Frolicking through the Fear
This is Zelda, frolicking when she was just a baaaby 🥹
CW: Political fear, ICE, Obsessive thinking & compulsions
This is going to be a mess but that's the only way I can get this out there. I've been dealing with a recent diagnosis of OCD, really delving into it and what it means for me. Learning how severe it is and how MUCH it has impacted my life without me knowing has taken a lot of work. A lot of grief processing. A LOT of anger. It's work that has taken most of my bandwidth for the past few months, which is why you haven't heard much from me. This is me opening back up.
I'm going to talk a lot about my fears, not because I want to pass them onto you, but because I need to externalize what has been keeping me trapped and silent. I'm going to express paranoid thoughts as a way of sharing my thought processes. I’m also going to share the big sister pep talk that helped me start living my life fully again
Paralysis is the best word to describe how I've felt over the last few months. I've felt a responsibility and a need to write more articles, but I've also felt completely paralyzed by the fear of being more public, increasing the chances of me being ‘noticed’ by the wrong people.
I'm an immigrant living in America, I'm a permanent resident, I've been married to a US citizen for 5 years now. I'm white. I have no criminal record. According to the propaganda, I should be safe. I'm “one of the good ones”, a phrase that disgusts me to even facetiously type. As if me not being 1st on the list should make me feel better about being 2nd on the list. Personally, I can't tolerate ANYONE being on the list.
It doesn't change the fact that when I go to leave the house, I take my pepper gel. When we consider driving outside of our city, I look into ICE reports. When I hear heavy footsteps on the apartment stairs, my mind simulates what I should do if it is ICE and all the possibilities. All the ways it can go wrong. All the ways my wife and I could get hurt. If I get a weird look in public, it's no longer just fear of transphobia, but a fear of us being targeted for much worse.
I was under the impression that these fears were protecting me, keeping me safe from a very real, very scary threat. That my compulsion to simulate every possible, horrible, outcome was somehow preventing any of them from coming to pass. In reality, all it did was prevent me from leaving the house and becoming more isolated. I was giving pep talks to my clients about fear, social media, and not allowing the propaganda to affect them; while internally dismissing my own advice ‘because I’m an immigrant’.
Paranoia vs caution, healthy fear vs being debilitated by propaganda. Living your life normally vs being willfully ignorant. Doing ‘enough’ vs personal safety. There are so many balancing acts we're all doing mentally and emotionally. I thought I was balancing them successfully. Then I tried to cancel a trip I was really looking forward to and it was made clear to me just how much it had prevented me from doing previously.
We had planned to go see Hannah’s Cousin and her family, which would require a 3 hour drive to a town where I had seen several reports of ICE abductions on reddit, before I stopped using social media. I asked her if there had been any activity there recently, she said that there had been someone taken a few blocks away, that week. My nervous system sounded the alarms, I went into panic mode. I wrote a message to Hannah saying that I wanted to cancel the trip, then cleaned the house while I contemplated whether to send it to them or not. I followed my own advice, externalized the negative energy (through cleaning and singing), brought my heart rate down with box breathing and calmed down as much as I could. Ultimately I decided that it would be “too risky” for us to go, just in case the worst was to happen. My nervous system had decided that because the risk was greater than 0%, that meant it was 100% likely. I was convinced this was a rational decision.
Thankfully, Hannah’s Cousin saw that this was not at all rational and called me. She asked me what I was scared of and how she could help. I started crying which made me want to retreat into myself, hang up and run away. I fought that feeling and I was honest with her. I said I was scared of ICE using FLOCK technology to identify us on the drive, pulling us over and taking me away, leaving Hannah and the car on the side of the road. There were more nebulous fears around that happening as we drove through the city as well, but oddly not once we got to their house. The more I needed to drill down into the fears to express them, the more they slipped through my fingers like irrational smoke. Not holding up to any scrutiny.
