Is this how we become immortal?

A coup on our mental health

The thing about intimate partner violence PTSD is that even though your mind knows you are safe, your body does not.

For fifteen years, my mind had forgotten. But years later, suddenly triggered, the body remembers: the shaking, the readiness to run, the coldness.

Rolling with the “trigger” metaphor (America loves its guns!), the sounds of gunshots — real or imagined — don’t come out of nowhere. When Trump gaslighted Zelenksyy by saying Ukraine shouldn’t have started the war, when he called Zelenskyy a “dictator,” and when he aligned with the bully and blamed the victim, any woman who’s been psychologically terrorized at the hands of a more powerful partner probably remembered what it felt like to be back in that house — alone, shivering.

By @elin_manon_illustration

POV: You’re riding up your mountain ski hill with your six-year-old daughter, who keeps asking why there are big red, soft, spongy pads wrapped around trees.

“If people slam against the tree, they won’t die,” you say.

“So, they don’t want them to die?”

She asks the question, like the concept is so revelatory, how other humans would go out of their way to protect each other like that.

Fast forward four years, and this U.S. administration is stripping all the spongy pads off the trees.

They are trying to dissolve the Department of Education, which ensures equitable education for her. They scrub mentions of “women” from government websites while keeping mentions of “men” and “white.” They take away our bodily rights, reducing women to second-class citizens. They are deporting Venezuelan friends who came here legally. They want to erase my trans friends and my friends’ trans children while denying them life-saving medical care. Now, NOAA is on the chopping block, which Alaskans like my husband, who work outside and on the ocean, rely on to stay alive.

In writing classes, teachers always say, “Show, don’t tell.”

Which is to say that they and their yapsickles can yap on about anything they want, but actions speak louder than their words. They are showing that people like me and my disabled daughter don’t matter.

“Erasure is murder. We got erasers, and sharp pens too. And we have direct action, art and love.” — Kiese Laymon

When government demonstrates that truth doesn’t matter, that up is down, and that my daughter and I are expendable, then my body feels under threat.

I don’t know about you, but my nervous system is so constantly fried that I can’t remember how to spell fried. I have to sleep with one eye open on that asteroid that is figuratively and literally barreling toward us so F-elon Squared can give their billionaire friends tax breaks and golf courses in Gaza.

I want to live in a world where our government wraps red, spongy things around the trees. I want a village that doesn’t want me or my daughter to die. I want a world where truth and reality matter, where we root for the underdogs and stand up to bullies.

Empathy is now lambasted as pathetic, “sinful,” and “demonic.” I’m thinking about the Fuck Your Feelings: Trump 2024 flags I see in Alabama and the Trump 2024: Make Liberals Cry Again bumper stickers running around in Juneau, Alaska. The trolls who commented horrible things on my posts like “the winners” get to pick the name of America’s tallest mountain, Natives are “lucky Americans and not the Russians colonized them,” and “sucks to be you” when another parent of a disabled child talks online about how hard it is.

I know it’s all projection of when they got slapped, yelled at, or ignored if they cried or expressed feelings. They victim-blame and numb to protect their hearts because it’s too painful to imagine innocent people could suffer needlessly.

Feeling our feelings is not only an act of resistance. It’s revolutionary. It’s also the only way to become free of them so they don’t make us sick.

My friend who tragically just lost her young brother to cancer wrote, “What if grief shows me the capacity.”

When we allow ourselves to feel, we grow tendrils that allow for a deeper connection to each other and ourselves. Our physical bodies become less important because we move beyond them. We transcend the physical world. We become immortal.

This sounds woo, I get it. But when you consider that there are nonverbal autistic children out there who know multiple languages, including Hebrew and Hieroglyphics, despite never having been exposed to them, you start to understand the collective field of consciousness.

“Every being, every thought, every particle— is connected through an unseen field of awareness,” writes Holly Erin Copeland, as evidenced by the telepathic autistic children on the podcast Telepathy Tapes.

This fundamental interconnectedness is why my daughter, who is autistic, has had nightmares almost every night since #47 took office. This is why our bodies can feel a threat so closely, even when its memory is physically, geographically, and temporally far away.

By @elin_manon_illustration

How sad for all those people who lack the ability to soften to the interconnectedness, to form deep relationships, to hear and listen to other languages. Who have told their feelings to f— off.

If only they could go beyond their skin suits and sprout roots from their feet to grow deep into the dark underground, where true power germinates. To entangle with the roots of other trees, connecting to the earth's hum.

Because when we grow roots (as I did yesterday during my therapy session), we grow tall and solid. We hold each other up by our unseen interconnectedness, and weather becomes just that, weather. It passes, and we stay up. Even if it kills us, we go on living, composting into the soil, existing in the collective consciousness of the forest ecosystem.

So keep growing those roots and letting the feelings move through you and not hold you hostage. Keep on connecting. If you’re like me and grounded in more ways than one and can’t go to all the protests, we can still connect here. Which is why I’m opening up the comments to everyone today.

Drop a line.

Love, Summer

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By @elin_manon_illustration