"Everyone Around Me Is Getting Tired"

“Something's telling me you can't be alone

A body is kicking around his rolling stone

Spit in the sink defines our lovers

Better than me to decide what's better

'Cause everyone around me is getting tired

And everyone around me is trying to write

Spit in the sink defines our lovers

Better than me to decide what's better.”

- Spit in the Sink by Haley Heynderickx

Today is 11/11, and I am most certainly tired. I think the soothing acoustic tones from Ms. Heynderickx has me in an especially emotional state. We have to fight the hopelessness. We HAVE to.

This is an entirely different task than “actually” battling the fascism growing throughout the country.

I don’t eat nearly enough. This leaves me quivering in bed until noon most days. I have to be gluten free, alongside many other dietary restrictions. Groceries are expensive everywhere, but specialty groceries are even worse. With higher prices and smaller sizes, I’ve learned how to save where I can.

I stuff myself full with errands and virtual meetings; people both sustain and exhaust me.

If my hands weren’t faulty, I would pick up a guitar and sing. The compression socks which keep me standing for longer stretches leave marks on my legs for days afterwards. Rows of bumps and ridges, varicose veins spidering further down—impressions that I am struggling to find beautiful.

I’ve put some thought into my own initial reaction to the news on Wednesday, and the days following. An afternoon of grief, and then a burst of near-manic mobilization within my community. (I feel that I’ve calmed a bit now. I needed to rest, lest my body collapse as it did in April.) I feel that my reaction is equal parts grief for the future, and relief at a long-due awakening/awareness of able-bodied, white, cisgender, and heterosexual Americans who have been lucky until now. Because, if you are like me or my close network of disabled queer friends, you have been intimately familiar with the hell that is America and how it treats us. I feel relieved at no longer being the only one panicking. Maybe now something might be done?

It’s heartbreaking to watch trans people scramble to take leaps they weren’t ready to make yet. January is a quickly closing door. They are trying to erase us. It is happening right now.

I believe one of American progressives’ mistakes was compartmentalizing Florida as something irregular. Our cries were ignored for so long. The disease has spread throughout the mind and body; Republicans are tracking to take all three branches of the government. The country’s organs are failing, and the disastrous America that marginalized folks have been living in cannot be ignored by the more privileged of us any longer. How will we fix this? An aggressive chemo treatment? Who else will be sacrificed for the sake of “hearing out” the fascists?