She listened to my fears with kindness and then gently refuted them. She reminded me that ICE SUCKS at their job. They haven’t been paid, they won’t be paid, and they are MISERABLE. They want us to be scared, that’s why they take videos of their arrests and send them to Fox News. They expected to be treated like patriotic heroes, instead they are hated and reviled, not given a moment’s rest. There are FAR less of them than they need to do any of the big claims they’re making, and the number is dwindling. They’re forcing through the dumbest and least capable recruits because they can’t get anyone else. The reality is the amount of people who attended just ONE of the recent Anti-ICE protests outnumber the amount of active ICE agents, easily. They don’t have the capability to scan every car that drives on the highway, let alone detain everyone who they ping. But they want us to believe they are as scary, organized, and capable as the Nazis that they idolize.
Fear is the point. They want us to be scared so we don’t resist. I go into all of this in more detail in my previous article about hope. Like I said, I know all of this, I teach this to my clients, so how did I get to the point of canceling a trip??
I believe the answer is social media. I had already limited my exposure to the news, so I stopped actively using Facebook and Tiktok. I kept using Reddit because I had classed it in my mind as ‘peer reviewed’, that their moderation and content voting would weed out propaganda, fear-mongering, or AI generated bullshit. I believe between my highly reduced time on reddit, the recommended videos on Youtube, and the times I’d catch myself scrolling Facebook after checking my business page or messages; it was just enough to let the fear seep through. Add that on top of my foundations getting rocked from working through my OCD diagnosis, fear took the wheel and it wouldn’t let the bus go below 50mph. Having someone gently listen and then dissect my fears helped reduce their severity. I needed to hear “it’s going to be okay, you are safe” from someone else as I wept. I got given the ‘Big Sister Pep Talk’ I’d been waiting my entire life for.
We just got back from our weekend visit and it was absolutely delightful, I’m so glad we went. I had been looking forward to it since we had originally planned the trip, and I’m so glad I was helped over the last hurdle that could have prevented us from going. We walked to a local park with our niece, an inspirationally strong-willed and curious kid. She would ask if she could run to a certain point and back, rather than just running off without warning. We got to a patch of grass outside a church, where she turned to her Mom and asked “Can I frolic?”. She then put on a masterclass in joyfully and excitedly existing. It reminded me: “Joy is resistance”.
I think maybe we all should frolic. Do something that is unapologetically happy, that promotes connection. Go for a walk with a friend, take yourself to the movies, go to a thrift store and point at things. Cook or eat something delicious, listen to music that moves you. Enjoy the beauty of nature, feel the light of the sun on your face and remind yourself that everything is temporary, especially self serving assholes. Love and joy will get us through this, fear only serves them.
I need us all to know:
There's no one right way to respond to everything happening right now.
We just do what we can while recognizing that this is not going to be fixed by one person, it's going to take all of us working together. The wrong way to respond is to do nothing.
This is where I need your help. I want to help other people, I need them to know I'm available and affordable. I've changed my pricing to pay-what-you-can (most pay between $40 - $120), with the first hour free. Word of mouth is VITAL for my business right now, any recommendations or reviews from clients are worth so much more than any advertising I could buy or TikTok content I could try to churn out. (Sidenote: I'm no longer posting or active on TikTok. I can't handle using it since I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. I'm planning an article on that movie soon, please go see it before it leaves theatres).
Helping people genuinely helps me. It gives me purpose. I love seeing the growth in my clients and celebrating their wins. I love my job, I'd do it for free if I could afford to. I HAVE done it for free when I couldn’t afford to 😅
I told you this would be a mess, but it's helped uncork my writing. I'm not going to set specific time-frames but I will be getting more articles out there soon, please watch this space, subscribe, and share with anyone who you think could relate to it.
I showed this to Hannah who gave me the perfect thought to end on: “What you've been experiencing has been fucking MESSY, all of this shit is so fucking MESSY. There's nothing wrong with messy feelings”.
