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trump

Guest Posts, Politics, Relationships

Irreconcilable Difference: Living With A Trump Supporter

December 19, 2020
trump

By Zarr

I have to do all of this by phone so I can’t upload it as a file. I’ve attached a picture instead because I can’t submit without an upload. My submission was written and hidden as a draft email. I can’t risk it being found. I can’t use my real name. This was written in June. I’ve begun to narrate the thoughts I have because imagining them as a story I am telling as opposed to an experience I am living, makes it somewhat more bearable. Even if not selected, I wanted someone else to know of my pain.

“I can’t wait for Trump to be re-elected………best president….feminists want feminism when it suits them, they want it both ways……”, I cringe and shrink. The words are coming from within my own home. Not on the tv, not the internet, not on a podcast, but from my own husband’s mouth. I can feel my heart rate increasing. I’m anxious, I’m in survival mode. We’ve been home together every single day for 3 months. Apart only when one of us goes to the store. I can feel myself struggling more to emotionally navigate through each day. I can’t sleep. I’m always on edge. Things are challenging with our children. I can dish it out and I’m not timid, but I avoid political conversations at all costs. Have you had a discussion with a Trump supporter? Have you tried to reason with one? They don’t want to hear you. His disregard for etiquette, his disregard for women, his disregard for common sense. Trump has given every man the green light to treat women as he does, to dismiss any woman who questions them, who has an opinion not aligned with his own.

We weren’t always political opposites. We both were passionate about Obama leading up to his election, and during the years of his presidency. We debated friends over his brilliance and the impact he’d have on our country. We prominently displayed Obama signage in our windows. I don’t know what sparked the transition to Trump-dom, but it began long before Trump’s arrival on the political landscape. It first started with my husband committing to one ill-reputed media source after another, and believing more and more of what he heard. A once minor divide widened to cavernous proportions.

I believe couples can have opposing beliefs and still have a healthy, loving relationship – perhaps only until those beliefs involve Trump. I feel absolutely shattered that this is who my (by the way, immigrant) husband supports. I rarely invite friends over to the house less politics come up. Just like Trump, he would counter any reasonable response with an ill thought out, dismissive rebuttal. I always refrain from engaging when he spouts Trump-isms. Like Trump he is mostly speaking to validate himself, and not to have actual intellectual discourse. Because on top of intense anxiety (that I can’t even remember if it was as intense prior to 44) and four children, this is too great an argument for me to become trapped within.

The impact of Trump has gone beyond conversations that are political. My husband is easily bothered by trivial things. It’s always someone or something’s fault. It is never because he has chosen a negative reaction. Everyone else should change, everything should meet the invisible standard that he has set – the one that he won’t inform you of until you’ve failed to meet it. You should have known! Once I said, “The reason you like Trump so much is because he communicates just like you!” I saw it actually took a few moments for him to register that it was not a compliment.

When I mentioned that I was going to watch the Together Graduation 2020 event (because we had a graduating senior this year), with Obama as commencement speaker, he let me know that if I turned it on he would turn something else on, to tune mine out. I am in the den every day while he is one room over watching both current and past news segments of ass kissing Trump reports and I never ask him to turn it off because it will be a fight. Now that I’m going to turn on something he doesn’t like, he Trumps out on me. When I question him, his glare becomes dark and he asks “Do you want to start a fight?” No, actually! What I want is to feel free to say how I feel and be involved in an adult conversation where our opinions differ and have it be ok. Instead of my admittedly fragile state not being able to withstand a Trump level argument that would just be him eventually yelling (but saying it’s not yelling) about liberal sheep.

Leaving, and why I haven’t, is a whole other story. As much as we hear how “Anyone can do it” and “If you really wanted to you would find a way”, it is truly not an option for every single person. It is not an option for me today, or in the near future. I was a stay at home mom for almost two decades, now I work part time to accommodate school drop off and pick up for two young kids. My husband has a successful career, and travels semi-regularly. During those trips I could breathe, I’d be so productive, things were easier with our children. I don’t know when I will catch my next breath now. Some days I hear him in his man cave, Trump-ing through a phone call and I go to my room and scream into a pillow, or I cry. It is absolutely draining.

