I HATE THAT HE MADE ME SQUIRM

Just like he wanted to

UGH! I am so annoyed with myself that I let Trump’s dehumanizing comments destroy my mood today. I grew more and more anxious as the day passed. Even though I mostly thought he was going to change his mind, I was still heartsick over the threats he’d made. Then Trump announced before the 8 p.m. deadline that he was going to accept Pakistan’s attempt to broker a deal—so now he magnanimously says he has agreed to wait two weeks before he erases a whole civilization. People are making all kinds of jokes about Taco Tuesday, but I think they’re missing the point.

This isn’t about whether Trump changes his mind or chickens out of his big, scary war talk. He is using these threats because he enjoys scaring us. He gets off on making women cry and feel afraid. That has always been his M.O., and why would it be different now that he controls the fate of every woman on earth.

His chubby little finger is on the biggest button in the world now. As his dementia advances, his thoughts are only able to focus on his resentments, which he is able to remember better than anything,* plus whatever else seems exciting in the moment. And threatening to push that button, thereby making all the little people squirm, is really fun for him. And if that isn’t enough, he has to up his sense of absolute power by announcing he can wipe out a WHOLE CIVILIZATION. Look upon him and see he is mighty.

Probably he was extra triggered by how the whole country made fun of him the weekend before last. Here are a few of the signs mocking him from my local, South Hadley, MA, No Kings protest:

Standing up to him feels much better than letting him fill me with panic! We have got to get him out of office, though. I cannot understand what it’s going to take…

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* I have noticed my mother best remembers her resentments. She’ll forget everything that happened all week, but will suddenly turn to me and say, “You know what’s been bothering me?” and then she’ll tell me about some way she was wronged, either yesterday or 20 years ago. I pray I can retrain my mind to let my resentments go so I don’t have them taking up extra space in my mind when my thoughts narrow. (For now, though, there is still one I can’t drop.)

My therapist felt she had reached a sticking point with me in regards to why I have so much trouble making space for myself to sit and write, so she recommended I try somatic therapy, which she claimed would work more with my body to help me figure out where my stuckness was and dislodge it. I felt resistant. The first time I saw the somatic therapist I’m going to see for the third time this week, I felt triggered by how slowly and deliberately she moved. I felt she was intentionally provoking me by telling me to take a slow, deep breath and center myself or was purposely pushing me into anxiety by suggesting I fully feel my feelings.

For the whole week after that first, unpleasant session, I thought about the session constantly. Why had I been so aggravated by someone telling me to take a deep breath? Why was I so upset by someone suggesting I feel my feelings? What was wrong with someone who moved in slow, deliberate ways? What was wrong with me that I felt triggered by that?

So the next week when I went in, I felt much more open. I explained how resistant I’d felt the first week. We wound up talking about my inner critic, an angry German woman with very tight braids who glowers over me named Helga, and then about my last stepfather, an angry drunk who was always telling me I was a brat, spoiled, lazy, full of myself, among other nasty things. And then this week I started reading a gift someone gave me at my SURPRISE 60th birthday party two weeks ago,* Mary Oliver’s essay collection (!! who knew that existed?) Upstream. These lines, in relation to the above, jumped out at me:

“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.”

And I thought, with a clap of insight, “Ohhhh! That’s why I have trouble sitting my butt in the chair and writing, because I think only a spoiled, lazy brat would give herself permission to do that!”

Maybe this realization is helping a little bit, because here I am, writing.

I hope a lot of you have read the amazing novel The Safekeep and are coming to my book club this Sunday, April 12th, at 2 p.m. EST. This is a perk for subscribers, but if you want to come and aren’t a subscriber, just write to me.