(no subject)

[olivermoss]

I usually avoid being chatty with the cashiers at the grocery stores. I know some of them are under pressure from management to be super friendly and some people glom onto to them for scraps of social contact. I figure it's a lot of stress for them so I usually treat those encounters as bussinesslike as possible.

Last night, one started talking to me because one of the floating baggers has just told her about the Joe Rogan bullshit about vaccines and we wound up chatting for a second. She was basically needing to vent about the ... everything. I mentioned about how during the forest fires I'd been in the stores stocking up not because of the pandemic, not because of the air being so bad out local monitoring stations couldn't even record how bad it was, but because of people coming in from outside of Portland to bear spray locals and try to run them down with cars. She said her partner is Non Binary and she basically told them to not even leave the house while that was going on.

Yeah, last fall in the middle of both a massive smoke event and a pandemic our top concern was other Americans seeing us and trying to beat the shit out of us. That's ... a lot. That's really a lot. I wonder if I am still a bit frozen somehow from having gone through that. Like part of why I am having trouble moving forward with anything was how bad all that was and not properly processing it. I had a therapist at the time, but her approach was to treat everything as unimportant. Basically 'yeah some people will get beaten up but statistically it wont be you, yeah some people will get cancer but it wont be you, etc' Yeah, I know it's unlikely to be me but it's still horrifying to have that going on around me and the world being that damn unsafe, but she ... she actually made me feel invalidated and even more isolated by saying none of this really effects me. Having someone to talk to once a week, literally the only conversation I was having at all at the time, was better than nothing but also .... her toolset seemed to be 'treat everything as NBD and people as alarmist for being stressed over politically motivated attacks in a pandemic where the air is orange.'

Anyway, we ended the brief conversation talking about a mass shooting that the police said was unrelated to the maga trains, but was on the day of an announced train that didn't happen and was by someone from those circles so we don't really buy that it wasn't a frustrated magat murdering people.

And then she wished death on Mitch McConnell for being the person whose been single handedly blocking votes on gun reform for ages.

It's just got me thinking about going through all this shit in isolation is just really a fucking lot and some of it's easing up but how do I move forward, especially since right now I am in a town heading back into 'extreme risk' lockdowns? I don't even have ways to try to break out of being so isolated, even now this late into 2021. Feels like I'm stuck in a time loop episode. Nothing moves forward, everything just resets.

Comments

[dine]

Feels like I'm stuck in a time loop episode. Nothing moves forward, everything just resets.

oh man, that exactly describes the feeling I've had forever! I'm sorry you're stuck in it also

[olivermoss]

It's such a maddening, helpless feeling. Sorry you're also stuck here.

[mistressofmuses]

That is a real and genuine feeling.

I am HORRIFIED that there were people coming in to harass and hurt people in your area. That is *literally* terrorism, as in using threats of harm and deliberately creating fear in your targets.
(On a more localized scale, there were worries outside the most prominent gay club in Denver back when clubs were a thing, because there were multiple shootings as the club let out, as well as multiple assaults. Similarly, there was never "proof" that it was motivated by hatred of us queers... But it sure didn't seem coincidental that people were repeatedly waiting outside the most prominent gay club in Denver to find their victims.)

I'm angry on your behalf that a therapist would be that invalidating. Sometimes it may be comforting to tell someone that statistically they aren't likely to be in danger... but at the same time, neither were the people who became victims. And it is NOT an irrational fear to worry about your own safety or the safety of people you care about, especially when your own community is being specifically targeted.

Your community (whether geographically, or in terms of identity) being targeted ALWAYS affects the members of that community. It is horrifically insensitive to claim that it doesn't or shouldn't.
Sure, you can't take responsibility or the weight of suffering for every person in the world. No one can. But that doesn't mean that suffering and cruelty stops affecting you.

[olivermoss]

We had both civilian 'maga trains' coming it and running through groups of people and bear spraying them, and also while Trump was obsessed with us we had federal officers refusing to show ID grabbing people in unmarked vans that turned out to be from Enterprise rent-a-car.

Also, back in the days people thought that Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer were just made up boogie men dreamt up by paranoid leftist I had a run in with them where I ran into traffic to avoid being surrounded.