Some of the things I am doing to cope, that whole self care concept that we keep hearing about, weren’t possible pre-shelter in place. With the absence of a brief commute to and from work, school and activity drop offs and pick ups with long waits, and social activities for myself and the kids, I now use that time to actively make an effort to keep my head above water. For me it is little things that are fulfilling and I love the small wins as someone who usually has the best intentions but never remains consistent. I exercise just 30 minutes daily, walk on the treadmill 3x/week and yoga on the in between days, I take a long, hot shower every night while I imagine washing away all the bad energy I am exposed to all day, and just hope for an uneventful next day, I read- to escape into another world, another mindset, an immersion outside of my own heavy reality, and I listen to guided meditations and sound baths, to get as comfortable as possible as I try to minimize the anxiety – even temporarily, and I have tele-sessions with my therapist.

With the election upcoming and no candidate to be excited about, I’m in a lesser of two evils mindset. Once upon a time I thought that once Trump left office, the constant politically induced pontificating would begin to fade. Maybe a reconnection would be able to start. Now with sheltering in place likely to continue through the summer, and November just around the corner afterwards, I’m less hopeful of that possibility, and am taking things moment by moment in order to protect my mental health. I think Trump has brought out the worst in many, and has validated the worst in people to be revealed.

Zarr is a mid-40’s mom living in Seattle. Trump has become the ultimate stalemate in her marriage of over 20 years. Despite her efforts to treat it as a non issue, which still causes tremendous internal self loathing and emotional turmoil, the negativity and hatred permeates her being.

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, Humor, Resistance

Recovering My Alternative Factuality: A Thank You to Mr. Trump

April 1, 2017
security

By Nina Gaby

DJ, may I call you that? It’s informal but then again, you are “for the people” of which I am one. Saying “President Trump” just carries all sorts of negativity, and this here is a little thank you note. Don’t worry, I’m not an academic or anything. I don’t even have an MFA. (That’s a college degree for people who are serious about their writing.) I just wanted to check in.

First off, DJ, you got me back in the pool. Last time I was this depressed was right after Reagan’s election. I’d just stopped drinking. I was all sorts of bloated and baggy-eyed (you know what I mean, bro) and wow, if I didn’t just swim my way out of that depression and addiction! I was gorgeous! Not a “10” but I bet you’d have looked twice at me, all artsy and zaftig1. Sober, however, I might have been a bit rejecting of you and for that I’m sorry in retrospect. You know I’m older now and have Thoracic Outlet Syndrome and shoulder shit and stuff and can’t really swim, but I’m back in the pool….I strap on one of those belts and jog back and forth, back and forth, just thinking about you. (PS I’m also doing yoga and lifting weights again, thanks to you.)

And who knew pink was my color? I never wear hats. But that march, well, a whole new me. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Fear, LBGQ

We Are All North Carolina Now

February 19, 2017
resistance

By Lindsey Danis

This summer, I prepared to visit North Carolina by growing out my hair for four months. I hoped this would help me, if not pass for straight, at least look more female—and thus forestall violence.

This would not be my first trip through the South. But it would be my first time since the passage of HB2, the North Carolina bathroom bill requiring individuals use the bathroom that matches their gender assigned at birth.

Normally I use the women’s restroom, because I’m generally read as female. But with my short hair, androgynous attire, and lack of makeup, jewelry, or other feminine markers, I worried I’d face harassment in North Carolina. When a viral video of a lesbian getting yanked out of the bathroom by police officers surfaced, my stomach clenched in fear. This could happen to me.

I’d gotten bathroom policed before. In a baseball cap, hooded sweatshirt, baggy pants, and sneakers, I looked masculine enough to frighten an airport employee. As I walked toward the ladies’ room, she called out, panic rising. “I’m a woman,” I yelled back without breaking stride. She relaxed and I got to pee in peace.

My North Carolina vacation was in honor of my mother’s birthday, so not a trip I could cancel. As the departure date drew closer, anxious thoughts kept me up at night. Would I have to get my mother to accompany me to the bathroom in case anyone challenged me? Would I get verbally or physically abused trying to pee? Should I buy some mace to make myself feel better? Or take along one of my wife’s pink tee-shirts so I could conform to gender norms?

The worst part wasn’t the fear that stole my appetite and my sleep, it was the total lack of understanding I received when I spoke up. “I’m really afraid of someone harassing me, because of this bathroom bill,” I said. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Resistance

On Quiet Resistance

January 20, 2017
action

By Vivian Wagner

Since Trump’s election, my social media feeds have been filled with calls to fight. To stand up. To make calls. To sign petitions. And I’ve been doing some of that. I’ve been trying to do everything I can. But mostly, at the moment, I’m finding that I need to protect myself, my sanity, my students, and my daily life.

