Volume 3, Issue 10: What to Do When the World is On Fire
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Hello friends. There is an overwhelming amount of difficult and terrible things happening in the world right now. It’s likely that you, like me, are feeling flung about like a pinball, slamming into one chunk of global or nationwide terror, and then another, and then another. With each bang against one of these bumpers of awful I, too, become incandescent with rage and sadness and heartbreak and disappointment (but never surprise because if someone is surprised then they haven’t been listening to and trusting the most marginalized).
My outrage is a wildfire. My anger could power a carnival’s worth of rides. As my friend’s Brazilian mother would say, “I’m so mad, I could bite myself.” And my anger isn’t pointed at a single thing because a bitch can multitask. I promise I can be angry about everything at once as well as absolutely gutted by it all. I am fatigued by the amount that I care, by the sheer amount of feelings happening all at once and all the time. Any single one of the things going on right now is devastating, whether it be pandemic, anti-trans legislation, police violence, taking away our abortion rights, the list goes on. They are happening all at once. They are not like one of my grandmother’s wuxia films, where our hero gets attacked by only one person at a time, though there is an entire gang waiting to take them down. Our current reality is, in the most cosmic of ways, an unfair fight.