by wonkie
In these times that try our souls, how are you all holding up? What are your coping methods? If
you are coping—and I hope you are.
I’m probably less stressed by the apocalyptic circumstances of the present than many people
because I have no children and I’ve been a doom freak all of my life. I’ve been expecting a
corporatist fascist takeover of the US for a long time. My parents were cynical about humans,
so I got my attitude while young.
I am depressed and distressed and bitter and angry but not at all surprised.
Most of the time, my stress is underlying, something I’m not conscious of, but I find myself
having crying jags over things I wouldn’t normally cry about and my ability to cope with normal
life complexities is impaired. I have panic attacks about stupid stuff like remembering to bring
my grocery list with me when I go to town. If I have more than two or three things I need to do,
I find myself doing nothing. Sometimes I can’t read my emails even though there’s no bad news
that I’m expecting.
The truth is, my life is pretty idyllic. If I paid no attention to anyone but me, my family and my
neighbors, I’d be very happy.
One of my pleasures in life is gardening. Every spring I make a raid on a place that sells plants
and I fill my car with geraniums and petunias, fuchsias and impatiens, daisies and dahlias. This
year I drove down with the intent to fill my planters and pots with the usual summer flowers.
But I spotted the hydrangeas.
All kinds. White blooms as big as my head. Blooms that were raspberry, fading into pink and
then to cream. Red ones. Blue ones. Lilac with purple stems. Round ones, the lacy kind, blooms
shaped like pears, blooms fat or delicate or in between. I filled my car with hydrangeas.
Then the next week I bought more. I had to buy a shit ton of soil and I built beds for them. I
made another trip and bought more which meant buying more soil and big pots. I ran out of
money and had to wait for the end of the month before buying more.
Then one afternoon while sitting on the deck, I found myself imaging more beds and pots and more hydrangeas. I realized that I had developed a compulsion.
I was depressed about the world so I was buying hydrangeas.
We are not wise or kind or good
We do the best we can
To build our house and chop our wood
And watch our garden grow. (Candide)
But I don’t want to hunker down in my garden and let the world go to hell around me, so I write
GOTV letters. I donate to Act Blue monthly and to some individual campaigns. Support Sharice
Davids! I’ve purchased some subscriptions to support the free press. Once a week I drop by a
nursing home and entertain a lady there with animal rescue stories. I sit with an ailing neighbor
lady once a week so her husband can get out of the house. I call my ex-husband up and chatter
at him—he’s got Parkinson’s and lives in a care facility. I am a volunteer at a cat rescue. Cats are
people too.
Actually, I like cats a lot better than homo sapiens.
My latest coping method is to intensely fantasize about a trip I’m planning to Escalante Natl
Monument in Utah. If any of you are planning to be in that area in late May, let me know and
we’ll meet up! I also sit out in the back yard and daydream about more flower beds and more
hydrangeas.
So that’s me. What are you all doing to cope? How are you all doing? How are you keeping the
lights on in your hearts?
This was supposed to go up a day earlier, but I got confused with the date line. Thanks and apologies wonkie!
My confession is that I really don’t know anything about flowers. Though I am a big fan of Candide…
For the last week or two I’ve been dealing with water infiltration and resulting black mold in the basement. Which has been, to a surprising and welcome degree, a great way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by all of the Trumpian BS.
It’s a tractable problem, and I can fix it. Tear out bad sheetrock and insulation, bag it up and throw it out. Treat the remaining nasty spots. Hang new insulation and sheetrock. Tape prep and paint.
All done! All better! It’s actually been kind of therapeutic.
Household chores, same. Pruning, fall cleanup. I’ve been putting peanuts out for the crows, who have figured out my schedule and arrive more or less on time each morning in a kind of raucous crowd. Gonna put the feeders up for the songbirds this weekend.
Listen to music, play music. Stay in touch with friends. Be mindful of my own reactions to events, emotionally physically and spiritually, and step away when it begins to overwhelm.
It will, for better or worse, still be there when you feel up to dealing with it.
I was volunteering at a local food bank, but stopped back in June when I got COVID. Now I just send them money, but it’s actually much more satisfying to contribute in person. So I may go back to that once I finish getting the basement cleaned up.
