A Little Lighter for Mental Health Purposes

Green ribbon for mental
health awareness

LINK HEAVY POST

Because of all the incredible, ridiculous, dangerous, scary horseshit that has been happening lately, I have been retreating more and more into myself and my personal circles, and out of social media. I'm still there a little bit, because a) I still need to know what's going on in the world, and b) I have some very dear friends whom I only see online. But in addition to the aforementioned (click any recent post) time restrictions that I put on my Facebook app (the other platforms are not generally an issue), I have now turned off notifications as well. So if I want to go there, I have to do it deliberately.

In any case, this post is about what I do to keep myself from huddling in a corner sucking my thumb. I suppose it's technically dissociation, although not in the clinical sense. It's probably better defined as my old standby, conflict avoidance. I'll be 57 next week, and I'm just tired of dealing with... well, with all that out there.

I write, of course. Mostly here, or the nightly write-down-my-worries notebook that I have picked back up again. I'm currently not writing fiction, fan- or otherwise. Don't know why.

I'm rereading old childhood favorites. For a while it was Agatha Christie's not-Poirot-nor-Marple novels, but many of those are political or spy thrillers, and are therefore unsettlingly close to what the world is like right now. Though I suppose if I wanted an actual taste of what the world is like right now, I'd have to pull out some Ian Fleming; some of our current crop of political types are one fluffy or hairless cat away from being Bond Villains. I have no objection to Poirot or Marple, but I want to read them in chronological order, and most of the early ones are on hold in my Libby app, as other people are reading them right now.

So I regressed even further into childhood and am reading Nancy Drew. Now, the ones I used to own (about fifty each of the Nancy Boys and Hardy Boys series) and the ones I'm reading now (on Kindle through the Libby app) are rewrites (from the 1960s) of the original stories (from the 1930s-1950s), to update some technology (like Nancy's convertible car) and some language (there are a few words in the early books that would be considered slurs today, and even the 1960s ones are not great by today's standards). Aside from these issues, and the formulaic nature of the stories (Nancy & friends come across a person who has been Done Wrong, Nancy vows to investigate, Bess gets scared, George shows off her "tomboy" strength, there is a Dangerous Situation involving kidnapping or flood or fire, and then they catch the Bad Guy), there is a lot that I notice as an adult that was not at all evident when I was a kid or even a young adult. 

Leaving aside the Mary Sue that is Nancy Drew (she can do just about anything), there are these elements in almost every story. George is there to be the muscle if there aren't any boys around. She also mildly fat-shames Bess at least once a book. So does the narration, as Bess is invariably described as "slightly plump, but still pretty." Ewwww. All three girls, and Nancy especially, have had a truly alarming number of traumatic brain injuries, ranging from the accidental (Bess gets swept overboard by the boom of a sailboat clocking her in the head) to the deliberate (Nancy gets hit over the head by a Bad Guy or indirectly by an Elaborate Trap with everything from decorative furniture to cannonballs about once a book). These head injuries are always cured by a cold cloth to the forehead and a "good nap."

Anyway, reading childhood favorites is a relatively safe and healthy way to keep myself out of the fray, and has been approved by my therapist. Even if I do cringe at most of the stuff up there. It's safe.

I have been looking for (additional) work fairly regularly, as my job (which I love) isn't enough on its own in our hypercapitalist hellscape of a country. I've had a couple of one-day side gigs, but that's not enough either. I can write, proofread, and edit; I could even do simple data entry. Everyone seems to decry my "lack of ambition" because I don't want to be a CEO one day, but really, I just want a job where I can do things that need to be done, in between my day-job shifts. But apparently, that lack of ambition is incomprehensible to hiring managers. I wonder if they think I'm lying in wait like a spider, trying to steal their job; it would not be the first time that people mistrust me because I "seem nice."

 Also, do you know how expensive car insurance is for a single, widowed, fifty-something mom of a 22yo and an 18yo? The 18yo only has a learner's permit and is never driving alone, and the 22yo only drives during school breaks, but that matters not to insurance companies. I'm a teamster with a good enough driving record to be considered safe to drive Other People's Children to school, but that doesn't matter either. Yes, I am shopping around.

Also, video games and TV. Genshin Impact, mostly, the trio of Wordle/Connections/Strands (posted on Bluesky), and stuff on my phone. I've discontinued my Duolingo subscription because I'm poor and I'm annoyed about their switch to AI, but I may as well use it until the subscription runs out. I swapped out Spanish for Chess over the summer there, but I'm back on Spanish now. I'm watching a bunch of those Netflix cooking competition shows (Is it Cake, Cook at any Cost, Easy Bake Battle, etc.) they made in like 2022 because they're fairly light and fluffy. I'm excited about the new season of Call The Midwife, but again, I'm avoiding the heavy stuff right now.

So I didn't manage to be super light here, because of the reasons for the required lightness. But it helped me feel a little better, so I declare this a successful blog post.

