Lies. Not Fake News, not Alternative Facts.

First of all, the president of the United States is trying to pull off a coup. He is trying to cheat his way to another term by throwing out the legal and legitimate votes against him. He said that was what he planned to do. He said he would try. He is now doing exactly what he said he would do. He has consistently shown all of us what kind of person he is, and I have believed him from the start. I also believed his victims when they told us what he was. It is obvious. It is clear. It is not ambiguous. It isn’t debatable. If you disagree, you’re either mistaken or lying. This is not a matter of opinion.

Your friends and family who support him are bad people. If you supported him, you’re a bad person. You don’t have to be. You could stop. You could stop right this minute, and I am begging you to do so.

But I won’t sit around waiting for that, because no decent person currently has time to wait for you to grow a conscience.

I am a gentle person. I am a kind person. I hate making people angry. I hate making anyone feel bad. I know the sting and suffering of living with shame, and I do not wish it on anyone lightly.

If you enabled this, then you should be ashamed. It should eat at you. If you make it easier for your friends and family to enable this, then you share their shame. It should not be comfortable to enable an abuser to hurt people. It should be humiliating and isolating. If your father or uncle or neighbor can look you in the eye and say he supports the man who is currently clinging tooth and nail to the power to further harm all of us, then something has gone badly wrong between you.

Do not entertain any discussion of alternative facts. They are lies. Fake news is propaganda. Refusing to count all the legitimate votes in an election is a coup. The republican party stands in support of fascism today. That is reality. That is true.

Your vote is an ethical matter. If you support people who do harm, then you do harm. If you vote against marriage equality, then you act to steal the security and dignity of your neighbors. If you vote to end safe and legal abortion, then you are responsible for the excruciating deaths of living people. If you vote against the total reform of our policing and justice systems, then you are there when a cop murders a black woman in her own home or a black teenager is funneled into prison to be used as slave labor.

It is not always completely clear which way our individual political choices may take us, but it is not so murky as to be impossible or pointless to navigate. Doing the right thing is harder than remaining deliberately ignorant, but it is our responsibility as human beings living in a society to try. Any human being. Any society. No, we didn’t sign up for this. It doesn’t matter.

• 

  Crows on bare tree branches against a gray sky

The Resilience Garden

People are planting victory gardens again. Another name for them that’s gaining traction is “resilience garden.” I’ve spent the last few days pretty much from breakfast to bedtime in mine. I’m tired and sore, but it’s worth it. 

This virus isn’t planning to just go away any time soon, unfortunately. Normal daily life won’t be able to fully resume until we have a vaccine that’s widely available. In the meantime, it’s important to prepare for the long term consequences of this much disruption to the way society normally functions. It’s also just generally valuable for more people to learn how to produce and share food with the people around them, because food access, especially access to fresh foods, is pretty key to health and quality of life.

The supply system in the US that normally gets food to grocery stores and restaurants wasn’t prepared for the massive shift in demand caused by covid19, which is why grocery stores are struggling to keep so many things in stock. No, your neighbors aren’t hoarding flour or broccoli. Everyone in your city is suddenly cooking and baking at home, even the many many people who never used to cook at all. They’re eating every meal at home, and so are their kids, instead of having meals at work, at school, and on-the-go. All the food that was destined for restaurants, which are now mostly either closed or serving a reduced number of patrons via takeout, cannot be easily redirected to grocery stores to fill this gap.

The system we have in place for food distribution is inflexible and clunky, and while the food is still being produced, it just isn’t all getting to stores at the rate it’s wanted and needed. They will probably catch up, but we don’t know exactly what further disruptions are coming as the virus spreads. So, if you can, this would probably be a great time to learn how to grow some tomatoes, lettuce, or strawberries. Even fresh herbs grown on the windowsill can make a big difference if you’re otherwise working with frozen or canned items. It’s also a good time to be considering how to connect with and support the people around you, if you haven’t already, because the normally wide world has to shrink for a while to the size of your immediate community.

My rather inexpert herb bed construction. Mistakes were made.

But it came together.

Two types of sage, oregano, thyme, and lemongrass planted in the new herb bed

The whole front garden with strawberries, broccoli, beets, tomatoes, onions, peas, carrots, blueberries, and herbs

It hasn’t all been tomatoes and parsley, though. I also completely gutted and replanted a front bed that had been taken over by grasses and volunteer bulbs. Walking around, it always makes me happy to see other people’s beautiful front gardens, so I wanted to contribute to that as well. People seem to be putting extra mindfulness into their daily walks, and it’s really nice to be out there and see them smile as they go by.