I learned to withdraw while growing up with an often angry, violent, alcoholic father. I learned to escape. I learned to make safe places that he could not invade. I learned to protect myself and my sister. And this is what I’m doing now. I’m replicating all of that. I’m hiding and camouflaging – things I learned long ago to do to survive.

The thing with Trump is that it’s not just him. It’s all of his followers. It’s the white asshole in the coffeeshop droning on about how it’s a revolution, about how he’s happy to be on top again, how women and minorities can just suck it. It’s the jerks in the jacked-up pickup trucks on the interstate here in southeastern Ohio, emboldened now, driving recklessly and with cruel abandon. It’s the endless commenters on CNN stories who hate and cut down and bully. The sexist, racist, xenophobic abusers are everywhere. And each one I see is a flashback, a reminder of physical and psychological danger. I need to do whatever necessary to survive. I know I need to fight, to stand up to tyranny. I know that politics are not the same thing as the family. But I need to also give myself permission to feel afraid, to grant that I have to build up my strength if I’m going to do any fighting at all. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Resistance

Epiphany Now: On Turning Fear Into Action

January 16, 2017
fear

By Jane O’Shields-Hayner

Laughter chimed through the house, and when the bed bounced I opened my eyes to see our children pulling at our pajamas, and shrieking out what they’d just seen under the tree. They begged us to wake up. I was sleepy, but it was Christmas morning, the one holiday a year parents can never sleep in.

I glanced at my iPad. It lay on my bedside table, within my reach, but I refused my impulse to grab it. Instead, I got up, brushed my teeth and followed the kids.

The tree was lit, as we always keep it throughout the night on Christmas Eve. From above, my living room seemed filled with a cloud of shimmering white light, and I descended into it, joining my family, who already had begun passing out gifts.

The holiday season arrived fast this year. In the wake of the presidential election, My husband and I Zombie walked through November, confused, in shock and denial, hardly knowing what to do. By December, we practiced our normal routines of the season, but strangely distant, and for myself, clutching at straws and feeling desperate. We were fixated on news updates as we hauled boxes of decorations from the attic and drove kids to endless holiday performances, concerts and parties. Late at night we mindlessly placed ornaments around the house while watching MSNBC. A pall lay over everything, but our determination to create happiness for the children kept us moving through the familiar tasks. Making art has always seen me through grief and it was, ultimately, my solace this year.  However, yesterday’s antics from our president-elect were sobering and crassly timed. I had gone to bed disgusted and wrapped in dread. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Resistance, Surviving

Our President-Elect Caused Me Chest Pains and an E.R. Visit

January 15, 2017
chest

By Stephen D. Gutierrez

The turkey was almost done and our guest was almost here and the house looked warm and cozy and everything was going superbly for our best Thanksgiving dinner ever, everything timed perfectly, my son Ben helping out, Jackie a star in the kitchen, me an adroit helper, the music on, the news off, the day cheerful and honest, a bright fall day in the San Francisco Bay Area, with enough gray to make the leaves stand out autumnally, and smoke in the air from a neighbor’s chimney when I stepped outside to get air. I did this often because inside I worried and fretted and battled anxiety, a looming sense of dread, of unavoidable catastrophe. I took my calming pill and walked around the block and saw neighbors strolling post-prandially, perhaps, the early eaters, and jovially, everybody happy and thankful.

All this unfolded around me so splendidly and movingly and authentically American, so naturally and kindly, not a worry in the air, only that wisp of smoke, I should have taken off my shirt and pretended I was an Indian coming out of the suburban bushes ready to partake of the national feast. I’m Indian enough! I can play both sides! I chuckled and stayed busy and still, I felt it, a pain in my chest.

So I decided to check my blood pressure. Next thing you know Jackie’s on the phone, calmly, with me sitting outside, calmly, giving the numbers and the symptoms to the right people. “It’s 170 over 100.” Next thing you know I’m in the hospital because of the chest pain, which wasn’t severe but persistent enough to concern me, obviously, and I’m still unfazed but a little upset that I just fucked up Thanksgiving dinner. Continue Reading…

Young Voices, Guest Posts, writing

The Broken Container

December 13, 2016
container

By Raisa Imogen

Last year, I was in Paris during the terrorist attacks, and I don’t know how to tell that story. Similarly, I don’t know how to tell the story about Trump’s recent election. But there seems to be a strange and shivering thread between the two events. Both violent, painful, chaotic. Yet Paris was somewhat contained. This election is not, the common mantra being: “we just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

We tell stories to make meaning of trauma, to contain pain so we can better examine it and give it value. But sometimes we are in such distress that the container cracks. We can no longer write or speak in the same way, we can no longer contain the pain or carry it comfortably.

