Reflecting on the great crashout of nov 2024

like a lot of ppl i crashed out after the election.

I kinda that it would take a couple of days to figure out who won the election, and that I would have time to emotionally prepare before seeing the results. However, I awoke at like 7 am the day after election day. I made myself coffee and sat on the steps of my front porch. I was stressed but it’s not like we’d know the results anytim.. AND THEN BAM AS SOON AS I OPENED THE INTERNET IT WAS THERE.

I yelped and ran upstairs to austin, who was asleep. I grabbed him and cried “trump won”. I was in a lot of distress. Austin groggily said “I know” and we had a short conversation and he went back to sleep.

I. Crashed. Out.

I messaged my friends, but I the group chat that I had wasn’t enough. Although this group of people proclaimed to be progressive, I’d assess them as closer to liberal, which, I don’t think they even could provide the support that I was looking for, as my ideologies were a lot more left than theirs (unfortunately, I’d figure this out in a painful way), and I just felt like a crazy person talking to them.

I took to twitter. I made a threads account. I started slinging tweets left and right, into the void and at strangers. I started voicing things I’ve been thinking about for years but never said anything. I just never thought that this political climate would get so bad. I was shocked and greiving the new life paths that oppression opened up. Life paths where I didn’t have control. Life paths that could include grieving the life I had just got.

It sounds kinda dumb but I started to grieve my couch. Austin and I bought this really expensive new couch. It’s more than what we could afford, but we wanted to put in this investment because we spend so much time on the couch and cuddles would be so nice when watching shows! So we bought it with the logic of “oh we’ll have this for decades!”

Except when trump got elected, the life path of “getting thrown into a concentration camp” got more likely than I ever thought it would. I thought the chance was 0%. I don’t really know what the percentage chance is, but it certainly does not feel like 0% anymore.

And so I started this very intense grieving process. I got upset at the thought that I wouldn’t get as many memories hanging out on this couch than what I thought I had bought. And then applying that to every thing and every experience in my life.

This also paired with how I’ve been reading a lot of feminist theory, especially about racism. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working on healing my relationship to my race, and during this process, I’ve uncovered so much anger when it comes to white supremacy. Spending time studying it, I am able to see how pervasive it is in my own thoughts, actions and behaviors, and also other’s.

Like, I had never put too much thought about race and my relationships, and how race effected them. UNTIL I started to unpack a friendship fallout and my therapist pointed this out.

I was really confused about how things hashed out. For example, I was really upset about how this group of friends decided to make a separate group chat to discuss me instead of directly talking to me. My therapist pointed out that historically, southern white women tend to try to fix things behind the scenes to keep the peace. And that’s what started my journey down the rabbit hole of connecting my own personal experiences to societal issues such as racism.

Anyways, this was something I kept to myself (my changing relationship with my race) and I think this kinda created a gap between the people in my life and I .

So yeah anyways, I went sicko mode on the internet. I even tweeted at my grandma’s account that I have been lurking for years (she’s a QANON MAGA person) right before permanently deleting my twitter (my shayla).

I also started to post more and more aggressive or abrasive political content on my instagram story. I knew that people don’t enjoy this type of content but I felt like my safety was at stake and that it was more important. I voiced my anger, I shared controversial opinions. And I was like “idc the girls that get it get it, the girls that don’t don’t!”

And I was okay with that until I realized that even my closest friends were not engaging with the content like I had hoped.

I had hoped to connect with my friends by expressing my feelings and putting ideas out there to think about and talk about. I knew that these posts could potentially be off-putting, but I was hoping that it would create stronger bonds with the people I thought similarly to.

BUT then I had a falling out with the aforementioned “progressive” people and they said some nasty things, including that I’m “unbearable to be around”.

“Unbearable to be around” was exactly what I was fearing when I decided to get more vocal, but I really thought the homies would have my back.

So I wondered, is what I’m posting online achieving my goals, or making things harder?

My goals were to connect with people in a more authentic way, but instead, I feel like I was alienating them.

So I’ve slowed my roll on my political posting and I’ve been trying to invest more time and energy into in person connections. Talking about politics might be easier in person and with people who care and have shared values!

Like, when I think about who I think sees my content on social media, I don’t think I have quite the right audience for the type of posts I was making. I’ve been thinking a lot about who I used to be, and I you know, grew up in a conservative small town in nc with republican parents. I think I forgot the context of my social life for a hot second. so I think being direct and abrasive and political is something I still want to explore, but I don’t think my instagram story is the best medium for this considering my audience and the medium itself (short lived and snipets of info).

So yeah, I crashed out and it was pretty evident on social media, but I’m feeling a bit better now and although I’m slightly embarrassed I think I learned a decent bit.

I’ve since read The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, as someone recommened to me while witnessing this crash out, and I know exactly why.

There’s this scene where the main character, lauren, is a child. this is a dystopia where the world is falling apart, and the characters live in a gated community at this point (I imagined it to be like the gated community in the walking dead). Lauren decides to be real with her bestie about the state of the world, and this upsets her friend. Her friend goes home crying and Lauren gets in trouble for upsetting her. Lauren’s dad was like “yeah I know you where just being real, but like, looking into the void and being real about how the world is falling a part, scares people. Not everyone can handle it.” So instead of being direct about telling people that society is falling apart in x/y/z way, we can just start doing things. Learning skills. If the world is falling apart, then we will need to learn how to feed ourselves, garden, sew, learn etc. So just doing the physical labor of the actions that need to be done when the world is falling a part, can be more helpful than talking about how it’s falling a part.

I pushed a lot of people away, and I am reflecting on what this has done to my relationships. I think it was something that was building up for so long… for example, I’ve sat in silence for my whole life as my grandma slings around her bigotry. She’s violently racist and homophobic. I’ve always been told to be the “bigger person”. I’ve swallowed up the violence of white supremacy and patriarchy for so long, and when Trump got elected, I decided to finally spit it back out at people. A lifetime of living in the shadows and accepting the hierarchy. No longer.

I told my grandma to go fuck herself.

I let my anger and rage out and let the people who have hurt me see the wounds that they have cause. And they fucking HATED IT. Of course.

And maybe because it was a bit of an extreme swing. I went from saying nothing and bottling it up to expressing everything.

I stopped caring about the feelings of white people when they get hurt when it comes to racism. I really don’t give a fuck about any white person’s hurt feelings when it comes to the violence that they perpetuate. And this is what probably got me in the most trouble.

I suddenly stopped caring about other people’s hurt feelings and prioritized my own, and this shit made people lose their minds. I think in the future I could improve how I could go about that, but I don’t have any regrets.

There weren’t really any girls that got it, besides, like austin and cece.

And so yeah, a lot of my relationship got really damaged during this time period and I’m not sure how to to really recover. A lot of them have been festering in their wounds and I can’t really bring myself to be the initiator of repair at the moment.