11th Month-a-versary

I know I’ve been a bit of a buzzkill in my latest posts. It’s been almost a year since our pandemmy began. I remember, for several of those first months, I was in denial. When the NBA postponed their season, Coachella and Lollapalooza completely cancelled, and my club shut its doors, I naively thought there was a chance we would wrap everything up by the summer. I sat high on my schadenfreude horse, laughing internally at everyone unlucky enough to have to celebrate a birthday while under lockdown. Sucked for them, but I was certain that by my birthday in October, things would be back to normal and I’d be able to take my annual trip abroad. I was leaning toward Indonesia, but Hassan wanted to visit South Korea, and I like Seoul, so I was open to changing directions. Soldiers of Pole had scheduled a Raising Hell for later in March, and we weren’t sure if we’d need to cancel, or if the show could go on. It was almost exciting, experiencing something unprecedented in recent memory like this, where the world suddenly stopped. Traffic in LA stopped. People stayed inside. Traffic tickets were put on pause. Meetings went from brick and mortar to digital. I remember wondering if we might learn anything from this moment, if the US workplace might adapt and phase out of some of the holdouts from the early, industrial factory work day. Things were bad, but maybe something positive could come of it?

I don’t think I could fathom what life would look like, eleven months later. I hadn’t experienced anything of equal gravity. In the United States, we export our wars to places where our citizens don’t have to engage directly with the trauma we are inflicting, taking on the mostly unsolicited role of “global police”. I’d never had to deal with movement restrictions to this degree. People kept likening the moment to wartime, and perhaps it is an apt comparison. At the time I’m writing this, we have lost 451,000 lives in the USA since March. By the time I post this, that number will probably rise to 453,000 or even 460,000. There is a very likely chance we will lose over 600,000 lives by the time the pandemic is over. For context, we lost 620,000 US citizens in the Civil War, which is the highest casualty count we’ve had from any conflict, act of nature, terrorist attack or anything other than the Spanish Flu, which killed 675,000 people in the US. I know numbers can impersonalize the gravity of every single mother, father, person loved and lost, but sometimes I have to pause at how staggering the data is. Yet many people don’t believe in the numbers. It seems sometimes that people are more willing to believe off-the-wall conspiracy theories about lizard people and a child sex trafficking cult where the ruling class drink infant blood, than reports by infectious disease experts. We even have wingnuts like Marjorie Taylor Greene making governance decisions in our congress, while simultaneously spouting absolutely wild theories, even going so far as to harass a kid who survived the Parkland school shooting. I know that I live in a world of moral grays, but even I have been blown away by how far from reality we have become as a nation. We are in a moment where there is no agreement on basic facts. Perhaps we should have expected it when our shitty canary in a coal mine, Kellyanne Conway, first coined the term “alternative facts” to describe the changing current of information.

The United States can govern the information that we disseminate, but our government has largely been muzzled into inaction. A democratic administration begins laying down tracks for our metaphorical railroad to progress, and the following year a republican administration follows swiftly behind, picking up the freshly laid tracks. I’m not a fan of either party. The harms republicans advocate for domestically, democrats enact internationally. Domestic guns, international guns, regardless we’re all about spreading militarization wherever we touch. And we propagate our entitlement, our gospel of necessary harm, by any rhetorical means necessary. The first farce was our belief in “American Exceptionalism”. After that, we gilded the American Dream. Our nation has hopped from one manufactured truth to another, and we built our nation on these faulty premises. The grotesque reality of our country doesn’t even cause people cognitive dissonance because we are extremely isolationist as a result of believing we’re the best and there’s nowhere we could learn from.

None of the bullshit of this present moment (aside from the global panini), surprises me. Oklahoma has always been full of conservative, bible thumping survivalists. I grew up living in a place that truly was representative of the fringe that has come to dominate our national conversation. While a lot of people were ignorant, I wouldn’t characterize Oklahomans as stupid, they were just isolated. Their distrust in the government and in the “wealthy elite” was based in reason. I mean heck, I don’t trust our government or rich people. What I’ve found is that, while there are plenty of virulent racists who want a white ethnostate, most people in rural America are not so far gone. They see the same corruption and class oppression that leftists see. They just process it differently, because the right has catered their rhetoric to tap into rural American fear. That fear gets pressure cooked into conspiracy-theory-based-radicalization by the far right. Because the left argues with data and facts, and US citizens are a very emotional people.

