They say: “What is a woman?”
Best response: Take a trans woman shopping. Help her pick out some really cute shit. If you can and she can’t, pay for it.

They say: “Aren’t you just reinforcing gender stereotypes?”
Best response: Buy gender-affirming clothing and hygiene products for trans people in need via the Transhealth wish list. (Or you can send them items directly, but ask first, they have limited storage space.)

They say: “Why are you letting children make irreversible decisions that they’ll regret later?”
Best response: Send a message of hope and affirmation to trans youth via the Southern Equality Project.

They say: “God made you to be a man/woman.”
Best response: Participate in an online or in-person support group hosted by Keshet (Jewish) or MASGD (Muslim) or Transmission Ministry Collective (Christian) or IQBC (Buddhist).

They say: “LGB people will lose all the progress they made if they don’t drop the T.”
Best response: Organize a day in the park or a movie night with your gay, bi, trans, and otherwise queer friends. Bring snacks.

They say: “There’s only two genders. It’s science.”
Best response: Enroll in the PRIDE study, the first long-term national health study of LGBTQIA+ people. It’s produced a huge amount of science supporting LGBTQIA+ health, and guidelines for healthcare providers to better care for us. They take privacy seriously and have a Certificate of Confidentiality and an organizational commitment to shield their data from legal demands, including from the federal government.

They say: “You’re mentally ill.”
Best response: “If you ever need to talk about serious stuff or just vent, I’m here and I’ll listen and I won’t judge,” to a trans friend who’s not quite close enough to know if that’s something they could ask of you.

They say: “This new social media trend has gotten out of hand.”
Best response: Browse the Digital Transgender Archive and educate yourself about the long and rich history of gender diversity.

They say: “Thank God Trump is finally doing something about this madness.”
Best response: Get into local politics. I mean yeah, sure, call your reps if there’s a chance in hell of them listening, but the places you really can make yourself heard are the town hall, the school board session, the city council meeting. Here’s some important advice on how to more effectively advocate for trans people in these settings.

They say: “It’s not surgery, it’s mutilation.”
Best response: “Do you need a ride home from the hospital? I can come check on you and bring you meals while you’re recovering,” to a trans person planning surgery.

They say: “I hate trans people.”
Best response: “I respect and support trans people.” Not to them. To everyone else. To your coworkers and your classmates and your neighbors and your friends and your Internet friends and anyone you can safely say it to.

They say: “You’re ruining your body.”
Best response: Log off for the night, eat, drink, stretch, read a chapter you love in a book you love, and go to bed on time for once. Caring for the community includes caring for yourself.

you say: hey cliff this post sure sounds all wise and noble but I caught you yelling “well it’s not my problem you go poopie in your pants if everyone on earth doesn’t perform pink and blue at your fucking pleasure, poopiepants” at some rando republican on another site like twenty minutes ago
my response: personal growth is a process

But I think it’s important for people to understand: it’s impossible to participate in politics without having some kind of values, because fundamentally, values are the only reason to want anything.

Science can tell us “measles causes suffering and death” and “the MMR vaccine prevents measles,” and logic can synthesize those into “the MMR vaccine reduces suffering and death,” but, strictly speaking, neither of them can say “you should get an MMR vaccine.” At some point, once all facts have been presented, you have to step forward as a human being and say “I think death and suffering are bad and should be minimized” for no reason except that it seems self-evident. That’s a value.

Values are the things you ultimately want, the goal of your goals. If “the government shouldn’t spy on people” is your goal, privacy is your value. If “everyone should have enough to eat” is your goal, it might be based in a value of public welfare or equity. The value is the part of a “should” argument that can’t be reduced any further. If someone asks you “why shouldn’t we torture people?”, you can say “because it causes suffering without benefit”; but if they ask “and why is that bad”, then you’re down to a values discussion.

Everyone who has opinions has values. Even if their opinion is “whatever’s best for me personally, fuck everyone else,” their value is personal benefit. There is no way to say one state of the world is better than another without referring to values.

And I think it’s important to understand this because it really underlines the limitations of Facts And Logic when it comes to political decision-making. Facts and logic can inform you about what your result will be, but the only way to decide whether you want that result is through your irrational animal emotions. That isn’t you failing as a debater. This is where you have to end up. Why do I think joy is better than misery? I just do.

Values aren’t innate or static; people can change what they value. But it will always be an emotional process because it can’t be a rational one. There’s no way to decide if you should care more about your country or your family based on logic alone; logic can help you explore the consequences but only emotion can answer a “should.”

So this is my Irrationalist Manifesto. This is my call to admit, and be proud of, the fact that you want things because you feel they are good. This is my reminder that there is no such thing as a politics purely guided by science and reason. This is why I want my politics to always grow upward from “people should be happy and safe” to ideology instead of downward from ideology to justifications. Because there’s always a part of your beliefs you can’t defend on any basis other than “because this is what I care about,” and that is the most important part.

It was April, and the world was ending. Pierce, Astin, and Darley stood on the deck of the Sir Edmund, watching the lights of New York slip away. The lights glittered as they always had. Even a mile away, all looked well. The spire atop the Empire State building burned purple into the sky. Headlights flitted over the bridges and down the canyons between skyscrapers.

Pierce said goodbye to the city, quietly. It had been his home for the last six months, after Texas started to succumb to the instability. He didn’t know if anyone he’d left behind was dead. They were lost to him, at any rate. Maybe his parents had made it up to Seattle or Minneapolis. Maybe his sister had been caught in one of the earthquakes. Maybe his friends didn’t get out before the roads cracked, and were making their way north on foot, plunging unprepared into the desert with only the hope of staying ahead of the crumbling edge of the Earth. It was all a lot of maybe.

Astin finished a cigarette, then started another. There were only so many cigarettes left in the world now. Each one he smoked was one fewer. Astin had the better part of a carton squirreled away on the ship, and by that count there were one hundred and twenty-four cigarettes left in his world. One hundred and twenty-three soon. Astin’s wife had begged him to quit smoking.

Darley looked to the north. There was a twinkle in the sky, a new star, over the North Pole. That was where they were headed. Darley had been there—well, everyone had been there—the last time a new star had appeared in the sky. They knew what it was, of course. The thing about astronomy is that it’s pure math, everything known; give an astronomer an orbital trajectory and they can tell you where a chunk of rock will be at 3pm on October 9^th eight million years from now. So Darley and her colleagues had known from the first sighting what would happen. It was all waiting after that.

