I found myself beginning the New Year not with the sense of a fresh start or clean slate as I have in the past, but with the feeling of bracing for impact.  I know that hope is one of the most important things a person needs to have in life, especially during difficult times, and that is precisely what I am struggling to maintain right now.  I typically maintain hope by analyzing a problematic situation and finding open doors and windows to progress, however far away they may be.  Regrettably for my mental health, at present I can find very little, which has filled me with despair.

I am simultaneously struggling with huge philosophical questions of the nature of human behavior and why we do certain things, questions that have no definitive answers and often only lead to conflict and controversy.  Why are we friendly and loving to those we have chosen to include in our families and communities while we react with hostility and even violence to anyone outside those groups?  Why are we so prone to succumbing to the lure of power and using that power to corrupt and corrode what is good?  Why are we so often vulnerable to lies that cause us to act against our own self-interests?  Why are we so frequently followers rather than leaders or at least truly realized individuals?  Are these problems inherent to our biology and psychology or are these phenomena imposed externally by culture, society, and religion?

I spend literally hours each day thinking about these things, searching for illumination into human behavior that will give me that glimmer of hope about humanity’s future, and therefore that of my own and my children’s.  Like many, I have always clung to the notion that people are inherently good, a notion that has been tattered over the last 8 years and utterly destroyed with the election.  I find myself plagued with questions over how what happened is even possible.  Are we really that horrible as a nation that we would rather have a demented madman at the helm of our country than lift a finger to help those who have less than the rest of us or merely look or live differently than we do?  I find myself absolutely disgusted, not to mention simultaneously saddened and enraged.

And yet I try to remind myself that it wasn’t a landslide vote.  Our country lies politically split nearly 50/50 amongst active voters.  As Samwise Gamgee tells Frodo in The Two Towers, “there’s good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”  I now find that my main problem is not in believing that there is still good in the world, but whether or not it has either the individual or collective power to do anything about what seems to be the spreading Shadow that Tolkien wrote of in his stories.  As King Theoden laments in the same movie, “what can men do against such reckless hate?”  And greed, in this case.

My tendency to sit on the back porch drinking coffee, vaping, and thinking has ebbed somewhat in the wake of a realization I had recently.  The election had not fully impacted me yet, and that morning a level of shock that I had been carrying for weeks finally wore off, and I sat in my chair sobbing, saying “I don’t know what to do” over and over again.  Feelings of helplessness and powerlessness do not sit well with me.  I have never been the sort of person to just sit and fret over a problem, I do something about it.

Since that morning, I have sadly accepted those feelings, necessarily accepting a level of surrender and futility at the same time that I still do not know is appropriate or not.  I like to think of myself as a person that is able to summon solutions to problems at will, and to find myself in the position of being utterly blank saddens and frightens me.  I certainly do not think that I, as one person, have the power to reverse or change what has happened, but I feel lost in the absence of knowing what I could possibly be doing to resist this awful wave of hostility and hatred that threatens to completely overtake my homeland.

Additionally, I am enraged because I know this state of affairs was brought about purposely by the same forces that worked so hard to get a head-sick fascist elected to power in the world’s largest democracy.  Community and communication were deliberately targeted to keep people from networking and talking to one another in the face of a mortal threat, to prevent them from even noticing what was happening.  Lies were spread to make people argue about what should have been obvious truths.

Furthermore, I am fully convinced that nefarious machinations were put into play to make sure that there would be no real resistance to their winning this most recent battle.  There were no protests, there were no calls for recounts, everyone with the power to do anything just shrugged their shoulders and said “oh well”.  This is what it looks like when people in power manage over decades to subjugate an entire culture with the aim of eventually taking it over.

I have no doubt that there remain activist organizations working hard against The Man and The Machine, I just have to find them, a job now made that much harder by that deliberate destruction of community and communication.  Will I even be able to rely on simple searches on an internet now infected by AI?  Information itself is now in danger of being utterly corrupted, even for those like myself who are pretty good at seeing through lies.

Right now, I have retreated from the world, which I cannot bear to interact with. I read no news, and my husband knows not to tell me any unless it’s really important and something I truly need to know.  I’m trying not to completely cut off all human contact by staying involved at my church, but it’s difficult when people can’t stop bringing up current events even if they have nothing to do with the activity at hand.  It’s very annoying when I’m actively trying to find ways to escape all of that and focus on something different and hopefully enjoyable.

I’m hoping that with a bit of time, my heart and spirit will mend enough for me to get back on my feet.  For the moment, though, I am demoralized, dispirited, and disheartened.  Everything feels pointless.  The only possible positive thing I can say about things right now is that I’m being forced to learn to “live in the moment”, because contemplating the future is too horrifying.  My spiritual life may turn out to be the only thing that can truly help me right now, the only thing to offer any comfort in the face of what has become reality.

I have decided to turn my attentions inward towards myself.  My entire life has been a difficult one, but the last several years have been particularly chaotic and troubling.  In the wake of that chaos and stress, I have slowly ground to a halt until my life consists of nothing but sleeping, eating, sitting and thinking, watching tv, reading and writing sometimes, and occasionally making art.  I am no longer an active participant in my home life, and I take very poor care of myself, in no small part due to the self-loathing that I feel.

I understand how and why this state of affairs has come to be, but it has gone on long enough.  I am tired of sitting in one place each and every day, swirling downward in my own head in a well-worn groove to the basement of my spirit where the ghosts live.  I have spent a lifetime giving my time and energy to others, and I think it’s high time to divert at least some of that time and energy to myself.

To that end, I’ve decided to do my best to put the past behind me and focus on a year-long effort to slowly push out bad habits with better ones.  Much of that time I spend sitting and thinking is spent ruminating about the past, catastrophizing the future, and demonizing people in my present thanks to the effects of my c-PTSD.  I am essentially destroying everything about my entire existence.

This effort will be accompanied by a concerted attempt to alter and transform how I see, well, everything, including myself.  I wear a pair of “black lenses” in my mind that essentially invert the appearance of the entire world like a black-and-white negative, rendering it creepily inaccurate and even monstrous.  I am hoping that regular affirmations to the contrary will slowly allow me to see a more accurate picture of both myself and the world, one that allows for more positivity and hope.

The goal of all of this personal work is very simple: to enjoy life even as fascist forces attempt to unravel the very fabric of society from beneath my feet.  These awful people are dependent upon people giving up hope and succumbing to the false aloneness they are attempting to impose upon all of us.  They want us to feel hopeless, helpless, powerless, and utterly alone, and I refuse to give them what they want.  That, in fact, may be the best weapon good people have in this fight: to simply refuse to bow to their wishes, at least as far as our thoughts and emotions are concerned.  As the 10th Doctor says in the episode The Last of the Time Lords, “That’s the one thing you can’t stop them from doing, is thinking.”