My dog pooped her pants.
I got home late from work, already teary eyed and wounded, as I’d just dropped off the last of my ex’s stuff at the post office. I didn’t know his new apartment number, just the building, but I figured that was his fault, somehow, and hoped the apartment manager would figure it out. I chose not to worry if they would.
Still, some sad song came on during the drive home, called “the damage you still do” and woof if that wasn’t all it took to crack me open. A little crying in the car, a little feeling sorry for myself, a little giving my dog another bath and tossing another diaper in the bin. A little shuffling of tarot cards in hopes that I’d get a satisfactory answer to why I felt like this, even as I pretended to wonder why I was still crying. The cards recycled the same message I’d been getting all week.
Follow your heart. Take action.
I type with the screen blacked out so I can’t judge my own writing before I’ve finished. I flip back in my journal for even more answers I won’t recieve. My piano is out of tune, and I play it angrily, grieving the sounds it used to make. Full and deep. Like the music was coursing through my body, from my fingers to my ears. Now it sounded strained and tired, and I cried again, moaning something pathetic against sheet music and wood.
I got the instrument for free a couple years ago from someone who just wanted it out, and I can’t afford to have it tuned, or to have the 3 broken keys fixed, hell I go further into debt everytime I buy myself groceries.
Its unfair.
I know that pain is a part of life, a part of love, a part of being. I’ve read all the books, I’ve muttered all the mantras, but it’s a difficult mindset to return to when the world around you is dying, and truly nothing, not even kindness, is free.
I thought to myself once, a couple years ago, that I could die happy. Truly a profound, ordinary moment, swinging in my hammock, looking up at the big blue sky through the canopy. Heaven on earth.
Things are harder now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. Maybe it was just a coping mechanism in the first place to deal with the impending doom, but I find that more and more, joy is becoming harder to come by. I take my meds; I’m on my third therapist this year because the company sucks and they keep quitting, but I can’t leave because I’m receiving “financial forgiveness” from the board.
Still don’t qualify for food stamps, though.
Over and over again I think to myself, it shouldn’t be this difficult. It shouldn’t be me and my will against the system, it shouldn’t be this hard to get help. I shouldn’t have to spend hours on paperwork just to get a one line rejection notice in the mail. No one should.
What can I do about this, what can any of us do about this? These are the questions that’ve been rattling around in my skull constantly for the past three months.
When we were kids, we thought the future was bright. Schools were opening computer labs based on the hip millennial “idea space” Libraries were full and vast, gas was cheap, the first lady was trying to get us all to eat healthy and PBS was making educational cartoons and told us it wasn’t too late for our planet.
We were led to believe that if we worked hard, we could succeed.
I can’t help but get angry when I look at what all those empty promises amounted to. Attacks from our own government, a fucking pedophile in the big chair, earth overshoot day being announced halfway through the year while the billonaires and boomers tell us how good we have it, and how lazy we are.
It’s time to dismantle the fucked-up system they’ve build, because we shouldn’t have to live in it any longer. The world is dying, every day, people, are dying, everyday, and we know who’s responsible. It’s time that we made them answer for it.
Hear me when I say this will not end until we ALL take action. Words alone will never change their minds. Let this be the beginning of the end.
STOP GIVING THEM YOUR FUCKING MONEY. That is all they care about, and this is one of the easiest things you can do. Support your neighbors, buy from FB marketplace or garage sales or thrift stores or ebay or depop where shit is cheap as hell. Use ecofriendly and ai limited search engines, (ecosia is my favorite right now, but I’ll probably write an article or something about that so stay tuned) cancel your corporate subscriptions, go to protests, start them yourself, read baned books, unplug from the fucking screen.
We have more power than we realize, but we all need to wake up.
I plan to use this platform to show the average Joe or Josephine that, if you’re craving action, no matter where you are in life, there are still things you can do to fight this, and none of us are as helpless as we feel.
I don’t have all the answers, and I’m still figuring out what fixing this even looks like, but I do know that I don’t want to sit around waiting for someone else to care enough to do something about it. I’m only one person, but I’ll start where I am, with the people around me, with this blog, and see what happens if we start taking care of each other again.
The cost of community is inconvenience. And you can choose your little comforts or you can choose to fight for the freedom we were promised. Pick your hard.
For those of you who want to fight, this blog is for you.
Dawn
I want everyone to know that I absolutely WRESTLED with WordPress in pursuit of this, but it was worth it 🙂
Forgive my typos, I’ve been failing spelling tests since I was in the fourth grade & my glasses are always smudged. :p
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