She had waited, and tried to shield herself from the panic as best she could, as the new star grew larger in the sky every night. As the news started to understand. Darley hadn’t gone out much during that time. You could still buy things then, so she’d made her apartment into a little nest. Big, soft, pale gray comforters. Hanging pots with trailing vines. Twinkling LEDs on a string. She’d learned to cook new recipes and she’d talked cheery nonsense to her cat. And she’d hoped the cat—Mr. Miffles, gray and stocky and always trying to chew the vines—would die of natural causes before the time came that she had to make a decision.

Mr. Miffles, that goddamn bastard cat, was thirteen years old and still fat and perfectly healthy when the new star became a new sun. It didn’t happen quickly. As if to add insult to injury, the new sun hung in the sky for days, weeks. People had to commute to work under it. Darley, for her part, calculated the rising and setting of the new sun, the nights that were scorched with light and the days when the sun rose twice.

The sun became a star again, receding into the blackness beyond, not to reappear for (by Darley’s reckoning) one billion, six thousand and twenty-nine years. But the damage was done. Days and nights became shorter, not by a lot, a few minutes. To an astronomer, someone who measures things to the nearest million lightyears, those few minutes were colossal. As perfectly as the gears of a watch, every movement inevitable, the Earth began to unravel at the Equator. Mountains became valleys, valleys became rifts, and month by month the rifts deepened and widened until they cracked and the two halves of the Earth spun free.

Darley had moved north by then, spreading a gray comforter on the back seats of her car so Mr. Miffles could sleep on the way up from Albuquerque to… to wherever was north. She had thoughts of trying to cross the Canadian border, getting up on Ellesmere Island somehow, surviving to the bitter end of the end. With every mile of Earth that crumbled behind her, the question whispered louder in her ear: “why do you want to survive to the end?”

And then, one night in a rat-bag motel in North Dakota, a particularly bad earthquake shook the fake-wood-paneled CRT television off a dresser and onto Mr. Miffles.

Darley lost a few days after that, and when Dean invited her onto the Sir Edmund, she figured she might as well as not. It was still science, of a sort.

Dean was belowdecks, missing out on the view, sorting and counting supplies. They had enough food and equipment, but it was all scavenged, cobbled together, and needed to be picked through. Dean had put the expedition together hastily, reaching out to a few old friends in the climbing world, getting answers back from even fewer. There was no reason for his plan, no fame in it. Except this: They would not cling to life; nor would they welcome death. In the face of certain oblivion they pursued what was still uncertain.

They were going to climb the mountain at the end of the Earth.

The Sir Edmund carved into the black sea, rounding Canada, staying far from land. In deep water a tsunami feels like nothing more than a bump. Onboard, the climbers spent their days with Dean, planning. They didn’t speak much to the crew of the ship. The crew seemed like ghosts, and Darley came to understand that they were; with no climb of their own, and no hope of return, they were empty inside. The captain spoke, and smiled sometimes, and looked right through walls.

Above a certain size, climbing a mountain is less an adventure, more a construction project. Base camps must be erected, then advanced base camps, then mountain camps, with trails decided and ropes hung between them. Acclimatizing to the thin air of Everest takes climbers weeks; on the Last Mountain the air would thin into vacuum. It was unlikely the climbers could make it much above thirty thousand feet, and even that would take a miracle.

Still they planned and plotted and pored over maps that Darley sketched of how the Last Mountain would grow and stretch over the coming weeks and months. They listed what they would carry in their backpacks and what they would leave in supply caches.

Darley slept well at night, for the first time in a long time. On the sea there were no earthquakes, and though the winds and currents pulled in strange directions the Sir Edmund was powerful enough to stay on her course. The engines rumbled, stars twinkled outside her window, and every night Darley dreamed of soft warm places.

And then there came a sunrise with no sunset, and the mountain grew in the sky. It was no longer a star but a streak of light, and then a tower, impossibly thin and stretching up into Heaven. In the midnight sun of the North Pole it glowed twenty-four hours a day. Its snowy flanks were broad and shallow, gradually curving upwards until at the center it became a fine spindle of rock. As the Earth had spun down the valleys of the Equator, it had spun up this mountain, and every second it was rising further.

The Sir Edmund navigated up an ice fjord, to get as close as she could to the Pole. Shattered walls of sea ice towered over her on both sides, calving icebergs the size of skyscrapers into the water. The Sir Edmund caught a few close calls, but made her way further inland, until she came to the place where rock met water, a frozen beach that seemed to go on forever. She beached herself, destroying her hull; no matter at this point. The instability was accelerating, and by the time the crew could have sailed back to New York, New York would be gone.

Dean and the climbers took a day to unload, and then bid the crew of the ship farewell. They left them with some food. Enough to get them to the end, if they wanted. The captain said goodbye to the climbers, or to something behind them.

They set out hauling sleds full of supplies up the slope. At the lower elevations, everything was rock covered with snow. Darley furtively looked around for some sign of life, some long-flying seabird that had managed to come up this far. There was nothing. Theirs were the only footprints in a circle of snow a hundred miles across.

A hundred miles across meant fifty miles to the peak, and when they had been in top condition they might have made it in three days, two without the sleds. It had been a hard year. They took the better part of a week.

There was no night in this place. The climbers rested when they were tired, and started hiking again when they woke. At least their equipment could stand up to the cold; though gathering food for the expedition had been a trial for Dean, high-end snowsuits and subzero sleeping bags were up for the looting.

Astin had gone through his last cigarette on the boat. Instead of being edgy, though, he seemed to gain a certain calm once they were out on the snow. He spoke little. Kept his eyes on the snow in front of his feet. He wasn’t sulking, Darley came to understand, he was experiencing. He was feeling what it was like to have arms and legs, to be cold and sore, to find strength in his muscles. He hadn’t gone dead; he was living in the next step.

Pierce, younger, had less peace. He wanted to talk, constantly, about everything, and Darley indulged him as much as she could. He asked her about astronomy, and Darley told him about the Pistol Star, a hypergiant three million times brighter than the Sun. She told him about the Boötes void, the great sphere in the universe where there are no stars. She told him about the galaxy filaments, the largest things that there are, structures woven from of superclusters of galaxies.

When Darley tired of talking to Pierce, he talked to her, not caring if she reacted or not. It was a stream of thoughts and opinions. The movies he liked to watch, the music he listened to, the girls he had dated. The business he was going to start. There was a broken-down old ambulance in his driveway in Texas that he was going to make into his dream RV, any one of these years now.

Dean walked at the back of the group, just keeping up. He would stay at base camp, coordinating operations and watching the climbers with a telescope. He’d caught a bad virus a few years back, lost some lung capacity, not to where he couldn’t hike, but climbing would be dicey. Also, he couldn’t hike. He tried to hide his gasping for breath, how often he needed a break. When he coughed himself ragged in his tent every night, he punctuated it with a mumbled “sorry!” and “excuse me!” as if every time was a surprise.