Odds are, I'll never actually catch a beating from them. Partially just odds and partially having better situational awareness than most people. I consider my ability to risk assess to be very good, but to risk assess well you need to know the risks and sometimes people taking just knowing the risk factors as paranoia.

The one day we had an announced train that didn't happen, someone from one of the groups went and shot a bunch of Portlanders on his own and the police were all 'this wasn't politically motivated'

Shit was bad, and those people haven't gone away.

I knew intellectually that my therapist had the wrong skill set to deal with me or the ongoing crisis, but it took me months to stop seeing her because that was my one voice call a week. I'm still dealing with that and her just saying I was bad at math for feeling certain strains. According to her, it's not that things are bad it's that I have multiple affinity groups so I see more problems! One affinity group, you see X number of problems. 8 Affinity groups means you see 8x problems! Math! Just ... fucking what?

[mistressofmuses]

Oh god, I remember the unmarked van thing. That was horrifying, too.

And I am *so* glad that you weren't surrounded when you encountered them.

It's certainly a common refrain that the worst thing about Trump wasn't really him himself, but what he revealed in other people, and what people showed themselves to be/what they wanted to do when they felt emboldened to do so. Those people are still there, and that remains a really awful thing to know.

...I'm trying to make her "multiple affinity groups" thing make sense. "Things are only bad for people and demographics you care about, so you just care about too many people!" That... fucking what, indeed.
That sounds frustratingly similar to privileged dumbasses on the internet. "Why is it that only POC see racism everywhere? It's just a few isolated incidents." "Why do all the lgbtq+ people think homophobia happens all the time? They're just too sensitive." "As a man, I never experience sexism at my job, so these women are clearly blowing this out of proportion."
It sounds like she had a terrible skill set to deal with what you were needing.

[olivermoss]

The place I was almost surrounded? I've walked there since, dozens of time. Sometimes at 3 AM. I am not exactly flinching at shadows here. Last fall, I stocked up and lived on egg noodles for a while to reduce how often I went out for food, but I still went when I needed to.

Yeah, a lot of people complain about Presidents making 'empty statements' but honestly it does set a tone and effects what is normalized and what isn't.

Honestly I think she was grasping at straws with the 'math' thing. On top of everything else there had been a murder involving a friend of a friend and the details were ... grisly. She was trying to convince me it wasn't weird to have that happen in affinity groups and I was just like ???? It's like she was trying to normalize what had just happened and no, nothing about it was normal. I had a degree of separation from the situation, but no, this ain't freaking normal.

A good therapist could likely help me a lot but I am just over them right now, especially since there is such a demand the only way to get one is to pay in full directly rather than having it be covered by insurance.

[mistressofmuses]

It sounds like she was grasping at straws with a lot of stuff. For *some* people, the idea of statistical unlikeliness of harm, or normalization of circumstances might be helpful or comforting in managing things... but to me that sounds borderline gaslight-y and extremely invalidating.

The difference between a good therapist and a lousy one is extreme. I was lucky that the short-term therapist I saw helped me with a LOT of stuff. But one I'd looked for back when I lived in Greeley was horrible. (And super biphobic, so that was cool.)

I hope you do eventually find a good one, but I don't blame you for being over it. And the cost is extremely prohibitive.

[olivermoss]

I tried to change to a new one, but therapists have been hella booked up and none who I wanted to see were taking new clients. I may try again, but not for a while.

Right now that money and time are likely better spent in other ways.

[sperrywink]

Your therapist does sound bad! To treat everything going around as blah blah blah is just ridiculous. I mean, my therapist would check in with me about political and pandemic stuff even if I'm not bringing it up to just make sure I am okay.

[olivermoss]

I think a certain amount of sadness at missing out on like not ever dating or having a family or other things is fine as long as it's balanced and not robbing you of your future. It's healthy to have the right amount. But she seemed to think any regrets were me being wrong and I haven't missed out on anything and it's like ... I didn't even want to be dwelling on this. I don't want to talk about the past outside of figure out how to fix the future, she was the one who kept digging in on it.