“Stop saying we’ll survive this because Renee Good didn’t!”
It’s very important to talk about what happened to Renee Good, the horror this administration has inflicted upon the world, and how we got here. I do not, however, think it is ever ethical to essentially encourage suicidal thoughts and aggressively tell people things will never get better. In fact, things won’t get better if everyone gives up and believes resistance is futile because we’re all dead anyway. In addition, someone trying to talk themselves out of a dark place isn’t necessarily undermining what happened to Renee, either. The people saying we’ll survive are generally people who are scared and have taken Trump seriously for years, not the people who downplayed him before the election.
I’ll say what I began saying in January of last year; if you’re really in such a dark place, you have no right to drag others down with you. It’s not “raising awareness” to scream at people trying to get through the day during very unsettling times. When you’re telling people to stop even saying we’ll survive, what are you actually doing? What are you accomplishing? If your answer is “being aggressively hopeless until my last breath”, then go do that somewhere else.
@thebreakfastgenie Such a mood. Like I am not still working on improving my mental health after the toll the 2024 election took for some doomer to try to make me suicidal again. Nope! Not interested. I assume some of the doom brigade are severely depressed themselves but I struggle to sympathize like get help, stop trying to drag everyone else down with you. And it drives me nuts when people act like believing in survival is somehow dismissing how bad it is. Bad isn’t hopeless! Maybe people who didn’t pay attention to Trump before the election(s) are just processing in a fundamentally different way? Idk I can’t imagine living like that lol.
Oh I definitely think part of this is that people really didn’t believe things would get this bad, so they’re having a delayed reaction and are feeling what we felt before or immediately after the election. There’s a reason why I cried every day for about 3 months straight, but have shed few tears lately. I was actually just talking about that with my supervisor; she asked me if I’d seen what happened to Renee Good, and I said yes, and, “Some people really screwed up over a year ago and didn’t think anything would fundamentally change. But I knew. That’s why I was crying my eyes out the next day and needed to go home from work.”
She said, “Yes, I remember that.” (She’d comforted me in that time. She’d just gotten citizenship, and despite her facing hardships in Algeria, I think she’s shocked over the past year.)
But I’d also put myself back in therapy immediately after the election because I knew what a bad place I was in, and I didn’t want this administration to kill me. We must live to see this end. We have to try, and we can’t be dragged down by people who’ve given up. As I said many times, Trump 1.0 taught me that daily misery doesn’t change current events, and only puts your own life on hold
@cardassiangoodreads Quoting a Discord friend (who is also a trained psychologist):
“We are at the point where things may start to get scarier as they start to get better.
The resistance is working, but that means Trump is going to get more desperate and escalate more. He’s not flexing power, he is desperately trying to get the power back.
Prepare to see things to look frightening but don’t let that pull you into despair or hopelessness. He has failed in every other attempt to consolidate power, and signs are pointing to him going to fail here too, but not until after a lot of scary acts
Remember, when overwhelming you is one of their tactical goals, self care is resistance”
I haven’t said this before because I don’t want to be misconstrued as undermining what’s happening, but this is actually my take as well. The administration is WEAK. They’re desperately trying to display strength, which is dangerous because they see violence as strength, but Renee’s death only increased protests against ICE. You have people shouting at ICE, “You can’t kill all of us!” People simply aren’t going down without a fight. The National Guard was told to get out of the states that didn’t request them (like CA). Resistance is much stronger now than it was this time last year; just think of how bleak things felt in January-February 2025. Trump is polling underwater on basically every issue, and not by a small amount. The administration keeps LOSING in a lot of ways. All their attempts to prosecute their enemies have been thrown out by courts thus far. They couldn’t even keep Jimmy Kimmel off the air. They drastically lowered hiring standards and training times for ICE officers because they’re NOT hitting their hiring goals and NOT hitting their deportation quotas. Democrats did very well in elections last year, and they could very well overperform this November in the midterms
Things have, indeed, gotten scarier as things fall apart more, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t falling apart. This will end. It’s still a long road until the end, but we inch closer to the end every day. It doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen until then, but it means we need to keep trying to survive and looking forward to when he’s gone forever and we can pick up the pieces
Additionally, “we will survive” does not mean “every individual person will survive.” It means “the We will survive” – that is, the community of people who care, the group of folks standing in solidarity with each other, the people fighting fiercely and closing ranks to protect the vulnerable. ICE has killed multiple people already, and any realistic perspective will admit that, barring some miracle, they will almost certainly kill more people before it’s over.
But We will survive, because they cannot kill all of Us. The We is a living thing, a breathing and thinking organism, a greater body that is more than the sum of its parts. You and I are part of that body: If you survive, then We survive; if I survive, then We survive. So let’s survive. They can’t kill all of Us.
as good of a time as any to share my list of activities I do during what i like to call Scheduled Soul Maintenence to avoid burnout
go on an aimless bike/ride/walk - move your body, do it for as long as you feel like it, discover new places near you weather that is a frog or a cafe
watch a new movie/read a new book/listen to a new album - get inspired, excercise having opinions and longer attention span, break out of consuming content and make a choice about what you want to expirience
create something in a medium i haven’t used in a while - get out of a habit, rekindle a flame you haven’t been upkeeping, making a friendship bracelet counts
go have a fun new drink/snack - arguably most important, have a little treat without rush, slow down and focus on physical sensations, treat yourself in a way that isn’t landfillcore
meet with friends and/or go to a place where you meet strangers - human connection is good for you, (maybe some casual sex if you like that/try something new with your partner)
make some bad art - create for the sake of creating without any expectations
play an instrument - this can be anything that makes you reach a kind of flow state
go see something you haven’t yet - get to know the cultural/geographical map of your area, this includes events, places, or just anything that makes you go out of your way to expirience something new, can be like a viewpoint or it can be a museum exhibit, anything you find cool
cook/bake something new - nurish your body, break out of cooking habits and routine, make it an event, plate it nicely too
and i would like to point out that none of these have to cost more money than your usual lifestyle.
ALT