Paris: the cherry glow of sirens, the bitter cold, windows slamming shut, a vacant Eiffel tower. Alternatively: my friend who calmly held my hand, the family member who made a quiche, a café filled with people drinking champagne the next day.

Either it becomes a story of horror and fear, which you’ve already heard, or a story of healing and bravery, which feels mawkish and insincere.

I think we dislike narratives which exist in gray, uncertain space. We want them to have logic, to land on one side of a binary — tragedy or comedy, conflict resolved or broken open, a character whose biggest desire is fulfilled or wrenched from them completely. Climax, falling action, resolution.

But trauma, especially when it first occurs, isn’t a neat and tidy narrative. Sometimes there is no narrative at all.

The New Yorker recently featured a piece where sixteen writers weighed in on the election. As my friend Marie Scarles observed, “There are so many different versions of why Trump won, and so many ways for us to imagine the future. Should we pay more attention to poor whites? To Muslims? To women? To LGBTQ? To racists? To immigrants? All seem urgent, but none can be held as the be-all-end-all.”

We are searching for a straightforward answer, an immediate ending so this can be over and done with.

After the election, hunched over my carrel in the library and unable to write, I got a text message from my father: “Trauma turns us into animals, which means story-telling turns off. We revert to fight, flight or shock.” But sometimes, maybe our storytelling tendencies shutting down is a good thing. Maybe it allows us to survive. Narratives can be healing, but they can also be dangerous.

By attending to many different perspectives, perhaps a new story will eventually arise, something both nuanced and messy, something which contains many strands. Perhaps it will be a story of hope, but a particular kind of hope, which Rebecca Solnit describes as, ”an ax you break down doors with in an emergency… [it] should shove you out the door.”

For now, we are living in uncertainty. The story is that there is no story, at least no singular one. Which means there is no singular conflict, no one resolution. I wish I had a coherent story to tell about Paris, but I don’t. For me, the container is still broken open, as it is now for America post-election. This means we must listen to each other, and listen carefully.

raisa-tolchinsky

Raisa Imogen was born in Portland, Oregon, grew up in Chicago, and is currently studying at the University of Bologna in Italy. Her poetry can be found at www.raisaimogen.net and at The Kenyon Review.

 

Join Ally and Jen Pastiloff for an intimate online course about what it means to be a woman at this time. Space is very limited. Course runs Jan 12-Feb 9, 2017. Click the picture to sign up or to get more info on the course and its perks!

Join Ally and Jen Pastiloff for an intimate online course about what it means to be a woman at this time. Space is very limited. Course runs Jan 12-Feb 9, 2017. Click the picture to sign up or to get more info on the course and its perks!

 

 

Join The Manifestation Retreat: Manifesting Under The Tuscan Sun. June 17-24 OR Sep 9-16. Email retreats@jenniferpastiloff.com or click the picture above.

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Guest Posts, healing, Sexual Assault/Rape

They Can’t Erase Our Voices.

October 10, 2016

By Domi J Shoemaker
I wish I could say that this thing I wrote after waking at 2:30am to take my pain meds and check my blood pressure after a hysterectomy that had only been performed so quickly because I benefit from the Affordable Care Act was an act of true inspiration. But it is more than that. It is also desperation. I have reached maximum capacity. I will tell you why.

After getting my surgery scheduled at the teaching hospital, I rolled across campus to an appointment that confirmed I would need a breast biopsy. The breast clinic did the biopsy two days later, and the .
day before my cancer surgery, a week ago today, and just before their gorgeous offices up on the hill closed for the day, someone giddy-sounding from the clinic called me and said,

“Domi, I am so happy to tell you the calcifications in your breast are benign.”

Now, with one week to go before my post-op appointment to find out the stage of cancer and whether they got all they needed to get, I listen to the presidential debate and hear that man say things like “Obamacare is a disaster. Just a disaster,” and I want to throw up.

This coming from a man who would surely try to shred me for the way I move through the world, the type of man I know all too well.

He is my old conservative “uncle” who put his hands and mouth wherever he wanted, on and IN my four-year-old body. He would zero in on the vacuum of need created in me those times when I saw my father rage at my mother and carry her down the hall by her throat.

He is my teacher when I was eleven, who carried me across the playground by my collar, with my feet kicking inches above the ground, desperate for purchase, just because I was cool-talking and called him Mr. Turkey like I was Vinnie Barbarino.