There was no moment that they knew they were at the true foot of the Last Mountain. The snow slope became steeper so slowly that it was hard to notice. The landscape was almost featureless, except for the bits of sea ice that had been lifted up with the rock. Darley imagined she might see a whale or a school of fish, marooned on the sudden upthrust, but every time she thought she did, she looked again and it was nothing but a jumble of ice.

Finally Dean just called it. “We’re building base camp here,” he told the group, and although here looked very much like there, they agreed. They set up a mess tent, sturdier than the little mountain tents they had slept in on the way, boiled snow for water, and had a proper hot meal indoors.

They’d dealt with the privations of the trail before. None of them were Everest climbers, but they weren’t novices. Pierce, wiry and nimble as a cat, had made a minor name for himself in bouldering and solo climbing. Astin was less graceful; small and hard and as implacable as a glacier grinding over rock, he had spent his twenties on long backpacking trips crisscrossing the Rockies. Darley had been out of the sport for a few years, as the demands of work had crept up on her, but still made it out to the climbing gym when she could. She was the tallest of the climbers, lanky as a deer, and she made up in reach what she lacked in power.

The last time all four of them had climbed together was years ago, in the crags over Donner Pass, the altitude cutting the summer heat thin. They’d spent two weeks camping rough, sleeping under the stars among the dusty brown rock and wind-bitten krummholz. The men’s beards grew long and their hair tangled, until it seemed like their faces were only eyes peeking through curly brown fuzzballs. Darley, fuzzy enough herself, laughed at them, as they passed a pipe around the fire and howled up at the Milky Way.

And then at the end, when it was time to return to their lives, she caught a van down into Reno and booked a room at a casino hotel. The room was a different world from the life of the mountains, all straight lines, soft fabrics, impossibly clean. Darley’s first shower in two weeks was a relief and a sorrow, the wildness swirling black and brown down the drain, perfect little soap bubbles chasing it down. The soap smelled like lemon and herbs.

On the Last Mountain, Darley sat on the floor of the tent and sipped hot broth from her little tin cup. Outside the tent, Astin had taken his shirt off and was basking in the sun. Though the Sir Edmund had battled strange and fierce winds on the way up, here at the North Pole the air was calm, and despite being freezing cold it had no bite to it. Pierce sat down next to Darley and started telling her about some girl he had taken on some hike somewhere—a total beginner nature walk, but get this, she didn’t know what a stinging nettle was and when she went to pee in the bushes she wiped herself with—and Darley smiled and nodded for him. Dean was setting up his telescope to scout the ridges and gullies of rock that lay ahead.

The next day they started climbing in earnest, sleds left behind, roped waist to waist to waist in case of crevasses. There were no glaciers here, but the rock could be treacherous in places, and a thin crust of snow might cover a bottomless chasm. Pierce led the three of them, probing the snow ahead with a long bamboo cane; Darley was in the middle, and Astin last.

As the slope steepened, there was less snow and more bare rock, and for a few hours the climbing was easier. At this point there was still no real technical aspect to it; it was just a long walk uphill. The air was starting to thin. Thin air isn’t something you can feel, not directly. You feel your lungs starting to ache. You feel your feet growing heavier. You realize it’s harder for your body to hold heat, and even when you’re warm in your snowsuit there’s a chill that won’t go away.

It was the air that stopped them, which they had expected. This wasn’t their big push, but an acclimatization hike. They’d set up an advance camp, spend a few nights teaching their bodies to make the most of the limited oxygen, then go down to base camp to recover and refill their supplies.

Even after hours of climbing, they had no appetites. Darley forced herself to at least drink water and have a few nibbles of trail mix, then sat outside the tents, looking downhill at the way they had come. The sky was gray and a light snow was falling, but the visibility was still good. She could see all the way out to the ocean, to the inlet where the Sir Edmund had come ashore. The distance was too great for her to make out the boat itself, to see if it was still there or if some ripple off the cataclysm had washed it away. Besides that there was little else. The world was a white circle in a blue infinity, broken up only by the ice that had been beached and the ice that floated free.

The next two days they spent at the camp, making little reconnaissance walks. Not that there was much to reconnoiter. The real work was being done by their bodies, speeding up their breathing, thickening their blood, preparing them for the heights above. It was tiring enough just existing up there.

Base camp was still far above sea level, but returning was a relief. They had left most of their gear at the advance camp, making the downhill hike easy work, though not without its hazards.

Pierce hadn’t slept well in the thin air, and he slipped on an icy slope, falling hard on his back, dragging the roped-together group downwards. Instantly, by instinct, Darley and Astin turned uphill, slamming their ice axes into the snow, digging their feet in. Self-arrest is one of the first skills a new mountaineer learns, and the training had been etched into them long ago. It worked; they only slid a few feet before friction caught them and they stopped, with Pierce still gasping at the end of the rope. “Shit, guys,” he said. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

Darley looked down, and saw a smear of blood on the slope. But Pierce was gathering himself, he just had a scrape on his lower leg where his snowsuit had rolled up a bit, he could keep walking. Astin offered to trade off the lead for a while, and Pierce shook his head. The group continued back down to base camp.

Dean had a pot of hot (if rehydrated) chili con carne waiting for them and it was the best thing they’d ever tasted. He wrapped Pierce’s leg wound and showed the group a map he’d drawn of the ridges above, a route that snaked up the mountain all the way to the central spire. From that point, if they could reach that point, there was no trail to follow.

The air was better here and they slept well, all together on the floor of the mess tent, sleeping bags piled on top of each other. The group had never singled Darley out for being the only woman, sexually or otherwise, and she joined the pile unselfconsciously. The warmth and weight of their bodies, the full stomachs, the light breeze ruffling the tent walls, and everything seemed all right.

Their next mission was to build a high camp. They spent the first day returning to their advance camp. Though Pierce had a slight limp, it was easier going than the first time up; the air seemed less painful, and they were able to eat a little more this time, sleep a little more. So the morning after that, they headed up to where life was painful again.

This time, they were carrying oxygen tanks, but they didn’t dare use them. Not yet. The tanks were only to cache at the high camp, for the real climb ahead. Each cylinder was good for twelve hours at the most, and they could only take as many as they could carry along with their tents and food and climbing gear. Even hauling bags on ropes behind them, that was only three apiece. Only enough to climb Everest.

The climbing was more technical now, though the too-regular shape of the mountain made it oddly monotonous, and the thin air made it slow. Pierce would climb up a pitch, clamber his way to a ledge, and fix the rope before the others followed him up. The climb was still not quite vertical, but it was steep enough now that they were on bare rock with only stray patches of snow. It was too cold for bare fingers, so they had to climb with gloves on, awkwardly. There were moments when Darley’s heart caught and she thought she would lose her grip and they would all plummet down together; but they never did.

