Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.

The desire to get tortuously wrapped up in my own bullshit is a difficult one to deny. This blog is supposed to be a space for self-reflection, after all, or at least a place for me to write about what is on my mind (which amounts to the same thing for me, generally speaking), so why don’t I engage in some circuitous thinking about the situation we’re in and the world as it stands today, a week after the election results became undeniably apparent? For one thing, it wouldn’t accomplish much. There’s little I can do to change the situation we find ourselves in these days, as the second coming of Trump has solidified on the horizon like an approaching hurricane. For another thing, it wouldn’t really be healthy. That sort of circuitous thinking is what forms the center of the worst depression, anxiety, and obsession spirals I’ve ever experienced when it gets out of control and I do not need to add “spiraling” to the list of reasons I’m exhausted and worn out. But I also can’t ignore it. I’ve got a lot on my mind that I need to process and then write about in order to move on. I need a place I can put all these thoughts and feelings as I’m adjusting to not just the results of the 2024 US Presidential Election but to the end of a deeply held belief. You see, despite the horrible childhood I had, I have put a lot of work into believing that people are, more often than not, decent sorts. Maybe not someone you can rely on or that will choose to do the right thing all the time, but that they generally will do more good than harm. Now, after the election, I have pretty statistically solid evidence that most people will do more harm than good. Sure, only a small part of that group is willfully and knowingly doing harm, but you’re still responsible for the harm you’ve caused even if it wasn’t your intention to cause it and god damn is a huge number of people going to responsible for a lot of harm. And no, them eventually suffering the same harm they caused for other people does nothing to absolve them.

I already wrote about this last bit in much more emotional detail last week, so I’m going to avoid rehashing that post–a rant about what happened and is going to happen because of how dumb or malicious people are–since I don’t think I could go over it all again in a more calm manner. I’d get fired up pretty quickly and wind up just as pissed off as I was last week since it’s not like anything has changed since then. I don’t need that now. What I do need is a little space to reflect on how to respond to all of this. I’ve had my emotional outburst. I’ve had a therapy session. I’ve talked about it a little bit, as much as I could without getting too upset about it, and now I need to figure out what’s next. I need to figure out what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. If I’m not careful, all of the therapy I’ve done over the past few years will have been for pretty much nothing. There’s little like returning to a situation like your abusive childhood to make you regress, after all. I went over it a bit in the linked post above, but to expand on the rather short summary from that post, I grew up in a home where three of the five people I spent the first twelve years of my life with were responsible for some pretty terrible things happening to me. One of them was the perpetrator (my elder brother) and the other two let it happen (my parents). My other siblings were complicit in small ways, but not voluntarily. Because, you see, when you are a child and your entire world is ruled by someone who delights in harming others and the authority figures responsible for you are doing nothing to protect the frequent target for all that harm, you do what you have to in order to avoid drawing attention to yourself, often becoming complicit in the harm yourself, along the way. It’s not like they had a choice if they wanted to survive. I mean, they were children! They weren’t responsible for what was happening, our parents were. Even when the “balance” shifted to an even three of six split because my parents had another child, my youngest sibling, it didn’t really change anything since I left for college when they were five and never went back except for holidays until 2019 (and have been back exactly once since then, to call my parents to account in an exchange that went terribly).

All of which is to say that I am struggling. I did a lot of work to not only escape that way of life and dynamic (half the reason I’m still on shaky financial ground in my 30s is because I refused to move back in with my parents after college: I’d have rather died than do that) but to see the world as a place that didn’t mirror the one in which I grew up. It took a lot of work while I was in college to not only intellectually recognize that my limited view of the world–a result of being homeschooled and having no friends since all the kids my age moved away–didn’t reflect reality but, more importantly, also emotionally grasp it. To not see the wider world as something I needed to protect myself from, to see people as being worth the benefit of the doubt, and to embrace the idea people as a whole were decent. All of that work threatens to be undone, now. I don’t want it to be, since I much prefer to live in a world where I believe that the people I meet are more likely to be caring than inconsiderate, but I’m not sure I can continue to hold that belief in the face of my traumatic upbringing and the current evidence that the majority of the voting population would rather see people come to harm than have to spend any time contemplating the true source of their own discomfort and pain. It was easier to stomach the first time, in 2016, because at least the majority didn’t choose Trump. This time, though, it looks like the final count will end with him in the majority. By a tiny margin, sure, but that that doesn’t make much of a difference to me because you have to also factor in all the apathetic people in the country who chose not to vote. Letting harm happen due to your own inaction doesn’t carry the same degree of responsibility as actually perpetrating it, but it still bears a decent amount of responsibility when it couldn’t have happened without you choosing to let it. I mean, I’ll give a pass to anyone who couldn’t vote due to the various ways that Republicans have made it difficult or impossible to vote, but even that number isn’t large enough to significantly offset the number of active Trump voters and passive people who let it happen by choosing to not vote.

I have to figure out how to handle all of this. It’s great to say “don’t proactively comply” or “don’t proactively make yourself miserable” when you’re not struggling to deal with what might become a slide back into your traumatized survival mindset that you’ve spent a lot of time and money over the last decade and a half digging yourself out of. If I don’t spend some time now figuring this stuff out, I’m just going to get overwhelmed when the dam of escapism breaks after stuff I enjoy starts getting banned for being porn or whatever it is they’re going to do to media with queer representation and characters that don’t conform to the strict Republican-prescriptive male/female gender binary. I have to act to figure out how to safeguard against that so that I’m still capable of indulging in escapism when I need it, all while still balancing precariously over the yawning chasm of my past trauma. Once that’s done, I have to turn my attention to the wider world and how I’m going to help other people. I can’t plan for every possible scenario, but I’m pretty good at laying the groundwork for the most-likely scenarios and then improvising in the moment, adapting what I’ve done to fit the needs of the situation. Taken all together, that feels like a lot to try to do over the next two months… I need to accept the reality of the world, make sure I’ve backed up everything I might lose, and then do what planning I can, all before the first day of the new Trump administration. It’s going to be tough, but that’s better than every alternative I’ve considered at this point.

You might be wondering, after reading all that, how I plan to take care of and safeguard myself. That’s the simplest and most difficult part, actually. I already know how to survive in a situation like this. I know everything I need to do because I literally only made it to adulthood by being better at it then my abusive brother and neglectful parents were at traumatizing me. Surviving comes in lots of different flavors and while I’m going to be struggling the entire time I’m doing it, for fear of slipping entirely back into the powerlessness I felt as a child and teen, I already mastered the kind I need for the next political area. I am an expert in surviving while also deflecting abuse and pain from those more vulnerable than me. The only difficulty will be in seeing how far I can stretch it this time around, now that those I care about are almost exclusively outside of arm’s reach. I’m confident I can figure it out, though. I’m not a child this time. I have at least a little more agency, even if the shift in scale makes it difficult to appreciate that. All I can do is hope it’ll be enough and, if nothing else, believe in my ability survive this. Because that belief is founded in incontrovertible truth, at the very least, and maybe that’s what I need to make the core of my belief system for however long this period of darkness lasts. Goodbye “most people are good” and hello “I can survive this.”