Nuts

I Don’t Know Karate But I Know Ka-razy!

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

I’ve always been crazy.

But now I’m capital C crazy. Cuckoo for Cocoa puffs, even though as a child, they were not my favorite cereal. That was Captain crunch. Actually it still is Captain crunch, but I don’t let myself buy it.

But I digress.

The crazy can be tricky, it can just sneak up on you like a cat stalking a bird. Other times it walks right up to you and slaps you like a diva on a soap opera.

Anxious Brain Speak

You’re too old. You’re so stupid for making the choices you made. You’re failing as a mother. You’re not good enough for that. You shouldn’t bother to try because it won’t happen.

These words flow through my brain, my anxiety battling with my rational side. Self doubt, the ultimate saboteur.

I continue to battle the trauma of my community disappearing in the blink of an eye, wiped clear by a fire storm in mere moments. The grief is so real, the anxiety so acute and the sorrow as deep as the ocean.

The crazy tries so hard to become dominant, to be the only state of mind.

When your brain is neurodivergent it does what it wants. It doesn’t always behave in ways a “normal” brain would. (Although there really is no normal anymore, judging by the way the people on this planet are behaving. It’s fucking nuts everywhere.)

When it comes to writing, my brain works in fits and starts. It’s been a week since I began this essay, but there was too much happening in my world to be able to focus, to be able to get the words floating in my head out and onto my screen.

I had to move out of my home so it could be cleaned of the toxins left behind by the fire in January. Since my daughter and I have been back living in the house after the fire because we did not understand exactly how toxic the smoke was, we have been inhaling a lot of shit. So of course my anxiety has created a doom and gloom narrative about the whole situation.

At the same time this was happening, my daughter graduated from high school. I am beyond proud of her, and quite frankly astonished that I was able to raise a human being to adulthood! It truly takes a village. But that bitch who is the voice of anxiety in my head made me wonder and worry about what kind of world she is entering as a young adult.

When I was pregnant I certainly didn’t think this country that I love that does not love me back would become a fascist regime run by a bunch of rich white men hell bent on destroying what little democracy we have left and stripping the established basic human rights from women and immigrants and the LGBTQ community so they can forward their Christo-fascist agenda to all of the constituencies regardless of who they worship or what their actual ideology is.

(Sorry, that was a run on sentence, but I wrote exactly what would have come out of my mouth.)

And today, marines are headed to Los Angeles to join the National Guard in combating people who are peacefully protesting the incredibly cruel ICE raids on immigrants hoping to get some day labor work, on immigrants who are lawfully here and are then taken into custody by ICE while attending appointments regarding their immigration status, on school age children who are afraid for their families as ICE sits outside of their schools.

What the actual fuck?

Sitting outside of schools to intimidate children? CHILDREN?

I should note that they are sitting outside of schools because the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District has made it plain that ICE will not be allowed to come into schools and take children away.

The crazy keeps getting crazier. The inmates have definitely taken over the asylum that is Washington DC.

Calls from the current administration for the arrest of anyone who spits at or attacks a police officer, deploying the National Guard and marines to an American city. Whose leaders did not ask for them to be deployed.

Where was all this action when there was a REAL INSURRECTION happening on January 6?

Are poor migrants and citizens peacefully demonstrating more dangerous than armed groups of militia, white nationalists and those happily ignorant of reality who called for the hanging of the vice president? Are they more dangerous than those who proudly carried flags from the losing side of the civil war? Are they more dangerous than those who defaced the Capital Building and physically attacked the capital police force?

My PTSD was triggered by the devastation left by the fires, but the insanity of the administration of the 🍊🤡 is taking things to a new level. I live in a state of constant fight or flight. I want to fight and go to downtown LA and protest along with all the people fighting for their rights. But because I am disabled and walk with a cane now, I definitely cannot run from the cops if things go south! Maybe if I fell down and played dead the riot police would leave me alone?

Although, adrenaline is a hell of a drug, which I learned when a bear walked around the corner of my house as I was sitting on my porch. I honestly didn’t know I could move that fast anymore, but come on, it was a bear!

So I guess I’ve got the flight part down!

I use writing to help my rat maze of a brain sort through the madness that is the world right now. We are bombarded on an hourly basis with sound and images of horrible things which are happening, in our neighborhoods and on the other side of the world. For an anxious or depressed brain it can be overwhelming and debilitating.

The crazy tries so hard to become dominant, to be the only state of mind.

I’ve learned to accept the crazy, but not as my dominant state of mind. The crazy has and always will be part of my brain, but in times which are meant to induce and elevate the crazy at all levels, we have to hold on to reality, as painful as it may be.

Chaos and fear are meant to keep us off balance, questioning what is real and what isn’t. Being bombarded with a constant barrage of unreliable information, threats to our collective and individual safety, and learning that the emperor indeed has no clothes has shaken the foundation of this country.

When you keep the people preoccupied with worry and fear you can undermine the already shaky foundation. Soon enough, the foundation will fail.

But we cannot let this happen. We cannot become conditioned to the chaos, numb to the extreme normalization of what is in fact, not normal. Flight is not an option for most so we must stand and fight.

However we can.