After hours of climbing, they finally made their high camp on a ragged little spit of rock standing out from the wall. It wasn’t flat, only less steep than the rest; there was nowhere truly flat that was bigger than a foothold. The air was thin, the sun unrelenting. Any exposed skin would burn while it froze. The fringes of their hair, the only parts of them not wrapped in snowsuit or goggles or scarf, sparkled with ice crystals.

They didn’t sleep that night. They were yards below the edge of the death zone, the altitude where the air can no longer support life. Below the death zone, a human body can acclimate, however slowly or painfully. Above it, acclimation is not possible. The body’s oxygen balance goes negative, each breath blowing out more oxygen than the next can take in. With math as cold and simple as the spinning of the planets, a person in the death zone dies a little more with each breath.

This camp was tiny and miserable. They couldn’t step more than a few feet away from the tent, even to relieve themselves, and there was no warmth to be had. They boiled hot tea on their little stove, but water boils lukewarm at altitude, and it was slight relief. Their guts had stopped working completely; it was an effort for Darley to gulp down her cup of tea, feeling like she had to work her throat manually. Even Pierce had gone quiet. Sympathetically, she tried to cheer him with astronomy facts, but she could feel herself babbling. Her memory was gone, her tongue thick. “Quasars,” she started. “Um, quasars are really big. They’re really far away.” She realized how she sounded, and stopped.

They lay in their sleeping bags until they gave up on trying to rest, then left what they needed to cache and climbed down again. They spent the next night at the advance camp, still not comfortable, but able to sleep. Darley dreamed of being smothered, something strangling her, and woke up to find Pierce had crawled out of his sleeping bag and wrapped his arms around her. It wasn’t affection; it was desperation, an animal seeking heat, a child seeking comfort. She tucked him back into his sleeping bag and he only half woke, making little whimpering noises before falling back asleep.

In the morning Pierce admitted he was too tired to lead, so Astin took point instead, in his quiet and steady way. They trudged down to base camp silently, joylessly, but there was no thought of abandoning the mission. They had planned their climb, and they would climb the plan. Three days of recovery at base camp, then back up to advance camp for a night, then high camp, and then the final push, whatever that meant. It was a rushed schedule for high-altitude climbing, but it was all the time they had. If they fell behind by a day… Darley had done the math a long time ago.

When they got back to base camp, Dean was huddled in the mess tent, buried in his own tiny mountain made of all the clothing and blankets and tarps that they had, blood spattered down the front of them. He was breathing shallowly, not even coughing anymore, just puffing out bloody foam.

“Shit, Dean,” Astin said, “You’ve got to get downhill.” Like any climber, he knew the symptoms of HAPE—high altitude pulmonary edema, when a person’s lungs can no longer tolerate the thin air and begin to fill with fluid. Descent is the only cure.

“And then what?” Dean asked in a rough whisper. “And then go home?”

“I don’t want to watch you die,” Astin said.

“I don’t want to die,” Dean said, but his eyes were unfocused. More foam gathered at Dean’s mouth, and he spat it out on the blankets.

Astin and Darley tried to stand Dean up, to see if they could walk him down. It was like lifting a mannequin. His legs buckled the moment there was any weight on them. Being upright seemed to help his breathing, at least; he was able to cough properly, hacking out thick red blood and gasping in some air. Astin and Darley set him down sitting upright, propped up against a pile of equipment, piled his blankets back on him, and stepped outside the tent.

“We could put him on a sled,” Astin said. “We could haul him down. The ship’s crew could take care of him.”

There were several things Darley didn’t say. “It would mean giving up the climb,” is what she did say. “We wouldn’t have time to go back up.”

“I know,” Astin said. “But…” He started crying, silently, not blubbering, just going red and wet in the eyes, his nose running. He wiped at his face with a glove, furtively, only making a bigger mess of himself. “I’m not ready yet,” he said.

“Neither am I,” Darley said. “It doesn’t change anything.” She hugged Astin, and though they had not said their decision out loud, they knew what it was. On any ordinary climb, it would be a mandate, the sacred code of the hills, to give up everything to evacuate a sick comrade. Who cares if it’s a world record climb you’re abandoning, if you’ve spent ten years saving up for it? They wouldn’t have hesitated.

There is an exception. On the high reaches of Everest, where even the whole are barely able to walk, those who fall stay where they fall. It isn’t callousness; above Camp Four, rescue is simply not possible. You stay with the dying and comfort them, give them a drink, pray with them and for them. And when they die you climb on. What choices do you have? They die and you summit, or they die and you don’t summit. Might as well.

When they went back into the tent, Dean was pale and silent. His eyes seemed to be stuck open. He was still breathing a little bit. His friends spent all night taking turns staying up with him, holding his hand, wiping his face.

When he died they buried him in the snow.

The plan was still the plan. They spent three days at base camp, not entirely solemn. There was food to eat, there was rest and they had each other. Astin had snuck four joints into his sled and on the last night they lit up outside, looking to the south. The sea had receded by now, falling into mist off the edge of the Earth. The seafloor was bare, sand and stone stretching to the horizon, dotted with a few beached icebergs like eerie blue hills.

“I wonder if we’re the only people on Earth,” Pierce said. He was on his second joint, a little pinner made from a third of Dean’s share. They had thought about leaving it on his grave as a tribute, but then again, who could waste the last weed in the universe? The perpetual daylight felt like night for once, and the three climbers cuddled together, sitting on sleeping bags laid out on the snow.

“I’m sure we’re not,” Darley said. “Someone will have wanted to live until the end. They’ll have boats somewhere up here. They might even be climbing.”

“And there’s the South Pole,” Astin said. “There was a whole research station there. Maybe they got a free ride up their mountain.”

Darley didn’t share her thoughts about how that probably went. “I wish we could see the stars,” she said.

“Maybe we will,” Pierce said. “From the top.”

On schedule, they headed back up, Astin leading again. Pierce’s leg hadn’t healed—that wasn’t possible under the conditions—but it hadn’t worsened either, and he could keep up. He seemed cheery on the way up, singing scraps of old pop music, forgetting the lyrics. They hiked up the shoulder of the Last Mountain to the Backstreet Boys and they reached advance camp when he was just getting started on Britney Spears.

Despite the altitude, they ate well at the advance camp. They’d cached stove fuel and freeze-dried food, and now they had hot Irish beef stew on the snow slope, looking out at the dry ocean. The air seemed thinner than it had before, thinner and stiller, and Darley suspected that altitude was not the only reason anymore.

