World War Me
reflections from occupied Portland
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. I’m glad you are here, and that we are in this together.
Two years ago I was driving on a sunny October day for a long-awaited break. I had planned out the day meticulously: the new Sufjan album Javelin would release, Krispin would be watching our children, and I would drive 1 hour and 45 minutes along the gorge that separates Washington from Oregon to an art museum in the middle of nowhere. It was my adventure, my big plan to go out into the wider world — the world I am constantly terrified of. I had been talking to my therapist of my fears regarding social collapse, that everywhere I looked I saw the signs of a society coming apart at the seams. The crushing poverty, drug use, racism, and spiritual bypassing I was surrounded with scared me, but everyone in my life kept encouraging me to give humanity another try. Maybe it all wasn’t as bad as it sometimes felt in my bones.
Before I left on my drive I checked the news. I saw the reports of attacks against Israelis, and it sickened me. As I drove towards the art museum, my sadness started to turn into grief, and then fear. How would this act of violence be used by the leaders of Israel against the people of Palestine? I listened to Sufjan sing sadly about his partner who died of cancer, and I started to cry. I drove past ancient scenery caused by the long long centuries of water flowing and all I could think was that this event of 10/7 would set off WWIII. That the cycles of violence would continue expanding outward until every single one of us was touched by it.
I wandered around the art museum, barely able to pay attention. There was religious iconography, the splendor of royals, indigenous artifacts, colonizer memories. A muddle, a mixture, of those who seek to control from above and those who make beauty from their surroundings. I tried to drink a grape soda but couldn’t even swallow. The dread was creeping up. I listened to Javelin again on the drive back, and this time it felt personal. It felt like I had been born into a world riddled with cancer, but covered up with stories, mythologies, makeup and more. An illusion of health, when the decay was right underneath the surface all along. Society was collapsing, war and conflict and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people was immanent, and nobody seemed to see it but me.
I finally made it home, safe and surrounded by my loved ones. In the days to come I felt ashamed of my tears, my sobs, my predictions of an endless cycles of punishing authoritarians taking opportunities to destroy those who cannot or will not comply. I chalked it up to growing up with an end-times obsessed mother, my CPTSD, reading too much news on my phone. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad after all. Perhaps everyone around me was right: there was nothing to worry about.
Maybe the authoritarians wouldn’t do the things they had boasted time and time again that they would do. Perhaps, maybe this time, I would be proven wrong.
The story of Palestine is the story of all of us, and the past two years have shown me this more than ever. Today I am allowing myself to feel it all: the grief, the rage, the despair, the scorn, the almost desperate desire for people to do something to stop it.
I am also allowing myself to feel proud in the ways I have showed up in the world in the past two years. In my own small and weird ways I have kept Palestine close to my heart. I have kept the children of the world who suffer at the hands of violent men close to my soul. I have worshipped at the feet of the moon, the sun, of the fresh herbs in my garden and I have decided to keep living despite it all. The cycles of violence continue ever onward but now I see through the propaganda that props it all up. I refuse to normalize it, or accept it as our only fate. I cry, I walk, I journal, I scream, I rage-post, I snuggle, I stare off into silence for hours, I wake up early and struggle to envision a hopeful future. I allow myself to be as human as I want the rest of the world to view the people of Palestine: as people who deserve the autonomy to choose their own life. People who deserve to have the loudest voices when it comes to their own future, and the future of their children. Just like I do, here in the United States.
Living in a place that is ostensibly home of the free these days feels like I took too many mushrooms and went to the state fair. Surrounded by red white and blue and people who are too terrified to live and think for themselves. People who are too scared to admit when they have made a mistake or that they have been much too compliant to unjust authorities. People who talk a big talk about resisting tyranny and then swarm social media to egg it on. People who only condone political violence when it’s a transphobic racist white Christian man they like who is on the receiving end of it, but who are gleeful when anyone not of their little world is blown to bits by the very guns they fought so hard to be able to hold.
It’s been two years since I spent a day stuck in fear and sobs, envisioning the horrors to come. Two years to that day, and more suffering and violence has happened than I could have even predicted. Every institute of Palestinian life has been eradicated: the hospitals full of small children and the elderly, the museums and mosques and libraries, the streets and cities and homes, the farms and access to any water or food or baby formula. They are being starved as I write this, and the few brave souls trying to reach them with aid are being kidnapped and tortured while the world watches.
In my own city of Portland, my president is mobilizing the military to come and use lethal force if necessary against those protesting the inhumane and illegal kidnapping of people by ICE agents. Men in full riot gear are in my city with their rifles slung around their shoulders while right-wing agitators livestream the small motly crew of protesters dressed in frog costumes and blowing bubbles at ICE agents. Families are being torn apart by ICE, thousands of innocent people are missing from the US concentration camps, trans people have almost zero rights, abortion access has been denied to millions and millions of people, pedophiles are being protected at the highest levels of our government, all of us will be paying double for what little health insurance we have, and soon it will be legal again to place children in gay conversion therapy.
It’s WWIII out here in Portland, and probably in your city too. But the tactics have changed and now we are being surveilled and controlled by our phones, our social media, and our inability to actually live in reality. The one where authoritarianism is on the rise in almost every corner of the globe. Nobody is coming to save us, but the good and bad news is this:
We always have, and we always will, save each other. In the past two years my friends and I started a coven, put on a religious trauma art show, released close to 100 podcast episodes, wrote hundreds of thousands of words, ate delicious treats, read so many good books, listened to gorgeous music, was helped by my friends and family and community, laughed at stupid memes, grieved the loss of my parents in my life, was educated on all sorts of things thanks to TikTok, parented my children, and fell in love with every single act of bravery and courage I came across. And there was so much to see!
I am remembering all of this today, two years after I felt like I was falling into a world split apart at the seams. It has been two years of slowly facing reality, and of building up the kind of life I want to live here and now. Of regulating my nervous system and screaming into the void. Of using the means of control like social media apps to be as weird and as off-putting and intense as I like. To be more creative instead of consumeristic. To grieve one genocide and to grieve them all. To be a perpetual burning heart that I feed with kindness, gentleness, and self-compassion.
I didn’t give up on the world two years ago, even though for a moment I wanted to. I still love it, despite everything. And there are so many brave folks scattered throughout this gigantic mass of land, and they are all up to their weird and wild ways of being ungovernable, creative, and curious. To be alive and awake right now is to experience pain, and fear, and uncertainty. But we also have spent the past few years (and decades even) building up a different way. Our own way. A way that honors all the complexities of who we are and hopes for a better future.
And nobody will ever be able to take that away from us.
Two years ago, I never made it to the end of Sufjan’s album. I just kept playing the sad songs on the beginning over and over again. But today I am listening to the last song, a cover of a song written and performed by Neil Young. It doesn’t fix everything I so desperately want changed right now. But it reminds me that so many of us are waking up to the world right under our fingertips. The one where the wind and the trees and the earth itself is crying out for care instead of exploitation. For mutuality instead of hierarchy. For community instead of supremacy.
Much love to you all from occupied Portland. What will the world look like one year from today? For all of our sakes, I hope it looks very different than the one I woke up to today. Starting with a free and self-determining Palestine.
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Thanks for voicing everything I’ve been feeling. One day at a time.
I totally forgot that Javelin does not actually end with "Shit Talk"! This feels important to me today as I hold all the contradictions of my life together. I contribute to my local paper sometimes (just very local stuff); they refused to publish my op-ed this week about Palestine. And there are apples at home that we picked from a local orchard, just waiting to be put into pie or made into apple butter.