There is a limit to what any one of us can absorb, and to what any one of us can do about it all. Recognize and respect your own limits. That doesn’t mean put your head in the sand and pretend nothing bad is happening, it just means don’t let it run you over.
You’re doing all good things, wonkie. It’s an inspiration to me, personally. Carry on, and take care of yourself.
This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We’re in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I’ve been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I’ll have planted 240 trees around the world.
It’s a small thing, but it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.
“it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it”
this ^^^
I’m sure it’s obvious from my comments here over the years that I’m fine with an active government.
But the government we have right now is profoundly toxic.
We need to resist all of that wherever we can, to the degree that we can, with whatever resources we can bring to that effort. But turning all of that around, for whatever meaning of “turn that around” manifests itself, will take time. And a lot of government-y stuff is going to be broken, and some it will stay broken indefinitely, perhaps forever.
So it’s important to find other avenues for, as the cliche has it, making the world a better place. Which mostly amounts to helping each other and not shitting on the given world we all live in. Or, you know, trying our best to do those things.
The federal government we have right now is effectively a cabal of greedy vindictive malicious wanna-be tyrants. Most of them are deeply incompetent, and the ones that aren’t we probably wish were.
Find ways to work around them. Get in their way if you can, to whatever degree of risk you can tolerate. Which might be none, which is OK. But find ways to do constructive things in spite of them.
That’s how we get through.
last few weeks i’ve learned that i cope by a combination of going numb and keeping busy as a distraction.
doing? utterly awful.
someday i’ll share why.
…going numb…
I had a cavity filled today. Four hours on from when they started, my upper lip on that side is still numb. Ah, the joys of trying to drink from a glass when you can only feel it on one side.
Latest birthday doodle using some of the “little monster” characters from the fairy tale. These have a family business as “The World’s Greatest Spies.” They all wear an eye patch over their left eye whether they need it or not.
There are times when it’s a great coping mechanism to be a compulsive optimist. Although that should probably be a *relative* optimist.
I expect the nation will take a lot (more) damage in the near term. But I think it is, eventually, recoverable damage. Not without a lot of work. And in a lot of cases, it will probably take a couple of generations for the memories to fade. Definitely, in the case of our foreign relations.
But consider our relations (pre-Trump!) with Germany and Japan. Economic competitors to some degree, sure. But even the oldest of us are only the children of the folks who fought World War II, and it’s never had the same emotional impact that it did for them. For us, it’s just history; for our children it’s mostly ancient history.
The rebuilding at home will be, by comparison with the destruction of trust, be quick and easy. Relatively. Lots and lots of people hurt in the meantime. But horrible as that is, overall it’s a long way from “permanent”.
And (see compulsive optimist) I could see us getting to something resembling the Progressive Era that followed the previous Gilded Age. Not just fixing the trashed stuff, by completely new improvements.
wj, you provoke me to trot out one of my favorite dictums once again:
I know, I know: you’re not saying we live in the best of all possible worlds, since your optimism amounts to saying that a better world might arise from the ashes of the current debacle. Do you think we will live long enough to see it?
I give the possibility less than even odds, myself, because I don’t see how we get there without a lot of fuss and bother. Maybe civil-war-level fuss and bother, because deMAGAfication will be fiercely resisted by the anti-anti-fascists. And it’s not clear that deMAGAfication would even be on the agenda if the Democrats ever regain power.
“Look forward, not back” they will say again. “The MAGAts stole the SCOTUS fair and square” they will mumble. “Fire the army of yahoos who signed up to be ICE ‘agents’? Tut, tut, there are civil service rules, you know” will be their position. They will not uproot and incinerate the poison ivy planted among the hydrangeas by the MAGAts, is what I’m saying.
Maybe, with “a lot of work”, you can take back the GOP and I can put some backbone into the Democratic Party, but I have my doubts on both fronts. And I’m not even sure what the actual “work” would have to be.
Well, at least I managed yesterday to install a motion-activated porch light for the benefit of my mailman, who will soon be trying to find the mail slot in my front door after dark.
–TP
The rebuilding at home will be, by comparison with the destruction of trust, be quick and easy.
I wish I shared your optimism here, but unfortunately I do not.
The problem I see is that all the people who are more than fine with what’s going on now are still gonna be here. They might not be an absolute majority, but there are a lot of them, and the non-democratic aspects of our polity – the Senate, the Electoral College – give them political clout beyond what their numbers would merit.