That night, while they slept, an earthquake rocked their tent, and a great rumble came from the mountain above them. It was a sound they’d heard before. They ran out of the tent, hastily stepping into their boots. A massive white cloud was rolling down the mountain at them. They didn’t have time to rope up. They linked hands, and a wall of powder snow slammed into them, and everything was white, and then everything was dark.

Darley pushed in front of her face with her free hand, clearing a little pocket. She had some air, then, and although the snow was locking her whole body in place, she was still upright and didn’t seem to be far from the surface. She started digging upwards, one-handed, not willing to let Pierce go.

Then Pierce started pulling on her, and she struggled to drag him back up until she realized that she was on the bottom of the pile, tipped head-down, and Pierce was pulling her up and out of the snow.

All three of them had survived, but their gear was gone. The tents, the food, the stove, the ropes, all had been washed away and buried. They had nothing but the clothes on their bodies and what little was in their pockets.

“Nowhere to go but up,” Pierce said, sounding oddly perky. They did have some supplies cached at the high camp, it was true. More than was left at base camp, and besides, the mountain was still shivering with quakes. Better to get above the snow, then.

They had to climb without ropes and harnesses this time, but they knew the route. Slowly, methodically, they picked their way up the steepening rock until they were at high camp.

High camp was as desperate and exposed as they had left it, but their supplies were still there. They had left a stove and a little fuel, so they could melt water. There were some granola bars so they ate them, even if the altitude meant the granola only sat like pebbles in their stomachs.

There was no question of sleeping, but they rested, until another earthquake came that almost shook them off the spit of rock. They didn’t lose anything this time, but they knew the time had come. Far below, the dry ocean now had a black edge.

The only things they took with them were water and the oxygen bottles.

Mountaineering oxygen bottles aren’t like SCUBA tanks; they don’t supply your whole breath. They just give you a little trickle of oxygen, a supplement, not enough to make the air like sea level, only enough to keep your balance from going negative in the death zone. The masks are fighter jet masks, thick black rubber that encloses your face from nose to chin. It feels like you’re suffocating – but take them off for a breath of fresh air, and you’ll know what suffocation is.

So enclosed, the three climbers moved upwards. The mountain towered above them, impossibly tall, but narrow now; sometimes their maneuvers took them all the way around it. The wall was now almost vertical, and every time Astin managed to find a new handhold felt like a miracle. Far up in the death zone, where he should barely have been able to move at all, he was pulling himself up cracks in the rock hand over hand, powerfully, a machine built for climbing. He had always climbed like there was nothing in the world but him and the mountain, and now there wasn’t.

Darley followed, with less abandon but still feeling a strange easing of her pain. Maybe it was the oxygen, maybe it was the inevitability—she was starting to feel good. It was satisfying hauling herself up, her muscles were warming up, maybe she could do this forever.

Pierce slipped. It wasn’t one of the earthquakes, it wasn’t ice or his injured leg; he just plum made a mistake and fell. And fell, and fell. Darley heard his little yelp of surprise and that was it. Pierce was gone.

Astin and Darley climbed on.

They hadn’t bothered checking watches or altimeters for a long time, but they had finished their first bottles of oxygen and were on to the second when they came to the needle. Here the rock was fully vertical, but no thicker around than a tree trunk, and still narrowing. Astin threw his arms around it and started shimmying up. Darley followed.

Below them, the Last Mountain had started to unravel. The fjords were gone, the coasts were gone, there was a perfect circle of land perfectly centered around the Pole and everything below that was… it was math now. If she had had her computer, or even paper and a calculator, Darley could have told you where it would be one billion years from now. Some things change. Orbital mechanics don’t.

Still they shimmied upward. They had to turn their oxygen up, to the full blast setting meant only for medical emergencies, just to breathe at all. Their second tanks emptied quickly at this rate, and soon they were on to their third and last. The tree trunk narrowed, from a redwood to a maple to a quaking aspen. Astin could almost reach his hand around it. And then he could. And then, when the rock was hardly more than the width of a pencil, it broke off in his hand. He tossed the rest of the spindle away. They were at the top.

Darley looked around. Beneath her, the snow was disappearing, subliming away into space. The blackness was racing upwards now, devouring the rock, base camp gone, then advance camp, then high camp. Around her, there were no more clouds anymore, no more blue, only blackness and the sun and the moon. Above her, Astin’s boot still had a little clump of moss from some long-ago hike wedged deep into the sole.

Astin reached his hand down to her, and she reached up to him.

The spire shook, and fractured, but they didn’t fall. They floated.

Darley and Astin embraced, surrounded by stars.

So I got really, really depressed without maybe being fully aware of it in any sense other than feeling like the last time I was all the way awake was maybe 2019. I try to keep a diary, and there’s just gaps of entire months in which I… apparently existed. And I was working and going to social things and stuff so it wasn’t like I was in bed all day, I was totally contracting the right muscles to move my body around. I was like 99% alive. I don’t know if I’m better, but at least I’m writing this.

(To be clear if anyone worries: I am not in danger, I have people, this isn’t a cry for help, it’s just my excuse note for disappearing.)

The reason for this is that my life has become sort of a grand tour of the Omnicrisis. One workplace closed down due to COVID; the next had me doing COVID testing, triage, contact tracing, and ultimately vaccinations. I am genuinely proud of the work I did there during the worst of the pandemic, but it was exhausting. Then that job got shut down due to private equity malfeasance. So I got a new job, which I’m still at so I’m not giving details, but… it has turned out to also be highly exposed to the Omnicrisis.

Oh, and being transgender, that thing I thought was really fun when it was safer and you could say shit like “my gender today is incandescent frog… with a hint of lemon” without worrying about being screencapped by a domestic terror network? It turns out that was real so I’m kind of stuck with it but also half the country has decided to be actual Nazis about it.

(The wonderful thing about owning your own domain is that if anyone tries to be like “uh, if it doesn’t come from the Braunau region of Austria it’s just sparkling disagreement” in the comments, I can just fucking delete it.)

So yeah, I kind of ran entirely out of creative energy for some reason. Moral weakness, I usually figure.

But I have two pieces of good news to share!

First: I have three new friends! Mrs. Frisby is orange and white and the spitting image of old Cornflower (Z”L, love you forever babe), and she’s also a really good mouse. Mice tend to take some taming before you can handle them, but Mrs. Frisby was jumping in my hand and snuggling up on Day One.

Tess is brown and very small and she’s the engineer of the group, which is a thing mice can be. I mean I’ve seen this mouse build a culvert out of toilet paper tubes so she could tunnel under the water bottle without putting the spout out of reach. (I do not know why she needed to tunnel under the water bottle, but it was important.)

