Extra BLAH in the Winter blahs.

I started to write a long entry about the election and the increase in hatred and division, but I kept getting interrupted, and I have lost energy and interest in writing the full article I wanted to write. While I wasn’t as surprised or shocked as others were, I went through an intense grieving period that made it hard to get through the week. I couldn’t sleep the night of the election, as the anxiety and nausea kept building. The next day I needed to take my car into the shop and take their shuttle to work.  The shuttle was a van packed with all Trump supporters.  They voted for him because “things have gone too far” and “they liked what he had to say” and they “don’t care as long as she (HRC) ends up in jail.” I tried to keep quiet through most of it, but I spoke up to say that his win is detrimental for those systematically oppressed by everything he stands for.  They started to give me the bootstraps speech and I pointed out that many of us are already bootstrapping as hard as possible.  They didn’t even really know what systematic oppression is.

In any case, I’m having a tough time balancing my want for making change vs. keeping some shards of sanity.  I’ve come to say I will only share things that I think might make others really think. I have and will continue to sign petitions, e-mail and call my senators/representatives/congresspeople, and I am taking the lead on racial issues from organizations like SURJ and people of color with whom I stand. Anything else seems to boil down to white savior complex, white fragility, and slacktivism. (This is how I feel about my own intentions/actions.  Everyone else’s mileage may vary.)

This outcome has really colored my seasonal affective disorder this year.  I feel like I’m fighting it better than I have in the past, but this just makes everything feel more hopeless than ever.  It doesn’t help that I don’t have A Thing that I am working toward. For most of this year, I was working on my dance solo, and even though that may seem like something small and amateurish, it was a big part of my life, with lots of meaning.  Now that’s done, I feel adrift. I have other dance ideas, but they require larger groups of people willing to do things outside the box, and it is hard to get people to do things like that when there are already more than enough dance teachers in the studio giving orders or coming up with ideas (no, I’m not saying that anyone is being overbearing or that the ideas are bad, but, I am a mere student to all those people.)  And I feel like my schedule is just eating me alive.  Like it’s difficult to have time off of work, and some of my weekends go toward working there, AND there is still the one-service church gig.

There is still this pervasive feeling of loving, liking, being passionate about nothing.  I’ve attempted reading a bunch of things, asking myself questions over and over, and nothing has helped. So I’ve concluded that I need to focus on making more of my own artistic endeavors, no matter how weird they might be.  I will try to post about them as a way to keep going, to keep accountable.  Hopefully this will help de-blah not just my winter, but my life as well.