Our Collective Shock is Real
It's a lot and I'm feeling it on a cellular level, truth is, we all are.
(Quick Note: Yesterday Lady Libertie of The American Pamphleteer shared The Libertie Memo and it encompasses everything that I was reaching for in yesterday’s post. Cohesive, coherent, and clear. Well worth a read and she is well worth a follow for smart and incisive political content!)
Hello, Friend,
My tinnitus has been on overdrive for the past week. The inside of my head sounds like a large chorus of tiny mice are chiming extremely high pitched bells together. Weeoooweeoooweeoooweeooo!!! It is as distracting and annoying as you might imagine. Some days are better than others, but it never goes away.
A few years back Mr. Potter, our daughter, and I and the people in two other vehicles were rear-ended by a medical tech rushing to work and not paying attention. The light was changing, she was four cars back and apparently thought the rest of us would all run the light. We were the second car back from the light, and the van behind us that she hit directly had a pregnant passenger. The tech was on her phone LAUGHING while the passengers of the three other vehicles stood in the parking lot of the Urgent Care center where she worked in various states of shock with police and emergency workers. To say I was furious is an understatement. This distracted me from my physical reaction. Though I felt like something wasn’t right with me, I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to divert any medical attention from the person who needed it most. The next day I realized I had a concussion, and the tinnitus showed up. It has yet to leave.
I feel like this is a metaphor for our collective current situation. Maybe that’s why my brain is screaming at me this week.
We’ve been rear-ended by a careless and cruel administration that finds our struggles humorous. We’re in a collective state of shock. Some of us are directly impacted more than others, and realizing that might make the rest of us feel that our stresses are insignificant in comparison. We aren’t sure how it’s all going to pan out, but it isn’t looking great. We’re feeling unsettled but unclear about the greater and the personal impacts of this ongoing assault. We may feel a lot of outrage and it may be distracting us from our other emotions. There’s a relentless buzzing that ebbs and flows in intensity as we process the constant chaos. Weeoooweeoooweeoooweeooo!!!
Some days are better than others, but it never goes away.
We’re being rear ended on a daily basis. There isn’t much downtime for rest, reflection, or recovery. We’re feeling the effects compounding, but it’s difficult to calculate the overarching scale of the impact. Part of that is rooted in the subtle ways it is impacting us, the small shifts in our ability to focus and in our mood, physical well being, and motivation. Joy is becoming more difficult to obtain and maintain. Hope feels increasingly elusive.
It is my inquisitive nature to see patterns, attempt to understand them, dig in deeper to make connections, and in doing so I want to help others find clarity. I don’t pretend to have all or any of the answers. Nothing about our current reality is logical. History may offer some clues, but there is so much happening that is unique to this moment.
I believe that it’s crucial that we acknowledge the singularity of what we’re experiencing and in doing so offer ourselves and each other some grace. The unrelenting assault and the subsequent exhaustion is purposeful and powerful. Keeping us exhausted demotivates us. The illogical nature of the constant chaos disarms us. The relentless buzzing distracts us. The subsequent fear sends our nervous systems into perpetual fight or flight mode.
Our collective shock is real.
It's a lot and I'm feeling it on a cellular level, truth is, we all are.
And now for a moment of shameless self-promotion…
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I feel that our present reality seems beyond unreal and yet it continues to grow...
I feel every day like this is a dream and I wish I could wake up. But it's not a dream, it's a shit show, a dumpster fire, an unrelenting ball of indecency, horror and hate. It makes me sick, heart broken 💔 and so mad. I don't sleep, I also have tinnitus, I wish I could reach out and hug the world. The insanity, the hatred, the power grabing shithead that is running our country into the ground, needs to go, him and his band of assholes!! I'm sorry but this is just getting to be to much. He ignores the courts, the judicial system. How can he be stopped?