Constance is black and white and a bitey little monster taking a little longer to tame, but she remains a valued contributor to our team.

And secondly: I have a plan that will put actual content up here! I’m going to keep the blog alive even while I’m Going Through It, and also save a lot of writing and art that would otherwise be lost to defunct/might-as-well-be websites, by beginning Rerun Season. I’ll be scheduling reposts of things I made for other sites to go out every Friday morning. I’ll also try to do original things, but I can’t guarantee a schedule on that. I’ll aim for less than six months this time.

UPDATE: okay so this absolutely did not happen. It turns out that “going through my old stuff for interesting bits” is actually an extremely ambitious project, because the interesting bits are somewhere in between very long stretches of ephemeral memes and petty Internet drama. I still want to work on this site but I cannot promise an update schedule better than “it happens when it happens.” I’ll post on my Bluesky when I update.

It was better than previous decades; if you lived in a liberal area and didn’t have any other strikes against you, you might get the live-and-let-live treatment. But if you did it was purely a personal favor, because nothing in the law or in society at large protected you. Sodomy laws could still be enforced. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legal, even in Massachusetts. You could get a murder charge cut down a degree or two by testifying that the victim had been gay at you. Ellen caused a huge scandal just by existing in public as a lesbian. “Gay” was standard teenage slang for “bad.” AIDS deaths were still common but finally starting to decline, with little help from a straight society that considered its existence to be a hilarious buttsex joke. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was a controversially progressive policy because at least servicemembers had the option to be closeted. The big debate in public schools was whether to teach children that straight sex exists.

(okay, that last one never really got better)

And it’s too simple to say “and we all got through it,” because we didn’t all. People absolutely did suffer and die. I stumbled through those years presenting as a weird straight girl, not with any kind of personal valor. There were gay and trans activists standing proud against the tide, and there were gay and trans people quietly but openly living their lives, but… fewer. It was harder.

But we, as a community, as a people, we got through it. We got all the way to where there were completely different reasons to dislike Ellen. We got to where there are openly trans people in government, and gay acceptance is so normalized that transness is routinely contrasted with decent, conventional gayness. (Not that being gay is entirely safe now, but it’s buck wild to hear conservatives say “I have no problem with the normal gays” when you’re old enough to remember 1995.)

I can’t promise when or how society will continue to progress, but history never literally goes backwards. Trans people are more visible and more explicitly targeted now than in the 90s, and that’s frightening; but we also have massively more legal and medical backing than we did then. And we have the Internet, making it impossible to completely repress the message that feels so obvious now that it’s hard for me to explain that I literally didn’t know this in the 90s: feeling ill at ease with which gender you’re supposed to be and which you’re supposed to be attracted to is a real thing and you are not alone. There is so much support and community that we’ve gained that we aren’t losing today.

And more important than hope for the future, what I want to give you today is hope for the now. Because while being queer in the 90s sucked, on a day to day basis it often didn’t. On that small scale I had queer friends and we cuddled and flirted and watched anime together on a horrible brown couch in my friend’s basement. We played with the cats and we wrote extremely bad fanfiction about boys kissing and we got in a big stupid fight about Final Fantasy VII and we… we lived our lives, you know? Without permission from society, without even fully understanding ourselves, there was still so much in our lives that was good.

(“Wait, how could you have a queer friend group if you were all closeted and didn’t even really know you were queer?” Well, you see, life could be very complicated that way.)

“I lived through the 90s” doesn’t sound very dramatic, but that’s my point. It was in some ways a worst-case-scenario compared to now, but it didn’t feel dramatic. It felt like life. But if you want a more dramatic example, here’s a quote from my grandfather.

I had a ball. Then I got to fighting with my mother. My mother got at me because I got lazy. When you have it good and you’re young, you just get lazy. Friday night, with all the commissars, we used to have parties. I used to go over Friday night and came home Tuesday morning. […] I just had a good time. In the morning I used to sleep till three o’clock. Slept the whole day, yeah, that’s what I did. And I worked only when I felt like it.

What he is describing, in this quote, is his experiences as a Jewish refugee in the USSR during World War II. Of course there’s a lot more to his story than this; he went through very painful times as well, he lost his home and many of his loved ones, and he had to be very lucky and resourceful to get into a situation where he had free time and money. I don’t mean to tell you that he just partied through the war. But he did party during the war. Life is like that, more often than you’d think.

The next four years are going to suck. We are going to lose things we took for granted and nobody knows how many or how fast. But we are also going to write some absolutely shit-ass fanfiction and get in extremely pointless arguments about it. We are going to have our first kiss and panic for a week about what it Means and then have our second kiss and realize this guy is kind of a dork actually. We are going to sit on the floor in front of the couch with an elderly cat on our lap and watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show in glorious standard definition and we are going to live every moment of our lives.

We are going to live as activists, as rebels, as outlaws. But we are also going to live as people. We do not need the government’s permission to do that. The next four years of your life will have happy memories, silly ones, naughty ones, ones that make you cringe when you’re older, ones that are simply part of the ongoing story of your life.

I can’t say “it won’t be that bad, we won’t be oppressed, it won’t really matter.” But I want you to know that you can be oppressed and still have days when you care much more about your fucking fanfiction argument.

Don’t give up. Don’t ask permission. Don’t comply in advance. Don’t comply afterwards either, if you can help it. Don’t confuse “illegal” with “impossible.” You will see horrible things on the news, it will always matter to someone and sometimes that someone will be you. And sometimes you will be terrified and miserable, and sometimes you will be a cool sexy outlaw, and sometimes things will feel normal but also like they could crack at any time, and most often of all you’ll put away the dishes and water the plants and text with a friend for a bit and then try to get some reading done before bed.

I think about this every time I see a commercial with people laughing. The actors who are trying to make it look light and spontaneous have been doing this exact laugh, every few minutes, for three days.

So if the people in commercials look a little hollow in the eyes, it’s not because they’re bad actors, or because capitalism exerts some sort of nebulous anti-personality force. It’s because capitalism exerts a very specific anti-personality force that has evolved the general concept of “telling people your product exists” into a timeloop pocket dimension for unusually attractive 23-year-olds who live with four roommates.

Also, the casting directors are really specific about the “type” they want so the hiring process for this involves sitting in a waiting room with forty people who look exactly like you and hoping you’re the one who’s best at it.

• Another shark species that has recorded a lot of bites on humans is nurse sharks. This is because nurse sharks are particularly calm and docile sharks. Which encourages divers to push their luck.

