ICE is out murdering people in the streets of Minnesota today (and other locations, including detention facilities) around the nation.
So fuck it, let’s talk about “doing enough” and despair.
“What can I do?” “Am I doing enough?” “Why aren’t other people doing more?” “I can’t fix everything, so I might as well give up.”
It seems logical. We ask what we can do during emergencies like this. The emergency continues. We start asking whether we’re doing enough or doing the right things. The emergency continues. We start asking why other people aren’t doing more. The emergency continues. We give up. We offload our responsibility to give a shit and succumb to despair.
The emergency continues.
I’m gonna stop and take a deep breath for a minute. Just thinking about this stuff, it’s easy to get spun up.
Being spun up is exactly what assholes want from you. It makes you easy to predict and exploit; it keeps you focused on trying to recover the illusion of control in a situation; it makes you stick to a narrative where your actions are helping, somehow.
Action during emergencies is necessary. (Duh.)
But unconsidered action plays into the hands of fucking assholes.
—I had to rewrite this next section like three times now because I kept getting spun up and writing bullshit. I’ve deleted about a thousand words so far.
Ranting, mostly.
What I’m doing to get out of my spun-up thinking is writing out my rant and putting it through a sanity check by asking questions about what I wrote and how I feel:
- Is what I just wrote in line with how I’m advising other people? (No, I’m just ranting about how people do stupid things.)
- How do I feel while I’m writing it? (Justified and righteous.)
- Have I ranted about this before? (Yes, multiple times in each case.)
- Am I actually putting some time and thought between wanting to fix the situation in Minnesota and writing about it? (No.)
- Do I feel like I have to justify my actions in the light of an ongoing emergency? Am I trying to write myself into a sense of control or at least justification? (…Yes, that’s fair.)
- Am I trying to drown out my own sense of unease and discomfort? (Totally.)
- How do I actually feel? (Bad. Uncomfortable. Tight in my chest. Teary-eyed but not actually crying. Like I have a stomach full of hair. Acid in my mouth. Continuous tightness across my brows. Sad. Afraid. Angry that warning people we’re headed this direction has meant nothing, so many people are acting surprised now, and not just the people on the “other” side.)
- Do I feel despair? (Yes.)
- Does that mean there’s no hope? (No.)
- Does that mean that there is no action that can be taken? (There is always action that can be taken.)
Here’s something that any abuse survivor can tell you:
Hope and despair aren’t opposites.
The thing that most people call hope is just wishful thinking, a way of staving off awareness of despair. That kind of hope is like buying lottery tickets: maybe someday things will be magically all better.
The thing that most people call despair is just wishful thinking of another type: the fact that no easy answers are suggesting themselves means that no action or perspective is necessary. All that is necessary is lie down and let the “inevitable” happen.
Both of those things are ways for us not to have to live with the awareness of our actual negative feelings.
Which suck, by the way.
One way buries those feelings under a vision of an improbable, positive future; the other tries to drown out those feelings by positing a future that’s even worse than what we actually fear, so much worse that there’s no point in fighting it.
Both ways keep you locked in place.
Abuse survivors have to come to grips with the knowledge that the situation is bad. Really bad. Worse than anyone else can see from the outside, usually. Your sense of self is gone. You’re a robot or tool that belongs to your abuser, after a while—not a person. It’s hard to take a step back to see the situation, when the part of you that can observe things has been destroyed. It’s a miracle anybody gets out.
Once you admit how bad the situation is, you can actually begin to hope.
Even if it’s just a hope that your abuser will die of a sudden heart attack! (The person who always says this to me, you know who you are!)
Effective action in an abuse situation tends to come out of a place where you acknowledge your negative feelings, admit that you’re a deeply flawed person who has in fact contributed to the problem (if you can even let yourself know it’s not your fault, that is), know that you’re probably not going to change anything, that what seems like the worst possible situation may get horrifically worse for you and people you love, and that yet…you hope.
And because you hope, you start taking steps to cut intimacy with your abuser, rebuild your sense of self, and build some form of independence.
Okay. Let me go back through my sanity check again.
- Is what I just wrote in line with how I’m advising other people? (Yes.)
- How do I feel while I’m writing it? (Icky and sad. Triggery.)
- Have I ranted about this before? (Some parts, yes. So this is likely flawed.)
- Am I actually putting some time and thought between wanting to fix the situation in Minnesota and writing about it? (A little.)
- Do I feel like I have to justify my actions in the light of an ongoing emergency? Am I trying to write myself into a sense of control or at least justification? (No. I feel useless and ashamed.)
- Am I trying to drown out my own sense of unease and discomfort? (No, although it’s difficult.)
- How do I actually feel? (Bad. Uncomfortable. Tight in my chest. Crying now. Like I have a stomach full of hair. Acid in my mouth. My face feels heavier. Sad. Afraid. Not angry at other people right now.)
- Do I feel despair? (Yes.)
- Does that mean there’s no hope? (No.)
- Does that mean that there is no action that can be taken? (There is always action that can be taken.)
Your sanity checks may vary.
What is happening is horrible.—Dammit, I got spun up again and had to delete more bullshit. Lemme try this again.
What is happening is horrible.
I am a part of what is happening, and I am part of the problem. I have benefited from the same patterns I hate now. I am a flawed person who wants things to be magically all better. I don’t want to have to live through this, even though I’ve been predicting it for years and still hoping it would pass me by.
I still deserve better.
We all do.
Illegitemi non carborundum. (Don’t let the bastards grind you down.)
—WWII saying, with respect to Sir Terry Pratchett.
You can find the Asshole Mitigation Plan series outline here.
