The thing that really sucked about 2016 is that I never saw it coming. I went into the year with the sense of excitement and optimism one usually does, confident that I could get my shit together a little more and find success with things that had always eluded me. The Jackalope Serial Company started in January with an ambitious first serial, a novel-length story that would take me the entire year to complete. Now that I had my mental health issues figured out, more or less, I was impatient to get to all of the things that I was too busy fighting my own broken brain to get to. Of course, that boundless energy and optimism didn’t last long.
As the year wore on, I found that it was a bigger struggle than I thought to undo three decades of bad habits and poor decisions; the serial faltered, then stopped altogether. In the wider world, political discourse had gone from rancorous to toxic as Donald Trump somehow managed to beat 16 career politicans (and a few outsiders) to take the Republican nomination for President. Great Britain surprise-voted themselves out of the European Union, kicking off a wave of far-right xenophobia and racism that would be repeated on this side of the pond months later. Surprise that Trump made it this far into the Presidential process turned to shock, and disgust at his incompetence and inexcusable behavior became horror, when he became President thanks to razor-thin victories in three states that gave him all of the electoral votes he needed.
As we were reeling from the shock and facing down the prospect of a disastrous four years of a Trumpist administration, I thought that I could be prepared for 2017 knowing that it was going to be a rough one. I expected that there would be a lot of hard days ahead, and most of my friends would be frightened, depressed, in trouble, and struggling. I resolved to plant my feet and stand my ground as best I could, help out however I could, resist and endure. While I was facing the oncoming tsunami of political bad news, I was blindsided by a few personal crises.
First, my family. I received a letter in the mail asking me if I was related to a child whose name I didn’t recognize. Sure that it was some kind of mistake, I brushed it off until I received a follow-up phone call that told me my sister had been deemed unfit to raise her two youngest children and they had been placed in foster care. The woman on the other end was a social worker looking for relatives to take them in indefinitely.
Suddenly, my husband and I were faced with the prospect of raising children. As an adoptee myself, I know how important it is — but there was no way we were prepared for such a huge task. I couldn’t ask my husband to blow up his entire life for children he had never met, and I knew that saying yes would put all of my plans on hold for who knows how long. There were a lot of hard conversations and frenzied calls to family; I finally got to reach my sister and pledged my support, but I told the social worker there was simply no way we could take them in.
Since then, I haven’t heard anything from either of them. I have no idea what’s going on, despite repeated attempts to get in contact.
Two weeks ago, I was involved in a five car accident that pretty much wrecked my car. Since I rear-ended the car in front of me and the driver of that car was able to avoid the “main” accident I was deemed at fault and will have to pay a huge deductible if the cost of repairs are under the car’s value. Since that’s looking less and less likely, I should be OK with the total write-off but I’m not looking forward to the rise in my insurance premiums later this year. Besides the stress of uncertainty about the status of my car and the fact that this was my first major accident, things turned out a lot better than they could have there. Still, it’s been very stressful.
On top of that, we’ve had persistent plumbing issues with our kitchen sink over the past couple of weeks that got progressively worse until we learned that the sewer line from our kitchen had been corroded completely. That’s been repaired, but now we’re back to square one — our kitchen sink drains very slowly, as if something is not quite blocking it. A fourth/fifth visit from the plumber is likely later this week.
The family crisis, accident and plumbing issue has been taking up a good deal of my focus; the Argumentation & Debate class has been eating up the remainder. As a result, I’ve been stressed to all hell and those old avoidance behaviors have been creeping back into my days. If I’ve been flighty, distant and unreliable online that’s why. I’m feeling overwhelmed with everything going on and I’m just trying to tackle the biggest problems with what limited energy I have. I have to reserve a lot to fight my worst impulses, which makes it even harder to deal with anything new.
I’m hoping that things will shake themselves out in a few weeks or months, but in the meantime things will continue to be a struggle. I haven’t had the spoons for activism or volunteer work yet, and it bums me out. I know that the administration of 45 and the Republican party are up to their persistent fuckery, but I just don’t have the emotional space to tackle that right now. I need to step back and try to right my world for a little bit.
Of course, this blog post means that I’m digging myself out of the hole, bit by bit. Hopefully I can return to a regular posting schedule soon.
From the Desk of Jakebe T. Rabbit 