a bunch of shit that looks like the sticky notes on a gym's NYR board, which is to say delusionally unaware of how difficult establishing any given habit is, though much like the people who participate in gym culture, I'm probably medium delusional instead of completely out of touch with my own competencies. Get back into the gym regularly, do my Duolingo without breaking my streak every other day, reestablish weekly cleaning, reestablish regular reading, be a better owner to my cats, be a better wife, be a friend—at all—to the many people I've left on read: achievable goals, if challenging to do all at once.
In my early 20s I had to do a lot of "work" on construction of a sense of self. (I'm sorry to put work in square quotes, but my actual experience of the process was closer to unsatisfying jacking off than, like, digging a hole.) Apparently childhood abuse survivors usually have to do this. My experience was that it was boring and difficult and unavoidably cringe, but still necessary. It did give me a lot of time to think about what a self even is, and because I'm a science major that thinking was largely unilluminated by formal study. After my dad died I tried to sort of manifest my way into a mid-20s that didn't require such thought or analysis (or the attendant therapists' bills) and it did mostly work, in the sense that repression is a useful cognitive technique, until, in order of occurrence in the same year, COVID hit, my city experienced an uprising, my coworker died suddenly and violently, and my grandfather died. I spent my early 30s living on a prayer. Imagine that song but it's a dirge.
This blog, or at least 2026 on this blog, is in part an effort to remedy what I now know to be my typical responses to trauma, namely memory loss and avoidance. So: I'm trying to get back to being the semi-functional adult I was for 2025. It's hard, due to PTSD. I'm still doing it though. Triumph emoji! Wait no that's more self-mythologizing.
It's hard not to think about the past 10 years in terms of cycles. Trump, obviously; my own overlapping triggers, certainly; COVID, wildfire smoke, all those little changes that one by one assemble themselves into a ransomer's message: life will never be the same. We are past the point of no return on so many different axes.
Awhile back I tried to explain to Kate how I think of these moments of grief and trauma and I think I mostly freaked her out, so bear with me. The way I cope is by embracing the binary nature of existence. I am not currently dead. Either I change that, or I will continue to live; if the latter, then I have a certain set of choices, and my job is to proceed as best as I can. I don't think of this as fatalism, and I will shoot you with a gun if you try to describe it as stoicism, though intellectually I accept that it's probably somewhat close to that philosophy. To me, it's just how I grew up. It's how I think of challenges in life when I'm feeling optimistic. Eventually I'll be dead and my life is mine to use until that happens. Even under conditions of severe constraint, I still have my mind, my will, my spirit. (Except right now, right now I have a cold and I'm being a huge baby about it. No jobs no cash no hope.)
Whatever the characterization of such an outlook, it means that when I think of the future, I mostly think of it in terms of what we could make happen. We can bend the needle of history and force ICE's disbandment. We can work, legislate, and propagandize our way towards dismantling the modern prison system and replacing it with something else. We're going to be on this earth as the climate changes no matter what, so I think we can find ways to survive. All of this is true and what it means in my life, in any of our lives, is calendar appointments for some meeting for some initiative that will probably be lost to history but that may end up being vitally important.
Both selfhood and the future are malleable. I could become a person who never completes a Duolingo course by failing to reestablish the habit, or I could make good on my promise to myself to read an actual novel in Spanish this year (and also keep up my Duolingo streak. As a point of pride). We could become a country with two gulag systems instead of one, or we could turn away from that. I think current events filtered through modern discourse tend to seem either preordained or impossible; there's over 7 billion of us and boy are the systems vast and complex, boy is change incredibly difficult. But either we do it or we die! So next week I'm going to put shit back on the calendar. At least I'm in a century that knows what bacteria is.