He is the man who, when I was twelve, called my mom for the hundred bucks we didn’t have to replace the passenger-side windshield of his split-windshield Dodge van aftermy feet had kicked it out, while his buddy tried to convince me not to climb back up the tree.

He is the man’s buddy who, with his hand on my thigh, tried to keep me in the van because I thought I had the power of a FLYING squirrel after he fed me PCP-laced Kool-Aid when I lied and said I was thirteen.

He is that man, when I really was thirteen, who rubbed up against me and said, “You have the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen,” when I was such a tomboy and had begged to wear cut off Levi’s and a T-shirt but got sidled with a swimsuit that pushed my breasts into the next area code.

He is the coach who, that following year, my first in high school, “hired” me to help coach the girls junior varsity basketball team. The coach who picked me up, when I was drunk, and he saw me walking alone at night. I convinced him to drop me off at a friend’s house with the promise of a kiss. He kissed me. With his tongue. I lost all interest in basketball.

He is the hundreds and hundreds of men who feel free to comment on my body whether in praise or in disgust and he is the woman who buys into that message that she deserves what she takes because she has given it for so long.

It isn’t a wonder that we all – at THE HANDS of men (and at the hands of women who follow their lead), who believe they have a right to use us at their will – have had to re-boot and readjust over and over just to be alive on this planet.

And here we all are. Speaking up! However we can.

I wish the piece posted below, which is only the 2nd thing I have written to its completion since starting all the health tests last January after an ambulance ride for what was a-fib likely due to anxiety, a symptom of my well-documented PTSD, PTSD at the hands of repeated early childhood (and beyond) trauma, were only MY story.

I feel fortunate to be alive and to have NOT killed anyone with this rage.

All that said, these words are meant to be a catalyst, not a masterpiece, because my words don’t need to be precious, they are meant to get shit done.

I wish this was just about me and my dearest friend, but it is the story of so many of us. To even pass this heinous man’s behavior off as “locker room talk” is to deny the fact that even locker room talk is designed to minimize the damage these putrid bags of bilious waste inflict upon those they treat as property.

#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

INDELIBLE

By the time I was 6, I was at least 3 people.
I don’t know how it happened, to me instead of you.
How I split and split again and you, you had to swallow the rage.
While I grew big, then bigger, then bigger again,
You withdrew and went inside yourself.
I found safety is loudness, in bigness, and in bright!
You found solace in smallness and silence.
Our strength is born in sameness.
You at the hands of your father and me at the hands of uncle,
THE HANDS who grabbed us and groped us as though we were owned and grown to be consumed.
It is not just us, my love, it’s her, and her and him, and them,
THE HANDS, they they tried to erase us.
BUT WE ARE INDELIBLE.

#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

And to honor the protector of those parts of me who helped me survive, I give you this-

p.s. “Listen, fucknuts, if you don’t want your rich white boys to pay for healthcare, stop creating the problem by taking whatever you want. That’s a goddamn coward’s way. Come talk to me about your excuses. See if you can earn it. I dare you.” ~Harley
And from the new me you see today-

p.p.s. Our bodies always move toward healing and homeostasis. As a species, this is how we have survived. This go-around with cancer and it’s friends, I have been using my body to create images and clips when I cannot find the words. All of the heart-shaped images are my own blood found on and in various pieces of clothing and furniture. That’s what endometrial cancer does. So I wanted to conquer my fear by calling the cancer out with images and representations of love.

October 10, 2016

#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

Domi J Shoemaker is the founder the Burnt Tongue Quarterly reading series and they have been published in Pank Magazine, Unshod Quills, Nailed Magazine, Gobshite Quarterly, and in the Forest Avenue Press Anthology, The Night and The Rain and The River. You can hear Domi on KBOO radio’s Bread and Roses archives with Leigh Anne Kranz. Domi worries about being a name-dropping attention whore who did a scene with Fred Armisen in Portlandia. Just Google Pedicabs Are Douchebags, and it will come up. Domi’s grandest achievement aside from completing an MFA at Pacific University, is working with Lidia Yuknavitch since 2012, and is currently co-facilitating the seasonal face to face workshop series, Corporeal Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch.
Join Lidia Yuknavitch and Jen Pastiloff for their signature “Writing & The Body” Retreat in Portland March 17-19 by clicking photo.

Join Lidia Yuknavitch and Jen Pastiloff for their signature “Writing & The Body” Retreat in Portland March 17-19 by clicking photo.

 

Click photo to read People Magazine.

Click photo to read People Magazine.