Eyes Taped Open
In November of 2016, I was married to and responsible for a man who voted for Donald Trump. It isn’t the only or even the main reason we divorced. But it’s not nothing. At the time, I had enough on my plate to deal with. Paperwork I had to put together by myself, finding a new place to live, a child under the age of two that needed my care, the second half of my Bachelor’s degree to finish so that I could, at some point, provide something. When my blue vote wasn’t enough, when my stupid little stereotypical dream fell apart, I closed my eyes to the world and focused on what I could control. I got divorced. I survived. Sometimes survival is all a person can manage.
Everything’s different now. It’s been different for a long time.
In November of 2024, I swore that I would keep my eyes taped open to make up for all my inaction in the first round. And I’ve stayed true to that promise, but jesus fucking christ. How to even sum up a single year of the second term?
Honestly, so much of it falls out of me in bits and pieces, like a jagged trauma narrative, disoriented and broken. I was in Colorado the day that a bullet supposedly grazed his ear, my aunt and I talking shit about the orange man at a restaurant before we’d heard the news. And her husband’s shrug afterwards: “They missed.” I knew then that the election was over and brat summer would just be a blip in history we’d soon forget.
We can’t pin what’s happening now on one man and I won’t. No matter how much I’d very much like to. But can we please have the conversation we should have had hundreds of years ago? About the genocides that birthed the United States of America? The people who were left out of the Constitution? About all the structures we’ve built that are not, in fact, broken, but are working as designed? This is imperialism and authoritarianism, we are the empire, and colonization never left. It just learned to hide a little better until recently. And now it has no reason to hide; they’re out in the streets killing now. They have been for a while.
I only have so many spoons in a given day and most of the time, they go towards my parenting responsibilities, my education, my jobs, my communities, my mental health. I try hard to not be bothered by the fact that I don’t necessarily have time for performative signaling, but still, I feel guilty that I am not always able to post on social media, to write long-form to post on the blog, to attend the meetings I want to attend, and whatever else. I’ve been struggling with my words lately because language simply doesn’t seem like enough. What could possibly be enough?
So, in the wake of all the horrors we’re collectively watching unfold, I budget my money accordingly and set the non-profits I believe in to auto-pay. I teach my daughter what I can: love beats all and so does kindness, the best times to be brave are when you’re scared. You know the lessons. And I read all the banned books and activist writers’ works. I organize my thoughts in journals and collect quotes for the big dissertation show-down that’s coming down the line for me. And believe me, it will be a fucking show-down.
I won’t lie. I am scared. I was raised under the false protection of a white family, but out on the streets, I am a brown woman. I’ve been carrying my passport around in my wallet just in case. But I’m also very angry. And nobody said it better than Hannah Gadsby:
“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
Please stay safe out there and take care of each other. We all have our jobs to do to be the helpers that Mr. Rogers always talked about. I’m hard at work over here making sure that I’m keeping my eyes taped open, my reading list rebellious, and getting my angry words down on the page just right. That’s what I have to contribute right now. It’s going to take all of us. What is your role?