And a lot of the people who Trump and the conservative movement in general have brought into government are still gonna be there. Especially in the judiciary, not to exclude the SCOTUS. Roberts, Alito, Thomas are all 70 or older, but Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett all have decades of time ahead of them.
To add to that, I think the Trump years are gonna make the professional civil service – the people who actually do the governmenty stuff – a much less attractive option for people who might otherwise be interested in basic public service.
If every four years you’re gonna have to worry about having to explain to some 20-something techbro asshole why what you do – monitoring economic and labor data, tracking the weather, medical research, etc. – is important enough to justify your continued employment is gonna make a lot of people look elsewhere.
Some folks who have been RIF’d would probably go back, a lot will not. And I can’t blame them.
Job security is one of the attractive things about working for the government at a lower salary than you likely would in the private sector. So much for that.
I don’t think we can save America from fascism without somehow countering the firehose of Goebbels style propaganda from Faux, Newsmax, and other Republican media outlets. Trump will stroke out, but the rest of the R party will remain. I don’t see it as a Trump cult as much as it is a Faux news cult.
russell, the critical phrase there was “by comparison.”. I don’t think that, in any absolute sense, it will be quick or easy. I just think that the foreign relations impact will be harder and slower to repair. In part because they can decline to join us in anything, whereas we are basically stuck with each other. (The dreams of Steven Miller, et al. notwithstanding.)
I just found out one of my college roommates passed away late last night/early this morning. It wasn’t a surprise. He had metastatic cancer and it was clear that he was nearing the end.
I hadn’t seen or heard from him for roughly 30 years until about a month ago when his brother called me out of the blue to let me know the situation and to invite me to a birthday party he was throwing for him early this month. In the last month, I spoke with my former roommate on the phone a few times and went to see him three times – once at the party and twice at his house.
My wife finally got to meet him at his birthday party after hearing stories about him for years from me and other mutual friends who I did stay in touch with. He was the only one out of our tighter circle of friends that she hadn’t met. She would joke that he was like Norm Peterson’s wife, Vera, on “Cheers” (or Niles’s wife, Mariss, on “Frasier”) who never made an appearance on screen, leaving you to wonder if she really existed.
Even minus 100 pounds and in a wheelchair, he was still the same charming, funny, and engaging guy. He and my wife might as well have been lifelong friends after five minutes.
There was never any reason that we lost touch for so long other than that we simply got caught up in our lives in ways that had him in a different place than the rest of us. He was kind of an enigmatic guy who would go in whatever direction without looking back, though he did express regret about losing touch for so long once we all got back together. And, once we did, it was like no time had passed. We might as well have been back in college hanging out in the crappy apartment we all lived in together.
I’m not fishing for condolences with this comment. I just wanted to share something that I think illustrates the weird poignancy that life occasionally throws at you unexpectedly. It’s like there was this significant part of my existence that had long been dormant but suddenly woke up to take hold of me and become, at least for a time, the most important focus of my personal life.
I can’t find the word for it, but it’s something like “heady,” only without the thrill, maybe with a bit of “mind-f**k” thrown in.
I have a lot of stress factors in my life at the moment, not least a late career pivot to become a teacher. At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet. The kids can be a real pain but also funny and sweet, and while the pay is middling, it’s stable.
My daughter makes me happy everytime I see her, she is extremely bright, funny and kindhearted. I worry about the future our generation will have left her with: rampant capitalism, global warming and a continous deterioration of democracy, the rule of law and basic human decency.
Reading (books, TLS and NYRB) watching French films and TV series and running helps me relax a bit.
novakant – At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.
I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this – at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.
Every new class is a learning experience.
novakant,
I don’t know if this will cheer you up or not but I’ve got almost 40 years of teaching experience, and post COVID, I downgraded my expectations to be happy if I could get the class to learn one thing during a class session. I’m getting to the point where I’m happy if I can get a few students to learn one thing in class.
I took up teaching maths part-time for the local university some time after I retired from full-time work. Sometimes I feel exploited, because the overseas students pay the universities very well, and the university pays me not much. But it is a joy to work with young people who take pleasure in learning.
Thank you, nous, lj and pb.