I was told there would be less fascism

A Very Millennial Response to the Moment (Because what else can we do?)

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. How *fun* it is to be alive right now, especially if you are obsessed with high control political and religious systems!!! Today I wrote a little personal essay / listicle about how I am getting through that is for paid subscribers only. If you are trans/non-binary and are unable to afford a subscription but believe you would benefit from access to the community/content, please email me at dlmmcsweeneys at gmail and I will get you sorted. Thank you to everyone who supports this project and enables it to keep going.

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I was told there would be less fascism

What a time to be an American millennial who was born and raised on myths of American supremacy and “freedom”, amiright? I am in the thick of figuring out how to protect my mental health these days as we are experiencing a kleptocracy, a technocratic coup, the collapse of the internet, and the capitulation of mainstream media to our present authoritarian regime. And by protect my mental health, I mean fight tooth and nail to claw my way into a headspace where I want to keep waking up alive and being present to my kids¹ and my friends and OH YEAH — ready to resist fascism with my terrible haircut and ill-fitting clothes and my personal obsession with besmirching the “legacy” of James Dobson².

Fascism is here, and it is no longer even bothering to try and hide itself. It’s exhausting and destabilizing and honestly predictable if we take the long view of history and the amount of indoctrination and right-wing white supremacist patriarchal propaganda that has been allowed to proliferate in American culture — protected and privileged due to aligning itself with colonizer Christianity.

Right now, as I type this out, it’s pretty easy to tell who is able to see reality for what it is and who is still clinging to some long-held beliefs about American exceptionalism (it could never happen here!!!). That’s the weirdly cathartic part about these times — when the gloves come off, they come ALL the way off. I am no longer a canary in the coal mine, an autistic voice begging people to care about the rise of authoritarianism thanks to organizations like Focus on the Family before we all get snuffed out. The mine is crumbling, and I am a loud wailing siren along with so many other voices saying “It is collapsing, right this very second -- and you and only you get to choose what to do about that.”

Living under fascism is different than stressing about the possibility of living under fascism. But it’s not all that new for me, it turns out. Take my childhood and young adulthood, for instance: I was denied access to education, only fed Christian nationalist propaganda through my homeschool textbooks, indoctrinated day in and day out about gender essentialism, groomed to be a Christian martyr/missionary/wife and mother, and indoctrinated to fear bodily autonomy and to vote against rights for anyone who wasn’t a white wealthy male. I thought what happened to me was inevitable, it was god’s will, it could never be changed. Now I know that there is possibility at the edges of everything: of belief, of capitalism, of resistance, of the self. We can change. We can take charge of our lives and decide who we are and how we want to respond to whatever life throws our way.