cw: the world is on fire
When we are all ready to move to Ireland, we will be immigrants. I will be an immigrant. Not an ex-pat, an immigrant.
I think it’s extremely important to use the right language to talk about this.
I knew it would be hard, this gap year before we’re able to move, but I (somehow) forgot how deeply I feel things. Vincent is a whole twenty-five years old and is on his next adventure soon, visiting a new country he’s never been to before, and I’m so excited for him — and I already am missing him.
It’s better than being rounded up. It’s better than permanent separation. It’s better that an early death at the hands of those who hate us. It’s better than concentration camps. It’s better than forced detransitioning. It’s better than being deported.
Even if leaving the US meant that I’d be sicker and less able, I would still be doing this. To me it is worth it to engage in the process of changing my fate and the fate of my future descendants. For fuck’s sake, my 25-year-old is privileged to do things I would NEVER have thought possible for him, let alone for me at that age.
It hasn’t even been a week since the inauguration of a new (old) president of the United States.
It hasn’t even been a week and people are already being rounded up and deported on military planes to places they’ve never been. It hasn’t even been a week and further dehumanization of the Other is accelerating faster than a fire spreads, and the conses are quencing.
Many people call America their home. The experience of living in America will be in the past tense for only a few, if they’re fortunate.
This shit is real, it’s really happening, it’s worse than you thought, it’s going to get so much worse, nobody is safe. Not even people who think they’d be the last to suffer. Now is the last sentence of Martin Niemöller’s prose:
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I don’t like having to be this serious. I’m a shitposting goofball but I know how to be deadly serious when it’s called for. Now is a time when it is called for.
There is a wound in my heart from all the grief I’m personally trying to process, while being aware that the buildup of grief and anger and terror in my home country is reaching levels so high they are becoming an invisible wall. May there never be a physical wall, but there is no telling exactly where depravity will lead. An invisible wall is just as entrapping if it keeps the people imprisoned within it.
We assume the worst not because we are catastrophizing, but because we need to have been able to grieve and be shocked before something happens — so that when it happens, we are mentally prepared so that we don’t have to freeze like prey in the path of an apex predator.
I will never tell you not to have your feelings, or to allow the grief to express itself, but times like this means that sometimes you have to scream into a pillow for two minutes and then get up and keep going. We will carry this trauma in our DNA, but that does not mean we cannot survive.
In every place I go, I see what is missing from the land of my birth.
Kindness, understanding, social support systems, trust, acceptance — I’ve shed tears every time I realize all over again that I’m not about to be kicked directly in my heart simply for showing up as who I am, with my disabilities and needs and queerness and pagan religious beliefs.
I saw this in Ireland. I see this in Australia. And when I visit Thailand — did you know they just legalized gay marriage a few days ago? — I know that my experiences there will also be better even if they are difficult.
I see respect for the land and the spirits dwelling within it. I see acknowledgement of the personhood of nature itself. I hear the different ways that different cultures are seeking to honor the indigenous peoples on whose land they settled.
I look up at the night sky and see the stars that we all see wheeling across the sky as the planet turns endlessly year after year after decade after century, for millennia.
My Work is not to save everyone. My Work is to bring light into the darkness. My Work is remembering that each person must be free to choose.
My Work is to help as I am able; and right now, as a person who also needed saving, my Work is to remember how to rest, how to find joy, how to have hope, so that I don’t fall under the weight of all the wrongness and injustice.
May your light not go out before its time.
xox,
Nix
epilogue:
can you hear, can you hear, can you hear my voice?
coming through, coming through, coming through the noise
I’m floating through outer space
I’m lost and I can’t find a way
oh, all the lights going dark and my hope’s destroyed
help me, is anybody there?
save me, I’m running out of air
calling out mayday
it’s so dark, it’s so dark out here in space
and it’s been so long, been so long since I’ve seen a face
my eyes are shut but I can see
the void between you and me
and I feel and I feel like I’m going insane
help me, is anybody there?
save me, I’m running out of air
calling out mayday
— lyric selection from MAYDAY by TheFatRat
featured image is a photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
