Thread by @UrsulaV

I kinda miss my capacity for shock.

Anyway, related, I was doomscrolling the fires the other day, watching places that I used to know cease to exist, and I nearly cried for a second and then I didn’t, because it wouldn’t help and there was too much shit to do. And damn, when this is all over, we’re all gonna break.

We’re all doing the thing where you shove your emotions down to deal with the crisis. And that’s actually useful, because a crisis is not made better by having Feelings. So it’s healthy to do it, and then when crisis is over, you cry and move on.

Except the crisis has never actually stopped, so our good and healthy emotional response is turning maladaptive, because we keep jamming down the emotions and now we’ve all got pressure-cookers in our chests.

I genuinely don’t know what my personal all-clear signal will look like, but when it hits, wow, I’m gonna freaking implode.

We’re gonna have a new diagnosis for 2020 PTSD. And people are gonna talk about us like we do the Depression. “Oh, well, you know, she lived through 2020, that’s why we’ll be cleaning out a hoard of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and ACAB stickers when she dies.”

So anyway, really, it’s okay if you’re not okay. The rest of us are either bawling in the closet or disassociating so hard we can damn near astral project. It’s not just you.