My little terrier doggie baby had to spend the night hospitalized at the emergency vet because she had cluster seizures. She's been epileptic since she was about two, but it was contained to one seizure every couple of months, sometimes longer. The gap between last night's clusters and the seizure before that was actually six months. Even though her vet originally told me it'd never go away, but she would be alright, I'd kinda hoped maybe they magically went away... but no. My poor baby.
I have to go pick her up this afternoon. She'll need to see her normal vet and we'll probably have to put her on an anti-seizure medication, but she'll be alright. My brain, though, seems to have only one way to respond to things, and that's running immediately to the worst worst worst worst case scenario. It's part of how cancer left indelible marks on my psyche. It was the worst thing I could imagine.
The worst thing I could imagine is what sends me into hyper vigilance. My brain just wants to prepare me so that if the worst of the worst comes true, I'm prepared to handle it... it's doing its job. It's just that it's exhausting me. Literally exhausting me. I keep going over all the reasons we don't need to be hyper vigilant about this, but only medication seems to get through.
My brain, by the way, does this with everything. EVERYTHING. I had some anxiety prior to cancer, mostly around work and stepping out of my comfort zone in other areas of my life. This was brought on by childhood abuse. My mother had this horrible abusive pattern. Get mad at me about something ridiculous, start a fight where the power dynamics are impossible for me to do anything to defend myself – especially as a child, withdraw love and affection I'm guessing punitively, then just wait. After a number of weeks, months, or years, she then returns to my life and expects the incident will just be forgotten and never brought up again.
As a result, even though I've been no contact with my family for the last 15+ years, I'm always on the lookout for some random thing that'll set off someone around me that I'd like to avoid. Cancer intensified that to the Nth degree. EVERYTHING is life or fucking death. Fight or flight. The biggest problem with THAT is that I pick fight. And when I fight, I fight to hurt because I was bullied with impunity throughout my entire life by children and adults. I know what hurts people. I know how to find a person's insecurity and hammer on that over and over and over until they rage or they cry or they slink away. I've done it before and I feel bad about doing it, even if the person deserved a taste of their own medicine, but I don't like it.
I don't like it, but I think it's necessary. Not as mindless cruelty to people you dislike, but as targeted anger to people who harm others. I want to say I learned how to weaponize the bullying of others against them when I was in 6th grade. Fourth and fifth grades were full of bullies that loved to make fun of my name or my clothes or my family or any little thing they could trigger me on... and I was (and still am) an emotional person who cries when they're angry, frustrated, sad, depressed, basically... if it's too much emotion, I cry.
I realized, after Stephanie Strayer pushed me against a brick wall so hard I hit my head, then took a Polaroid of me crying and showed it to everyone, that this is what hurts people, and this is how girls hurt girls who don't fit in. Like a girl who was actually nonbinary, but didn't have words for that in the 80s and had to deal with other labels like, “not like the other girls”, and “tomboy” that were close, but not quite true, and always kinda carried a negative connotation, with a German last name that was easy to make into new, horrible words. These bullies pulled out the my insecurities and weaponized them.
So, in 6th grade, when a girl whose name I don't remember kept relentlessly attacking me in front of her friends over every little thing, finally got on my last nerve, I turned to her and told her that at least I didn't have to suck up to the teacher to get a decent grade. I think I used the words “teacher's pet” a few times while her dumbass friends looked on and made “oooo” sounds. I dropped it, walked away, and she didn't bother me ever again.
But I knew I hurt her, and I didn't like hurting her.
But I also know it works. Because it works on me.
To bring that back around to politics and pulling punches, this is what I mean. Not a lot of people are willing to go there because we're not like them. Which is admirable, but short-sighted. No, we aren't mean and cruel. We don't hurt people because it makes us feel good, and we do our level best not to hurt people at all, no matter how brainwashed they happen to be. We understand the reasons, and we know who is feeding these poor souls all these crap lies to exploit them... but we can't let the town idiot run the town.
Red states CAUSE their own disasters. They ignore climate change, prioritize really dumb and bad culture war legislation, let corporations get away with murder. While it's super lovely to think of the poor people, it's these poor people that voted in such a way that their state became a mess. At some point, blue states are just enabling the really bad choices that red states make. If the federal government wants to limit any federal aid that goes to California wildfire victims, California will need to keep more of our resources at home.
We can't do anything about the discrepancy between where federal dollars go because the IRS controls all that directly. We CAN, however, keep our experts at home, where we need them, and give no additional aid other than what they're naturally getting through our federal taxes. Tough love. You all keep voting in ways that make your states vulnerable to natural disasters. We've supported you for a very very long time, but there comes a point when you have to learn from your own mistakes.
It won't happen, though... nominal leftists are far more interested in appearing as though they're model compassionate progressives than actually doing the messy work necessary to make change. Not in a purity test “have you ever made a mistake” sort of way, but in a holier-than-thou, look-at-how-compassionate-we-are sort of way. In the past, I've seen people who have done some terrible things, never took accountability for their actions, never sat with their discomfort, never did anything at all to indicate they've learned from the experience be welcomed back into nominal leftist spaces because of “compassion”.
It's not that people don't deserve opportunities to change their path... they absolutely do... but they have to actually change their path. Nominal leftists (a term I lifted from something I read on reddit) are often pretty selfish. A lot of what they do is for the optics, after all. That selfless compassion. That unconditional love for your fellow humans. They would sacrifice everything to help someone else... but that thinking doesn't ever get us forward.
People keep voting for bad infrastructure, then we keep cleaning up the mess left behind. Then, when we are in actual need of h