Let’s Go Round the Sun Again, One Step at a Time

Like most milestones that humans care about, the new year is pretty arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad time to wipe our mental slates clean and look forward with a little extra hope.

A lot of people are probably already finding their new year’s resolutions to be a heavy burden, because we’re usually encouraged to set our sights way too high when crafting goals. If you picked something that’s making you miserable and burning you out, I hope you’ll consider stepping it down to a more reasonable level now rather than just dropping it when you run out of energy entirely. That’s not failure, it’s just good planning.

Restrictive diets don’t tend to work for the vast majority of people, but adding an extra vegetable source to one meal a day is pretty doable for many, and that can help build a long term habit that supports individual health. So can adding five or ten minutes of stretching or meditation at a convenient time of the day rather than committing to spend an hour at the gym five times a week when you haven’t gone in months or years. It doesn’t mean you can’t increase your goals as you go along, but keeping the increments ridiculously tiny means that it’s almost impossible to let yourself down. Small wins make a huge difference in confidence and self-image, while repeated failures are disheartening and typically lead to completely abandoning all effort.

This stuff is even more important to consider if you live with mental illness or are neurodivergent. There’s a huge amount of pressure to use that yearly boost of energy to DO ALL THE THINGS and be… better. And it works, but only for a few days, and then our actual limits come down even harder on us because we burn out all of our reserves. And then all that hope turns into just another thing that we feel bad about failing to live up to, and none of us needs more of that. Not a one. We need a bunch of little successes a hell of a lot more than we need a handful of new regrets.

So, please, give yourself the gift of some really small but consistent wins this year.

Some humble, slightly random suggestions for new moderated goals:

• Go to bed just ten minutes earlier than you have been
• Set your alarm for ten minutes earlier (but only if you went to bed earlier. Sleep is so important.)
• Switch just your afternoon tea or coffee to decaf
• Add a veggie you don’t hate to one meal a day
• Stretch for a couple of minutes every morning
• Walk around your block once a day at a convenient time
• Write 50 words on a project every day, or even less if that’s too much
• Spend fifteen minutes doodling if you’ve been missing your art
• Spend ten minutes gardening and then go inside if it’s cold or raining
• Clean or organize one part of your space for ten minutes and then let yourself stop for the day
• Read a page or two of a book you’re interested in every day
• Catch yourself when you start thinking negative things about yourself and practice redirecting to something more neutral whenever you can. Neutral is a much more achievable starter goal than positivity, and it’s still an improvement.

Adding something small to your day tends to be easier than eliminating something, and in the long run it can have the same effect by slowly edging out whatever it is that you think you should reduce. If you’re interested, the book Mini Habits by Stephen Guise is a pretty helpful guide for setting consistently achievable goals and he also explains why they work so well.

Too Late

My family used to go to church when I was a little kid. I have a whole bunch of thoughts about christianity as a whole, but they’re not particularly relevant here because the main thing that colors my memory of that church has nothing to do with religion. It’s the fact that we were consistently late in arriving. We usually snuck in through the back door, having missed the first quarter or half of the service, to sit on the edge of a big fireplace at the back of the hall until the singing started so we could scoot along the rows of folding chairs without disrupting things too much.

We were late for school, too. Pretty much every day. One time I arrived without shoes, somehow. I don’t actually remember how that was resolved. I was a daydreamy unmedicated kid with ADHD attending an elementary school that had a small farm, so I was also late getting back from lunch every day. Sometimes I had a few mosquito fish from the pond cupped in my hands that I wanted to arrange in a vase in the classroom. I’m not sure why the supervision in that school was so lax that I could get away with that, but it happened more than once. When I got to middle school, I got lost in the library during breaks and missed classes. In high school, I was dropped off late and went straight to the library, instead of to a class where I would once again be informed that I had interrupted the lesson. As if I didn’t know. As if there was anything I could actually do about it.

Being on time, or (even more unfathomable) being early, were just things that happened to other people. Better people, probably.

