BRB, screaming forever

It's... been an interesting couple of weeks.

There's truly nothing like the stunning banality of slipping into fascism in the modern United States to bring on a mental-health backslide.

As I type and file and have an after-work cup of tea with David, the hub of gleeful cruelty that is the Administration builds concentration camps for tens of thousands of refugees who they call criminals. Some survivors of Japanese-American internment camps still live, and now they have to watch us do it all again - but this time, the kids don't even have their parents.

As we ponder high school options for Bonus Kid, Justice Kennedy announces his retirement, thus solidifying the impossibility of a return to sanity within our lifetime - and a hell of an uphill fight to get it back within Bonus Kid's lifetime.

My last hope was that this flimsy bulwark against fully unchecked, ravaging, gleeful governmental cruelty would, at least, hold long enough for us to regain the US House of Representatives in November.

I'm sorry. This blog is supposed to be a positive place. That's why I haven't posted in 2 weeks. I didn't have anything happy to say. I still don't. But I must say something.

I haven't felt this bad since election night, 2016.

I didn't drink nearly that much last night, but I did drink plenty. I cried. I mourned. I still feel as though I'm in mourning today. It feels for all the world like I'm floating somewhere, a few feet above my body. I very nearly called in sick to work today, because I feel an exhaustion of my very soul that I have not felt in months. I could sleep for days, but I kept waking up last night on the verge of an anxiety attack.

I'm just so tired, and now I fight with no hope of seeing a turnaround from constant barrages and desperate damage control, until I've died of old age and it's my stepkid's fight.

And yet, we have no choice but to fight on. It may be a long cycle, but these things are cyclical. It may look horrifically like 1930s Germany, but good people fought, managed some damage control, and saved lives. We must do our best.

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." - Atticus Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird

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