I just ended a video assessment with my general practitioner, who is patient and thorough. I have always been forthcoming about my struggles with anxiety and depression and it was this doctor who keenly diagnosed 9 years ago that I had developed fibromyalgia. Today, I completely flunked my anti depression screening. My physician takes her oath seriously and was loath to allow me to end our session without promising to make an appointment with a mental health professional. (Disclaimer: if you or someone you know is suffering from anxiety panic attacks or depression please seek help immediately.) While I appreciate her professional concern, I have a lifetime, my own, of experience with my mental state and I know exactly the source of this malaise and it might take another lifetime to cure it.

In 2016, my body quit. Long an advocate and proponent of endorphins, even in my most troubling mental states, my body would drag itself to a gym or the outdoors and push through a regimen that allowed it to keep soldiering, despite my troubled mind. When Trump began his first term and fascism began snaking its way through the halls of democracy, my body capitulated and fibromyalgia claimed its stake. There were days when light itself hurt my being. My doctor quickly determined that Cymbalta would help, along with acupuncture, diet and exercise. She was right. My body and my mind united in not just trying to sustain me but also in resisting the fascist threat. Volunteer. Donate. Educate. Share and keep doing all those things. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” said Martin Luther King, Jr. By 2020, though weary and certainly bludgeoned by COVID, I could see justice. The Biden years would be comforting to me for what they were not more than for what they were. They were not seditious and grifting. They were not traitorous and embarrassing. Perhaps the arc had properly bent.

In October of 2024, I was part of a groundswell. No one will ever convince me Kamala Harris did not win our last election. Everyone could feel the energy. After the disappointing outcome, there would be finger pointing and ridiculous conjecture about what the campaign got wrong but I will tell you this – nothing. There was nothing wrong. She was the perfect candidate who ran a flawless campaign and a blind, Russian pig should’ve won that contest against Trump regardless. I will never accept that the most deceitful, duplicitous, felonious charlatan to ever take power in the United States fairly won the election of 2024.  

Now, I am beset. I have alarmed my trusted physician. My body has succumbed to Covid twice in four months’ time and currently I am battling a sinus infection. And I am exhausted. Being American is exhausting; the shame and determination to do better only to feel I am tilting at windmills. The constant political circus, the everyday injustices, watching the flames of fascism race across the country faster than Santa Ana winds. It is not that I am shocked by the racist rhetoric, the rampant misogyny, the nepotism and deceit; I won’t pretend America has ever been better than those things. It is that in 2009, I began to believe that we could become the nation that so many want America to be. Instead, we are not now mired down but rapidly denigrating as the “Leader of the Free World”.

You see, it’s not the Oath Keepers of America who are failing democracy. People like that have been and always will be exactly what they are – willfully uneducated little pricks who feed off the machismo of others because they will never get enough of a leg up in the world to make a difference one way or another. It is the sons and daughters, mostly white, of upper middle-class America who are failing us all. These entitled crybabies look around and see people other than themselves beginning to thrive and deduce that somehow that must mean they themselves are being denied. As a white upper middle-class American woman, I will confess I take zero pride in being any of those things. I was born a white, upper middle-class female; I did nothing to merit any status. What has any Oath Keeper done to be more of an American than a Guatemalan woman who left her parents, strapped a child to her back, endured endured rape and torture and the Darien gap to come here and clean toilets? Proud to be an American? The fuck I am, when we are touting rapists and pedophiles and bigots. What pride could one feel? No. In truth, being an American has made me ashamed of humanity; “as goes America, so goes the world.” I see fascism rising, these awful despots clamoring for power, emboldened by what America has wrought.

How do you “citizen” when so many of our fellow citizens are being oppressed? Have you heard these questions: were there good southerners who didn’t have slaves but did nothing to stop slavery; were there good Germans who weren’t Nazis but said nothing when their neighbors were slaughtered? What answers did you hear?

My doctor squinted at the screen, as if she could determine through it if I am a danger to myself or others. A danger to others. I almost laughed. Should a doctor have asked that of Trump the morning of the inauguration? I don’t have the energy to harm myself. I will confess, I don’t want to see what comes next. If I could lie down peacefully in a field of poppies and sleep eternally you bet your ass I would. Who wants what is next? Who, besides the broligarchs and sycophants, could possibly want what comes next? What might truly gut me could be the answer.