I wonder how we can grieve as a nation when we can’t even all agree that what is happening is happening? How can we begin to mourn the hundreds of thousands of lives we have lost when people don’t care about the dead and dying? I know too many young people who only care when they are directly impacted, people who think this virus is only killing the elderly, and who don’t care if the elderly die. I worry about a future where the next generation inherits that same disregard for life.Will my country continue to operate totally individualistically? Will the future youth not give a flying fuck about whether I live or die the way my generation could care less about our elders dying? It’s chilling to imagine this casual dismissiveness carrying on into the next generations. My mom always used to say, “you reap what you sow,” and I’m afraid we are sowing bad fruits.

I don’t know when the denial transitioned to anger. Maybe in July, when the reality that I would be separate from Evan for at least six more months sank in. It felt like an incredibly petty loss to get bent out of shape about, since aside from my job and movement restrictions, I hadn’t experienced any major personal losses at that point. I realized that the emotional support I’d been getting from Evan would not be available to me for a while, if not until the end of the pandemic.

Sometimes I feel like I’m doing well in spite of everything. In capitalist terms, I am. I know that I’ve complained about inconsistent clients and losing new customers, but the reality is that I’m making the same amount of money as before the pandemic. The combination of having multiple revenue streams and building long-term relationships with GKM and LSM has meant that I am living a relatively comfortable life. I’ve even been able to save. I complain to stay sane, but I don’t have real economic struggles right now. I’ve also quadrupled my social media audience, which has led to a slew of opportunities that I would not have had otherwise. I began 2020 as a much smaller account, and now people think of me as having clout power. While clout is very relative, I know I’ve been lucky. Yet, these individualistic gains feel utterly hollow right now. I know it’s important to celebrate personal victories, and I tend to downplay every success I’ve had, because the Catholic in me believes pride is a sin lol. I know it sounds inauthentic considering the sheer volume of selfies I post, but those only go to feed the algorithm. I’ve actually been very self-conscious lately and uncomfortable looking at myself for too long.

Anyway, the concept of “doing well” feels inauthentic to the way that I feel right now. Intellectually, I know that I’m doing well, but my mental health has taken a major dive. It’s hard to make medical metaphors right now considering, but I feel a bit like my immune system is attacking itself. My body has sensed a foreign invader, except that that invader is me. And I’m ruthlessly attacking myself, tearing apart every inch of my body. I haven’t hated my body this much in quite a while. I know this is a completely irrational feeling. I know there is nothing to hate, and there is so much to appreciate, but mental illness doesn’t operate on rational terms. I think of my body as something to govern, use, punish, exert, whip into shape, and moderate. For many years it was the only thing I had any control over. Now, as my body does what it wants, I sense my own microcosm moving of its own accord. I have no control over this moment, and the moments where I realize my new reality, I want to jump out of my skin. It’s been very hard to accept that there are so many things beyond my control right now, as much as it’s not just me, it’s pretty much everybody across our precious little planet.

I’ve come to realize that hitting the bottom isn’t just a one-time thing. It happens sometimes, when the fragile internal peace I dedicate so much time and effort to sustaining is shaken. There isn’t enough yoga, meditation, therapy, and psychoactive drugs to soothe away the very real traumas of this moment. Sometimes it’s bound to hit you. You realize you have hardly left your house in a week. You realize you haven’t seen a friend in person in a month, maybe longer. You realize you haven’t put on a real outfit in god knows how long. You check your health app and notice you’ve taken fewer than one hundred steps. You try to recall a day you haven’t thought about work, and then you realize that work is everywhere, that there is no leaving work behind when you work from home and you don’t leave your house. I try to get out. I roller skate by the beach multiple times per week, I travel for outcalls, I have a studio. I find reasons to grocery shop in different areas just to feel like I’ve gone somewhere. But it’s not true freedom. It doesn’t bring joy the way that serendipitously bumping into a friend at a restaurant does. It isn’t as comforting as visiting family for some banal holiday dinner. It isn’t as calming as a drink on Friday with friends and coworkers. Is there space to mourn the trivial losses when the substantial losses are immense?

I think we all need to mourn, regardless of whether it’s for people, time, youth, opportunities, emotional support, or any of the other multitude of losses we’ve incurred. Simultaneously, I know that the losses are only beginning. We don’t know what evictions, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and other financial losses are coming down the pike for a country that was abandoned by its government for so long. When the dust settles, what will be left?

Welp, another joyful one for the Patreon. At some point I have to get back to talking about dicks climbing into my vulva and other fun things. I’m starting my period this week, which has meant tender breasts, bloating, and acute irritation. I’m a cute, and I’m fucking irritated lol. But all is not doom and gloom. I’m taking care of myself and setting aside time for breaks. I even got a lovely massage today and feel a million times better. Thank y’all for reading my ramblings. I don’t know what I would do without you.