I had become completely familiar with the embarrassing, out of place feeling of lateness, but it never felt fine. It was just inevitable. I got used to the fact that, no matter how frantically the adults in my life tried, we did not arrive anywhere on time. The same thing happened when I tried, and then there was disappointment on top of the embarrassment. Lateness permeated my life to the point that it became part of my identity pretty early on. I was just a late person. It went along nicely with the constant reminders from authority figures that I was too bright to be struggling with my schoolwork, so I must just be lazy.

I still feel uneasy about arriving early, even though I know there’s literally no downside to it. It’s too alien. It feels like a trap.

The weird thing is, now that I’m on medication, my brain just plain tracks time better. I don’t sit down to glance at my phone and lose an entire hour or more. I lose fifteen minutes instead, look up in a panic assuming that I’ve already missed whatever appointment I was supposed to be getting ready for, and realize that I’m actually right on time as long as I leave right away. There are a lot of things like that, where I used to think I just lacked discipline and skills, mostly because everyone assured me that was the case, but it turns out that altering my brain chemistry to be a little more functional suddenly allows me to access discipline and skills that I’ve had all along.

Now, I’m not just fighting my ADHD anymore, I’m fighting my own identity. I’m a late person, who’s always late. Except I’m often not particularly late anymore. I’m on time for appointments, or a few minutes early. When I am late, it’s usually for things that are emotionally important to me. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I think it does come down to this identity thing. The closer the thing is to my heart, the more it means to me, the more my expectation is that I’ll muck it up. That I won’t get there, and that I’ll let someone down, even if that person is just me. Especially if that person is just me.

I was late finishing this blog post even though I had already planned it out and written a draft for it because showing up to an appointment I make with myself is pretty much the hardest kind of accountability for me. But, it’s only a few hours late, and it’s pretty much finished now. I have confidence at this point that I’ll continue getting better at timekeeping and planning and getting to places when I say I will, even when that place is my desk and the person I’m meeting is me. I’ve got the tools, and I’m motivated, and in spite of what I was told so frequently, I’m not actually lazy. Pretty much no one is.

(Fairness note: My parents had four kids with various shades of ADHD to wrangle, and that shit is genetically inherited. It is not surprising that we were late for everything. It’s actually fairly surprising that we ever got anywhere at all.)

Red vine leaves carpet a cement wall behind a long grass-seed stem on a sunny autumn day

It’s Okay Not to Love Books

I love books. I love writing and reading. I feel that books have helped me immensely throughout my life, and I think it’s okay not to read. It’s okay to not feel any particular attachment to books. It’s okay to like reading, but to prefer digital formats to physical books. It is not just okay, but probably wise, to donate or throw away books that don’t make you happy. Your space doesn’t need to look like a library unless that makes you feel good. If it does, that’s also fine.

It’s kinda not fine, though, to pitch a fit over the idea of anyone else not valuing books the way you do. For some people, they’re just objects. That’s fine. They are just objects. The value of any object is personal and subjective, and it may change over time.

The anger over Marie Kondo’s (misquoted and out of context) suggestion that people keep less than thirty books in their homes is worrying for a lot of reasons.

First of all, it’s untrue. She says you should keep whatever makes you happy. If books make you happy, she’d encourage you to proudly display and enjoy them, not convince you to throw them away. Stop bitching at this nice woman who just wants to help people tidy their houses. It’s her thing, just like books are your thing. She isn’t coming to take anything from you, and she doesn’t want to.

It also shows that a lot of avid readers and writers haven’t considered that there are plenty of totally valid reasons why people might not feel the same way they do about books. A number of disabilities, including dyslexia and ADHD, can make it extremely difficult to read, or to sit still long enough to enjoy a book. Some people literally cannot form images in their heads as they read, so pages full of text hold little appeal for them. Some never had access to books growing up and didn’t develop that love. Other people just have dominant interests that don’t lend themselves well to sitting quietly and reading. Not everything is best absorbed in that format, and not everyone learns easily from the written word.

Finally, the actual force of it is driven by classism and ableism, among other things. Yes, a lot of people only share those posts because it’s kinda funny to imagine themselves cutting down on something that obviously means so much to them, but a lot of other people have shown genuine disgust and anger at the idea of not having a library’s worth of knowledge in their living rooms. There’s this deep belief, often instilled when we’re kids, that reading a lot and having as many books as possible makes us smarter, and therefor better, than our peers. This can become part of our identities as readers. It’s been a part of mine, and I didn’t realize how much that was driven by certain social biases until fairly recently. I’m still learning to untangle it.

