Always Undone

Dec 18th - House Impeaches Trump

Jan 8th - First CDC warning

Jan 9th - Trump campaign rally

Jan 14th - Trump campaign rally

Jan 16h - House sends impeachment articles to Senate

Jan 18th - Trump golfs

Jan 19th - Trump golfs

Jan 20th - first case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.

Jan 22nd - “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan 28th - Trump campaign rally

Jan 30th - Trump campaign rally

Feb 1st - Trump golfs

Feb 2nd - “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."

Feb 5th - Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.

Feb 10th - Trump campaign rally

Feb 12th - Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42

Feb 15h - Trump golfs

Feb 19th - Trump campaign rally

Feb 20th - Trump campaign rally

Feb 21st - Trump campaign rally

Feb 24th - “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Feb 25h - “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

Feb 25h - “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb 26th - “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

Feb 26th - “We're going very substantially down, not up.” Also "This is a flu. This is like a flu"; "Now, you treat this like a flu"; "It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."

February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Feb 28th - “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

Feb 28th - Trump campaign rally

March 2nd - “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

March 2nd - “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5th - “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5th - “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6th - “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6th - “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6th - “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6th - “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”

March 7th - Trump golfs

March 8th - Trump golfs

March 8th - “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

March 9th - “This blindsided the world.”

March 13th - [Declared state of emergency]

March 17th - “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

March 18th - "It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate."

March 23th- Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93

March 25th - 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.

March 30th - Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16

April 2nd - 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

I’ve been constantly coping

Filling each moment to the brim

With distractions

And habits.

When I spill over

Whenever my partner goes to do something that takes courage, strength and the strength of a thousand seas like finally going back to an AA meeting to introduce yourself with your new name or play her first big show, I always say the same thing. I look her in the eyes and right in the damn heart and I tell her, “Be bold and brave.”

Fear, nervousness, anxiety. Most often, it is there to push us forward and to knock out our scrappy knees along the way. But keep going. You have to keep going. I cry whenever she gives me advice that I do not solicit, or rather, request explicitly. Unwelcome advice will drive me in the opposite direction quicker than you can say, I told you so. But, be bold and brave has become a tagline of sorts. 

We have many of those, little taglines and oneliners and things to come back to. One of the most heart-breaking things about losing my mother was that I could not pinpoint a single phrase of her’s to hold on to. Nothing to pin to my body. Besides kindred spirit, but that is not the maternal catchphrase I am yearning for. 

In response, my partner and I have leaned heavy into things to hold on to. Tangible items. I can feel myself becoming a hoarder and my OCD taking over as I store up things for my unborn but wishfully named children to give to their children, with tales of grandma. 

So being bold and brave becomes a mantra. Along with stacks of notes, postcards, magnets, trinkets, and expansive rock collections, we hold onto these one-liners like our lives depend on it. Our legacies seem to. I say that to her often, though she already has grown the grace to endure hard things in a way I admire up close. 

Today, I wanted to be a little bolder and braver. It’s also reactionary and I am coding this in the lens that I want to view it but I think that by the end, it will be agreed that this is a constructive and well-planned process. Clearly, we will begin at the beginning. 

A coworker asked me if I had cut my hair short again. I said yes, I just shaved it right off. Her response, in a crude motherly combination of horror and disappointment, why. I balked, I thought I knew why I had shaved my head, but being accosted so pointedly, it made me want to hide. 

I fiddled with my headband, which I was disappointed to learn did not cover my head in the cute way that the mirror had reflected in the morning. I felt caught, like a fraud. If my body were a speech impediment they would have tied me up already. I felt the fine buzz of my hair on my eager fingertips. I took a breath. 

It was sunny, so I just went for it. I was messing with my hair too much and it’s usually easier when it’s shorter. That was what I said, pretty point blank. My coworker said I would have to go through the awful grow-out phase. I played it off with a joke I have used hundreds of times before for moments like this. Catchphrases serve many purposes. 

After, I felt anxious all afternoon. I am struggling to stumble along and all I want is to be hired to work somewhere new and change my damn life already. On the way home I decided to go apply for jobs in a place that wasn’t my bed, my beloved sanctuary. I came out into the world at a cute little coffee shop. 

In the car, I tugged on my headband. Red and white polka-dots, I reveled in the Rosie the Riveter vibes and I felt as soon as I slipped it on. I couldn’t get it to sit right, and clearly, it was not capable of covering my whole head, so patches will show. I looked in the mirror. Be bold and brave. 

I have gone out in public without my head covered about five times in the last three to five months. I don various scarves, headbands, hats, headwraps, “do-rags” as the aforementioned co-worker once said, to keep my hair covered and my hands one step further away from the pull. 

Rosie the Riveter was strewn in the passenger seat as I tensely hustled into the coffee shop. Unfortunately, there were many other people and we all arrived at once, so I proved my social survival skills sooner than I had prepared for. I then proceeded to stumble through my order, take a lap around the store, and find a spot. 

Since then, I feel my hands drift up to my head. Those perfect spots right behind my ears, or the throbbing scab at the base of my neck, the pimples along my hairline, all begging to be broken free and coddled and picked and pulled and inspected. Only the worthy may be ingested. However, the standards are not particularly high. 

I haven’t picked or pulled though since I sat down. Its been maybe half an hour. That feels like a huge win. I never know how long its been since I last pulled because it feels like I am always pulling. I would much prefer the feeling of being bold and brave to be more consistent. Despite it taking more work, it is beneficial over the long term. 

If I really had to say how I feel. 

It would be a total mess. It is complicated to explain that I missed therapy again this week when the charge is still on my bank statements. My fraudulent charges have been against myself. I need therapy so badly but am scared to go. I think my therapist might hate me so that makes me scared to go. I think that is my OCD talking but I’m not sure. But really I think she has caught me in too many lies. 

I want to leave and start over and try again. I am in too deep to atone for my sins. I don’t know where the hyperbolies intersect with the understatements. When I can’t trust my thinking, I must change my thinking from “why is this so hard” to “what pieces of truth are there”. 

Perspective and perception are powerful. Neither view negates that my thinking cannot be trusted. But one stifles any change, and one empowers it. Probing questions that can lead to solutions, rather than questions that continue to ram into the wall. 

I have been banging my head against the wall for so long that I have forgotten about the door a few feet away. I am so sick of ramming my head into the wall. Clearly, the bricks have not shaken but I am bloody and bruised. In my case, I am also pretty bald. 

My soccer coach (and idol) in high school frequently said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Perhaps that was when I became a hypochondriac and began to do the same things over and over and expecting different results. I don’t recall any instances of insanity prior to hearing that line, now that I think about it. 

So, I know the dangers of continuing to bang my head against the wall. And I know I am trapped here, in a repetitious hole. Yet, I continue to lean back and propel myself towards the barren red brick. I spend time speculating why this happens. Subsequently, nothing has changed. My bruises grow bigger and my thinking leans into the fog. 

It’s torturous, the way that things become harder the deeper you get. Its too easy to get out at first, so we stay. Comfortability is misleading and I do not trust it when it happens organically. I can only trust it when I completely force and manipulate it, which can also be defined as an unrealistic obsession with control. Our bootstraps fail to get bigger as our hands become more clumsy. 

I am fumbling. I cry in fear of eating three times a day and lie to my most beloved partner about my food intake, because I can feed on the shame alone. My self-depreciation has become my sustenance and I refuse to let her love take that from me. The wall has appeared again. Fight, flight or freeze.