joshmillard dot com

Quietly struggling with the magnitude of terribleness

Importing a brief thread on Mastodon. Haven't settled on any kind of format for quotation yet; have learned the lesson from long years that passively embedding off external servers is a bad idea, even if masto is the least of my worries there by far. So, manually:

Quietly struggling with the magnitude of terribleness out there right now and don't have anything useful to say about it and so just trying to put my brain elsewhere whenever I can to not spin out with grief and terror that this is where we are. This shit sucks at such a huge scale and rapid pace that distraction and dissociation feel like essential survival/sanity skills right now, rimmed with the razor wire of irrationally powerful guilt for not somehow being omnipotent to fix shit.

This is I guess taking a break from trying to take a break to acknowledge this horrid fucking feeling of collective helplessness in the face of foreseeable, foreseen, obviously terrible developments that nonetheless nobody in power to do something about it chose to do anything about; watching the comfortable withered husk of democratic representatives flail guilelessly like a gas station wavy-hands inflatable and then call it a weekend while Alexandria burns in real time.

I was so uncharactaristically, undistractably angry at the end of 2016 and in the months after, an experience I hadn't really ever had before that, and it was both a rational and proportionate response to the situation in a lot of respects and also absolutely awful for me. And I can't be in that kind of non-stop boiling mental place again. But me putting up some boundaries around my headspace for the sake of my mental health doesn't make the situation not horrible and insane. This is all awful.

So, I dunno. Just acknowledging it. Acknowledging that I'm torn between a world of wide-eyed, rational horror, and the necessary self-defense of trying to spend most of my time not just going fetal in response to that. Making art, making jokes, reading stuff that doesn't gut me, chatting with friends, helping people out where I can. All the low-stakes bullshit of a life that isn't constant unblinking perception of horror, not because the horror isn't real but because we need to make it through.