I CanNOT Understand This

A bitmoji cartoon of a brunette-with-grey
woman dressed in blue pinching her nose
with incipient headache.

Yes, today's topic is the same old same old.

Again.

Or at least a variation on a theme.

Immediately after the shooting death of Charlie Kirk, the usual suspects (in this case, primarily the man sitting in the White House and the inner circle of his fan club) started saying that the <spins wheel> "transgender libt*rd antifa" was the cause. Dogwhistle terms were flying fast and furious, "the demon-rats" were being called domestic terrorists, and the larger fan club started threatening historically black universities. Because that makes sense to them, I guess.

Less than 48 hours later, we find out that no, he was a Good Mormon Boy. None of these people has retracted their statements. Some are doubling down by either doing "la la la I can't hear you" with their fingers in their ears, or by outright fabricating statements that 90% of mass shooters are from the "party that wants to take my guns."

I can only assume that this makes sense to them, too.

Look, I'm not sorry that Chirlie Kirk is no longer on this earth, but I'm not glad about it either. I am sorry (in spite of the massive irony of a superficially civil gun nut being shot in public) that it happened this way, partly because of those people described up there. And partly because in my country's twisted love affair with guns, this somehow justifies more guns. I don't believe in the death penalty; I think it's barbaric. But I do believe that actions have consequences, whether you call it Karma or something else. 

"Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows," (Galatians 6:7) is another way to put it, and that one is repeated several times in other ways in the same holy book that CK and all those folks up there in that earlier paragraph purport to believe.

I do know several reasonable Christians (a family member or two, a few friends both online and off-) who try their best to actually follow Christ's teachings instead of the weirdly ass-backwards Christian-Nationalist version. I treasure these people. They are, however, as a group, neither powerful nor loud enough to drown out the bullshit giving them a bad name.

The other groups I do not grok are those whose faces are likely to be eaten by leopards at any moment, but don't think they will be the victims of the face-eating-leopards party. MAGA people of color, MAGA LGBTQ+, MAGA immigrants, etc. Oh, honey, they hate you too. They just hate you slightly less than their current scapegoats. Don't worry; they will eventually get around to eating your face too, if you're a good sycophant and lackey.

Other shootings - those of more than just one MAGA media darling - happened this week, too, but we don't hear nearly as much about those, of course. The Epstein files are still out there as well, and CKs death has served as a handy distraction from that. I have heard some people say that it was deliberate for that purpose. Whether or not that is true, it's still a distraction. Weirdly, some of these same MAGA folks seem to think that, "What if <insert democrat> person is on the list? Huh, bet you never thought of that!" is some kind of gotcha, but honestly, if there is (and I can certainly think of a few who might be) then they should go down too.

I'm finding this timeline to be very stressful, in spite of my self-induced social media restrictions.

Ridiculous

EDIT: this Social Security issue worked itself out the day before the cut off. It sure would’ve been great if they had let me know in the interim that things were in process, but at least it’s OK now.

I'm still only on social media for around an hour a day (for me, that means Meta for the most part; I tend to use YouTube for DIY or game hints or a handful of cutesy things I follow, not news, and TikTok only when my kids send me something). So I'm on enough, and reading electronic newspapers and so forth, to know what's going on in the world, while still protecting my own psyche.

Reading Agatha Christie's thrillers (as opposed to her mysteries; the thrillers are all very International Intrigue) has convinced me that either a) nothing changes, or b) the woman had the gift of prophecy, because there's a lot of Rise of Fascism stuff there. 

But even with All That Out There™, life has to go on. Bills have to be paid, kids must go to school, laundry must be folded... you get what I mean.

So, about those things. 

• Bills paid up-to-date, but I didn't work at the district during the summer, so I have no end-of-August paycheck. 
• A benefit we receive from our state may have been lost in the mail. We're on Day 11 of the 7-10 business days, and the phone rep says if I haven't gotten it by Friday to let them know and they'll issue another.
• I've done all the paperwork, jumped through all the hoops, and tried calling 3-4 times a week all summer to get Lizzy's survivor benefits extended to when she graduates high school next June. I tried again today but now they won't let me represent her. She's not 18 yet, but she will be this month, so I guess that the SSA considers her to be close enough. That means that we don't know whether we will be getting a direct deposit (to my account) as we have been, or whether it will be a paper check, and we still don't know whether it will continue through June.
• We are ready for school! Lizzy has an outfit picked out for school tomorrow, Abby is getting her stuff together for her senior year of college, and I have at least my morning route tomorrow!
• The new washer/dryer we got from the power company (it was a great deal intended to assist with power efficiency is terrific. Small, and a little finicky (I have to vacuum the lint traps to get them clear enough to do another load), but as long as I'm on top of it, they work great!

So, yeah, 2025 Life sucks. My personal 2025 life has a lot of headaches and (as always) financial woes, but it's pretty balanced out.