(day 3 after)
Thursday morning I woke myself up crying which just sounds weird so I’m not sure if I’m remembering that correctly.
Thursday night we were watching The English Teacher (fun sitcom) and during some arbitrary scene I don’t know which and I don’t know if it was a trigger I started sobbing.
I read a post from a black woman extremely angry at white people and I struggle with her blanket hatred. I also wonder what black/other oppressed people feel when we/white non-racist people are going through the anguish they live with every day. I remember reading about the bond and then the break in bond of Jews and blacks during 60s activism. What started as commonality became a perceived zero-sum game. This is how the oppressed turn on each other.
I listened to a podcast with Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and Jonathan V. Last discussing a post-mortem. They were heavy on Democrat-bashing, which was considerably different from the podcast with Molly Jong-Fast and the great Dahlia Lithwick’s grief over the fact that a very fair and valid and absolutely democratic election process had America choosing fascism by a landslide. This wasn’t a failure of effort or imagination from the Democrats. Or a failure of the system. And that’s the realization that you should be sobbing about.
I feel sad that Lisa can’t enjoy the Really Good Movie Civil War by Alex Garland because.
I cancelled my Thursday night Italian lesson (after messaging her that I was quitting completely then relenting) because of the above emotions and she was very understanding. We are good (?) friends at this point and she knows who I am emotionally and I know that we’re aligned philosophically and I still feel a bit silly.
I had a bad reaction from a drug a few several years back and had a freak out. For weeks or months after it took me a while to be able to deal with it. A dealing with it mechanism was to consciously force my brain to look the other way when something started intruding. If that makes sense?
I want to be kinder to people. Not that I’m not. But actively kind. As we were leaving a bar I asked one of our favorite bartenders how she was doing and there was a soft understanding of what we both were going through.
I’m worried that my composing is going to become meaningless.