Sure, it’s fine to sleep on a pile of books every night like a dragon, but that really does not mean you’re better than anyone else. It doesn’t mean you’re smarter than anyone else. More than anything else, it probably means that you may have some common interests with other avid readers. Which is a great thing, but it’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be.

Some cute brown mushrooms on a mossy log that I found on my last road trip.

Writing days this past week: 0

Kindness Porn

I’ve started watching the Tidying Up show with Marie Kondo, not because I’m actually planning to follow her method at the moment, but just because she’s such a delight to watch and listen to. I also loved her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and would highly recommend it as a very relaxing read. It’s an excellent bedtime book.

In spite of all the totally legitimate criticism of the minimalist movement, Marie is really nonjudgemental and seems to be purely motivated by a desire to help people make their own environments comfortable for themselves, not to make them fit into any particular image. If that box of Star Wars memorabilia makes you happy, she wants to help you display it, not guilt you into throwing it away. She really strikes me, above all else, as a person who has completely leaned into who she is, her own unique view of the world, and what matters to her. I think that’s pretty special.

I have a slowly growing little list of shows that are both positive and relaxing, and Tidying Up is going on it. The Great British Baking show and Queer Eye are also pretty high up there. I never realized how starved I was for just seeing basic kindness on TV until I first found myself watching a baking competition where the contestants would often stop work just to help each other. Even the comedians on GBBS give out hugs and encouragement in equal measure with their kindhearted teasing and jokes.

Queer Eye offers something even more rare, which is a group of men doing emotional labor for other men. Many straight men rely almost entirely on their female partners for that kind of emotional processing and support, and it can be terribly isolating. The men of Queer Eye are gentle and encouraging, and they provide a great image of non-toxic masculinity. Plus, the show offers a lot of body positivity for men, another rarity.

Side note: There was a great discussion I saw a while ago about how this heavy reliance on their female partners can encourage men to believe in the mythical Friend Zone. Men tend to view any kind of emotional labor as something you only exchange with a romantic partner, whereas women usually also give and receive that kind of support from friends. Thus, basic supportive friendship for a woman looks, to a straight man, like a relationship. This is not a good thing. It wears women out, trying to keep up with the needs of a person who isn’t getting emotional support from anyone else in their life, and is part of why older men tend to die soon after losing their partners. They have no emotional support networks to take up the strain, unlike most older women. Plus, it encourages men to ruin perfectly good friendships by putting their female friends in The Girlfriend Zone. Knock this off, dudes. Being friends isn’t a consolation prize, y’all just need to learn how to do it right.

Here are some of the shows on my kindness porn list:

• Great British Baking show
• Queer Eye This is the remake, not the original. I’ve just never watched the original show, so I can’t comment on its tone.
• Tidying up
• This one is not a TV show, but Jessica Kellgren-Fozard has a youtube channel, Jessica Out of the Closet, that is pretty much like distilled sunshine. She’s a disability activist, vintage beauty vlogger, and she shares stories about her life with her wife and their two dogs. Sometimes she also talks about her beliefs as a quaker, and about queer and disabled historical figures. She’s one of the most positive and intentionally kind people I’ve ever seen in my life.
• Big Dreams, Small Spaces is a British show about renovating small gardens so that they’re more functional and beautiful for the families who need them. They often feature disabled people, with a focus on accessibility and tailoring those spaces really well to the people who will use them.
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a short one, but very fun to watch. The host, Samin Nosrat, is incredibly passionate about good food, with none of the usual quibbling about calories or creepy talk about guilty pleasures. She enjoys herself, teaches about the important basic elements of flavor, and she goes out and talks to people who make amazing food around the world. She also has a book.

If anyone has any suggestions for more shows I should add to this list, I’d love to hear them.

I had to rescue this orchid from Safeway, because they had sprayed all the other orchids with glitter paint and it was sad.

This is my weird hairless dog in pajamas giving me a hug. Granted, she was doing this to stop me from working so I’d pay attention to her instead, but still.

Writing days this past week: 2

Good Job, 2018 You

I don’t really love the whole resolution thing. A lot of the time, we’re encouraged to be way too all-or-nothing in our goals, and frustration naturally follows. There’s also a whole culture of guilt built up around it that kinda sucks, where we look back at the past year only to find things to fix with our new resolutions, and to feel ashamed of the ones we abandoned last January.