• Man, the federal government has a lot of different job positions for goons. Obviously there’s the military and FBI and CIA and Secret Service and ICE and DEA, but there’s also the Diplomatic Security Service. And the US Marshals. And the Federal Air Marshals, who are completely distinct. And the Federal Protective Service, to guard federal buildings. And the DoD Police to guard federal military buildings. And the Capitol Police. And the Park Police. And the Smithsonian Institution Office Of Protective Services. And a security service that only exists to drive nuclear warheads around. It’s such a rich environment for the development and advancement of career-oriented goons.

• Maybe the most evil kind of guilt is feeling guilty for feeling happy in a fallen world. The world’s always falling, you gotta be happy sometime.

• Edgy cowboy singing about “where the deer and the antelope PREY”

• The final boss of post-cringe is admitting that American cheese is versatile and tasty

• Remember when porn videos were called things like Jiggling Asses 17 and were produced by actual studios? On physical media, that you could buy in stores? It was a different world.

• I still maintain that everything Ian Malcom says in Jurassic Park is either wrong or uselessly general – yeah, the behavior of large systems is unpredictable, but that’s more in the formal sense of “we cannot say where every animal will be at every moment with centimeter accuracy.” Mathematical chaos does not have the same meaning as as “everything has descended into chaos.”

• Anyway I really do want to teach children that gender is fake. Not that they can’t have one! People have lots of fake things that are very important to them, like names and property. But you gotta know the difference between things that exist because we say so, like Wednesday and authority, and things that actually exist, like the Earth spinning and fancy uniforms.

• “POV” stands for “imagine a situation.” No one knows why the letters are P, O, and V. There are many theories.

• The correct way to write the shortened binomen of Tyrannosaurus shirt is T. shirt.

• Oh my god, all I pressed was T and the autocorrect suggested “Tyrannosaurus.”

• Great white sharks make me feel a little bit the way tyrannosaurs do. It’s just so much power in an animal that barely knows what it’s doing. And because it’s a real thing but it’s so far away in time/place that I will probably never see a live one in person, it feels almost mythic. They’re basically dragons.

• Pineapple and mango are honorary citrus.

• Apparently tortoises are slow because their shells are heavy? I always just thought they had super slow metabolisms. Well, probably both.

• Remember during the Iraq War when people would have fundraisers for soldiers to have body armor? That was so fucked up. They asked the Army for ballistic plates and the Army was like “go tell your mom to hold a bake sale.”

• Gameshow where contestants have to guess the gender identity of the butch in a butch/femme relationship. It’s called Het or Miss.

• The line under that in my notebook says “what if people get mad about this one because like the butch could be nonbinary or could be a woman who doesn’t go by miss or they could be bisexual or” and then the line under that just says “breathe.”

• I didn’t know our model of what the Milky Way galaxy looks like had changed so recently! In 2005 we were updated from a spiral galaxy to a barred spiral! I guess it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at when you really, really can’t get a view from the outside.

• I just realized X-ray machines aren’t really “cameras,” they’re lights that create a camera-less photogram on the film.

• True fact: in the 1920s you could get X-ray hair removal. Works great, no regrowth, maybe a few minor side effects.

• Although I will always excuse the people of olden times for thinking radiation cures everything. Because one of the first things they learned about it is that it cures cancer! Radiation therapy for cancer is more than a hundred years old. Understanding that radiation can also cause cancer is somewhat more recent.

• Hey so how were there plant patents in 1940? They didn’t have genetic testing then, were they really enforcing these based on a drawing and a description? Seems like you could have a lot of legitimate convergent evolution going on. Especially considering how many of the descriptions are essentially “the distinguishing feature of my plum tree is that it has better yields and bigger fruits than previous plum trees.”

• (Or maybe they were zealously enforced because plant cultivars actually are that distinct to the naked eye? I don’t know, it’s possible. Agriculture is a big field.)

• The reason ninjas are always depicted wearing all black is because they’re actually dressed like stagehands. Real ninjas were spies so they didn’t have uniforms, they dressed to blend in. But Japanese theater directors would portray the stealth of a ninja assassination by having one of the stagehands suddenly jump out and stab a character. It was kind of a fourth wall thing. So a stagehand outfit became known as a ninja outfit.

• I looked up some nearby “ninja academies” so I could make fun of them for being dressed like Edo-period tech crew, but they’re all just wearing workout clothes because it turns out that the contemporary US meaning of “ninja” is “adult monkey bars.”

• Cephalophore: a saint depicted holding their own severed head
• Cynocephalus: a saint depicted with the head of a dog
• Ecorche: a saint depicted without skin

• Aged urine is known as lant, and was heavily used as a cleaner (for wool but also various household uses, also for making gunpowder) in the ancient and medieval world. People would routinely save their pee in jars to sell to the cloth-fuller.

• Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman very possibly had sex with each other.

And Cornflower loved you more than I ever could have. I adopted her the same day I got you and from the moment you met she adored you. She was still a baby then and you were her big brother, her best friend, her whole world, the man who taught her how to be a mouse. You put up with her annoying teenager energy, you cuddled with her every night, you shared your food and your wheel and your burrow with her. She grew to be twice your size but she’d still let you walk all over her (often physically).

In your last days, she’d sit with you when you were tired and groom you when you were scraggly. When I found you this morning she was still snuggled up tight against you. I had to push her away to take your body. To the last day she wanted to keep you safe.

There have been so many mice in this world and sometimes it kills me to think that every one of you has had your own unique personality. That’s too much to know, when your lives are so short and often so hard.

I can take satisfaction in this, at least: when you were with me, you were absolutely spoiled rotten. For the last year-and-change of your life you didn’t spend one day cold or hungry. You never had to fear cats or owls or traps. You lived like a little mousey king, going to bed every night surrounded by a pile of carefully cached, lightly gnawed food blocks. In terms of mouse lives it had to be 99th percentile. I’m glad I could give you that.

Farewell, Matthias the Warrior, the toughest little mouse I have ever known.

1. Set up a tent indoors, in the most private space available.
2. Arrange LED lights and/or galaxy lamp in a pleasing fashion.
3. Plug in a phone charger outside the tent so that you can control your music and will know if there is some big emergency, but do not bring the phone inside the tent. The arrangement of static-prone nylon and metallic poles inside a tent creates an electromagnetic field that would instantly brick your phone. This isn’t true, but tell yourself that it is.
4. Add Bluetooth speaker/earbuds, connect to phone, put on “Lo-Fi Hip Hop For Study And Relaxation” stream.
5. Obtain all loose cushions, pillows, sleeping pads, blankets, and stuffed animals in house. Arrange in roughly oval nest.
6. Place “Caramel Cheesecake Cookie” wax cube in warmer, activate. (Outside the tent!)
7. Set up small reading lamp, stack up books about fluffy and inconsequential topics.
8. Invite tentmate(s) for snuggling or companionship. Be clear this is not a conversation space.
9. Turn off room lights. Enter nest. Zip door closed.
10. You are not on Earth anymore. You are on a space capsule flying away at unfathomable speed and you do not even receive radio transmissions from Earth. Soon you will land on a new planet full of life and possibilities, but not yet. Right now, in transit, there is nothing expected of you. Right now your universe is six feet wide and nothing in it can hurt you. You are floating in warmth and softness and the nowness and the realness of the blankets against your skin. Things might or might not be okay out there – who knows? Every one of the billions of planets around you has its own billions of stories and none of them are your problem. Things are okay in here, and as long as you are in here, that is all that matters.

