You Are Not Alone

[Background image via Pixabay.]
If you are overwhelmed by the ruthless onslaught of the Trump Regime's malice that permeates the news every day—

If you are seized by sadness or rage at the ferocious sadism of their cruel agenda—

If you are feeling utterly impotent in trying to effectively counter any of the heinous attacks on vulnerable people that are coming ever more swiftly—

If you are disappointed in the people with power who are meant to take action they are refusing to take—

If you are stuck in a place with few like-minded allies, inundated instead with the hateful disgorgements of Republican cultists—

If you ache with heartbreak and indignation at the public celebrations of harm perpetrated on a mass scale—

If you wonder how the people designing and facilitating and defending that harm can live with themselves, and wonder equally how you can live with their actions being done in your name—

If you are drowning in a whirlpool of emotions so impenetrably oppressive that you can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins, as your anguish bleeds into your fury bleeds into your desperation bleeds into your fear—

If you are more frightened than you have ever been—

If you don't know from where your next bit of energy to stay engaged will come—

If you are battling intrusive thoughts that in turn battle each other for your focus, and your mind skips from election integrity to concentration camps to climate change to police violence to the erosion of abortion access to healthcare to this to that like a record spinning ceaselessly on a turntable you can't reach to quiet—

If you need to cry, or if you're already crying a lot—

If you need help—

If you don't know how you're supposed to keep doing the things that life obliges us to do every day when your country, our world, the entire planet seems to be falling into fascism—

If you are feeling hopeless—

If you are hanging on by your fingernails—

— know this: You are not alone.

We live in an era of official and pervasive gaslighting. There are people who want to tell you that you aren't seeing what you're seeing; that you don't have a legitimate reason to feel what you are feeling.

There are people who will insult you, harass you, threaten you for expressing the pain of the wounds being caused by this relentless trauma, in order to silence you. They will tell you that you are hysterical and weak.

There are people who insist, if you express the reverberating grief and anger bouncing around your insides like an unstoppable pinball, that you are overreacting; that you are oversensitive; that you are crazy.

You are none of these things.

You are empathetic and compassionate and willing to keep looking when others look away, because you care about other humans; because their lives matter to you.

You are strong and you are resisting and you are surviving.

And you are not alone.

[Related Reading: Malice Is His Agenda. Compassion Is Mine.]