That said, this is still a perfectly good time to look back at the past year and do some self-reflection. I think it’d be nice, though, if we were all encouraged to be proud of the growth we did achieve, instead of looking at our failings. Everyone has probably done at least a few things in the past year that they can be proud of. They might have learned something important about themselves, built a new routine that made them more productive, changed an old pattern of behavior that didn’t work well, or started eating vegetables a little more often. I did all of those things, and I’m making a conscious effort to give myself credit for all of it. It was hard, but I grew a lot.

I also wrote a blog post every single week in 2018. It’s not a perfect record – a number of the posts came out late – but it’s still a big deal for me to be able to be that consistent about anything. I want to thank everyone who has read any of those posts, because knowing that people might notice if I didn’t put them out helped keep me on track.

I really appreciate you all, and I hope you can find things to congratulate yourselves for when you look back at 2018. I hope you can be kind to yourselves in 2019, too. Your specific resolutions may or may not be manageable, but you’re still going to grow and change this year. We all will.

Round moss clumps on bare tree branches on a sunny winter day.

Writing days this past week: 3

National Coming Out Day – I’m Still Gettin’ Bi

I got pretty much nothing done last week, but I’m feeling much better now, so I’m looking forward to getting back in the swing of things. I tried to write this post yesterday, but it just turned into a jumbled mess, so here’s the short and sweet version:

Yesterday (Thursday) was national coming out day, and in that spirit I’ma remind y’all that I’m bisexual. Coming out and being visible is a privilege, and one that I don’t take for granted. It’s also important, because queer folks (who can do so safely) being visible is part of moving toward a culture where we don’t just assume that everyone is straight and cis. It’s a way of pushing back against our current culture where people can be fired and endangered because of who they are, and where people risk losing friends and family members because of who and how they love.

Anyone who thinks it’s unnecessary to share this information publicly should probably keep in mind that every time a straight cis person mentions their spouse in casual conversation, they’re doing something that many queer people cannot do without mentally calculating the very real risk of rejection or anger. Every time you go into a public bathroom and don’t worry about your safety, you’re doing something that many trans folks, including children, can’t do. Coming out isn’t a bid for attention. It’s just the constant act of swimming against the currents of a culture that fundamentally assumes we don’t exist, and often asserts that we shouldn’t exist. We’re essentially forced to do it, or allow ourselves to be erased. If you want it to not be a big deal, then fight homophobia and transphobia and all the other bigotry that makes the world unsafe for your queer neighbors, friends, and family members.

All that said, here’s my favorite song about coming out as bisexual, because it’s hilarious and cute.

This is the bi pride flag! I drew it. No, the layers aren’t even. I’m trying really hard not to let that bug me, because it is late and perfection is a deep pit where madness lurks.

Writing days this past week: 0

Racists are a Bummer

So, I sat down to write this post yesterday (Thursday,) but I checked my Facebook page first. I’ve been trying to help boost a friend’s gofundme page, but increasing the visibility of that post means that a very mixed bag of people see it, and some of them feel the need to leave incredibly rude and heartless comments. They’re completely normal people who could easily be your friends, family members, or fellow church-goers, but they basically revel in the pain of another person as long as that person is someone they feel free to target.

To be clear: If you go out of your way to make an immigrant feel unwelcome and unsafe in this country, you’re an asshole. The saddest part is that only one person has felt moved to leave a purely supportive comment, but I’ve deleted quite a few cruel and confrontational ones. This is all too normal.

I wasn’t feeling awesome, after reading those comments, and I wasn’t really sure what to say about it. These aren’t people who care to change. They’re generally extremely confident in their right to hurt others. They rarely face any consequences, social or otherwise, for their cruelty. Rida, on the other hand, is made unsafe by these attitudes. She lives with the consequences of this casual racism and xenophobia, and she’s still someone who devotes her time and energy to helping others. If you are able to offer her any support, either financially, by sharing her gofundme page, or just with some kind words to balance out the harsh ones, that would be greatly appreciated.

In other news, I’m finally going to do an actual sleep study, so maybe I’ll eventually start feeling rested in the morning. That’d be nice.

I was at a party last Friday and this thing was there. It was pretty cool.

Writing days this past week: 4