(All steps are optional/circumstances-permitting except #10, which is mandatory.)

So That’s How You’re Coping With The Election, Huh?

Yep! And I’m not even ashamed of it. In 2016, I cared about US federal politics, I followed it closely, and what did it get me? Internet arguments. A spot in some protests where we chanted shit like “RULE OF LAW! RULE OF LAW!” Insomnia. Encyclopedic knowledge of all the weird peripheral Trump characters like Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus. Podcasts. Thinking maybe Robert Mueller really was going to blow the whole thing wide open. Internet arguments. Livestreams of Senate hearings. That one guy who would tweet “BOOM!” every time that some assistant’s assistant assistant testified that the assistant’s assistant may or may not have violated some act of Congress that hasn’t been enforced since 1925. Safety pins. Internet arguments.

What all these have in common is that they do exactly as much good for the world as making yourself a denial tent.

I wasn’t participating in politics, not really. I was participating in something that functioned essentially like a fandom – lots of lore to learn, big discussion forums, lots of speculation and analysis – except that a fandom is supposed to make you happy and this very much did not. For every thousand hours of anger and anxiety, I probably did five or six hours of quasi-useful Resistance work like protesting or fundraising. That’s… not nothing, every raindrop raises the sea and all that, but it’s a pretty goddamn poor yield. I could have spent 9995 hours jacking off and gotten the same outcome. Probably should have. At least I would’ve been happier.

Worse than the wasted time, though, was the wasted hope. Sometimes I thought maybe it could really happen, maybe in some way or another the world would come to its senses and everything would go back to normal and the news would be boring again. I would like to tell you that I never really believed it… but I believed it enough that the first few times the hunt for “principled Republicans who value country over party” failed, I did feel something. But each time, I felt a little less. By mid-2017 I didn’t expect good things to happen, but I sure was mad that they weren’t.

(Yes, I’m aware that thinking of the Obama/hypothetical-Clinton administrations as “boring news” is part of the problem. This is not a post about how I have only ever had correct opinions.)

Bottom line was, I cared about the things happening in this country. And the angrier I got, the more the anger itself felt like caring. They say “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” right? Well, I sure was paying attention! I was paying so much attention I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t enjoy anything!

While all this was going on, I was drifting more and more to the left politically, which is fine in itself, but (at least online) there’s a real fine line between “both parties are capitalist pigs, the people have to rely on each other” and “both parties are capitalist pigs, we’re cooked, RIP Earth it was nice while it lasted.” There’s a genuinely admirable desire in leftism to fix everything, to not settle for incremental percentage-tweaking but to demand big changes that set society on the path to utopia, and, well… it’s not that I think they’re wrong, but it sure can wring the last few drops out of your hope gland.

And then things got worse. Then it went from “just” political beliefs to becoming extremely personal. Then there was a plague and I’m a nurse and I tried to be a good person and make Noble Sacrifices For The Common Good and instead the consensus emerged that I was a dumb sucker who ruined my own life because of propaganda. I guess I was a dumb sucker; I did thousands of COVID tests and contact tracings and N-95 fittings, I went a year without touching another human being outside of work, and a million Americans died anyway. Because I was bailing out our boat with a teacup while MAGA was filling it back up with a firehose. Then there was a massive campaign against trans people and… I cannot think of a thing more precisely aimed to torment me in particular than a massive international online campaign to convince the world that my body is disgusting and I’m a sexual predator.

And then 76 million people voted to do this all over again.

Kind of impossible not to care about that, right? Personally, emotionally, politically, morally, of course you gotta fucking care, right?

And then you realize that all this caring has added 30 points to your blood pressure.

How to stop Being angry Even Though You’re Right

I started reading about anger management. It didn’t help much. A lot of the mainstream psychology resources on the topic are basically about convincing you that you’re wrong to be angry. Take some deep breaths, journal out your feelings, and you’ll realize that your friend didn’t mean to be rude! It’s possible that this works great when this is the full extent of your problems. Psychology professors really love examples like “you got cut off in traffic” and don’t so much love examples like “you got reminded, over and over again for years, how disposable your life is to the American political machine.” Have you considered that the American political machine was probably just having a rough day?

It’s hard to calm down when calming down feels like giving in. I start thinking things like “oh yeah, I’m sure the bastards would love for me to develop ‘coping skills’ to make myself docile and ’emotionally regulated,’ wouldn’t that be convenient for them.”

But would it? When I feel okay I have more time and energy to make myself inconvenient. (I do have less cutting comebacks on social media, but sadly some compromises must be made.) Probably the happiest and most hopeful I’ve been since COVID hit was when the first vaccines came out. I signed up for vaccination clinics and I gave hundreds of shots and they were not less effective because I forgot to give them with passion. My community didn’t need me to be a Good Person, they needed antibodies.

There’s other times I feel like calming down would be a sort of betrayal of people less privileged than me. I tell myself “you’re just justifying childish self-indulgence, not everyone has the luxury of a little play-pretend tent when they can’t deal, why do you think you deserve to roll around in pillows while others are suffering?”

But it’s not about what I deserve. It’s about what refuels me enough that I can help in the ways that actually help. The mostly quiet, private, and boring tasks of helping someone get their immigration paperwork in order, or working an extra shift to donate your pay to a bail fund, or being someone’s support person while they’re recovering from surgery. Red-hot rage is a sustaining emotion for fighting in the literal punchy-punchy sense, but it’s a lot less useful for fighting in the sense of not giving up the fight.

What I’m really doing in the tent is trying to break down the vanity and the immaturity of thinking anyone wants or needs me to have Correct Emotions. Because all this caring is making harder to give care. It’s making me undervalue the kinds of resistance to power that don’t feel cathartic or heroic, the kinds where successes are small and uncertain – which happens to describe nearly all the things I’m actually capable of doing. Letting myself wallow in “of course I’m opposing fascism, look how hard I’m crying about it” is vastly more self-indulgent than a blanket fort. I don’t want to come out of the tent docile. I want to come out useful.

The most important thing you can do about hate isn’t hating the haters. It’s undoing their work.