Reflections on Terror (Mine)

Still learning a thing or two

One of the few things that makes getting older palatable (sometimes even fun), is that you are still learning a thing or two along the way. Imagine my delight at discovering, after half a century of painstakingly coiling sleeping-bags into a tight roll and jamming them into a sleeve only after several false starts and a broken nail, that you can simply stuff that sleeping-bag into the sleeve, smooshing the hell out of it and voilà. Life is full of discoveries like that. Those moments when decades of inefficient adherence to a norm are tripped and sprung open by a gadget, a thought, a person, a thing you read – and you simply can’t go back to the way things were before. I am, of course, speaking about America here. More specifically, my view of it now. Even more specifically, my reaction to it under Trump. The second time.

I wish the lessons I am learning now were as delightful as a sleeping-bag hack. They aren’t -- but that switch is the same. That moment of “I see it now”. A couple of days after protesting against ICE downtown, I found myself balled up in bed in the middle of the day, shaking and crying, unable to force myself to my feet. I am not a balled-up-in-bed kind of gal. While I am no stranger to weeping, infrequent panic attacks, and subverted rage – I typically don’t take to my bed. I do the opposite. I take long huffy walks, write mean emails I will shortly regret, call a friend who won’t judge me too harshly, and occasionally I buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke them serially imagining how sorry everyone I love will be when I die of cancer.

Trust me, I know I need to work on my shit, but that’s not the point. The point is that while I was under that sheet, shaking uncontrollably, I was trying to identify the feeling. It wasn’t the usual despondency or rage. What was it? I could barely open my eyes and look at my bedroom. I shivered. My crying occasionally calmed down to a sputter and I would shift, only to be taken over again. To my mind, this lasted a day – maybe it was only a few hours – but I was only able to get out of bed when I managed to identify the feeling. Which sounds counter-intuitive, but that meant I could at least start using my brain.

It was terror. It wasn’t just fear about what was going on “out there”. It wasn’t just weepy frustration over being assaulted every day by news of Trump doing his sociopathic best to drive the country and even his followers into ruin. It wasn’t any of the usual fears about what was happening to the economy, immigrants, government workers and agencies, AI (oh God, AI) etc etc etc. It wasn’t even the heartbreak of watching reels of masked men jumping out of vans and ripping families apart. Sure, a few days before I took to the bed, I’d been protesting downtown. My group had been tear-gassed, surrounded by the LAPD and the National Guard, seen people beaten and shot with rubber bullets, and flash banged. I had walked away from it feeling a bit shaken, but not incapacitated. I even went out to dinner afterwards.

I could handle all that, couldn’t I?

Apparently not. Something new had crept into my nest of snapping, writhing, biting fears. Sheer terror. And the terror I felt was specific and new.

They/It was coming for me. That was the switch. I had never, never felt that vulnerable in my life. And not in a Brené Brown-putting-yourself-out-there kind of way. But in a you-don’t-want-to-be-stuck-next-to-me-in-a-foxhole (unless you want me clinging to you, throwing up on your neck and pooping in my pants) kind of way.

Some of you are already ahead of me by now. Some of you already know that the relative safety I have felt all my life is an illusion. You probably already knew about the sleeping-bag too. But if you are like me: white, straight, healthy, able, relatively attractive, college-educated it’s a fucking revelation. And I’m embarrassed that it took so long for me to see it.

On reflection, the reasons for the terror are real and, well, terrifying. The structure, let’s say the United States, like all structures is like Plato’s shadows on the wall. We only know what we see. And until Trump got into office, I had gone about the task of creating my own happiness really successfully. As an artist, I skirted having to buy a house or enter into too many bourgeois pissing contests with the Joneses. I didn’t run in a world where the label on my purse or the car I drove mattered a damn. I needed a thing to carry stuff in and a thing to get me around. My husband and I, and later my children, lived very simply in a two-bedroom rented apartment with worn carpets. We had an often-battered used car and sent our kids to public schools. For the most part, it suited us – gave us room to devote to acting and writing and we got to spend a LOT of time with our children. There were low times, not saying there weren’t – but on the whole, I landed in that bed, shivering like a fevered child, because for the first time in forever I didn’t feel ultimately safe. I had believed that Social Security and Medicare and our modest union pensions would ensure that we wouldn’t burden our children and that we’d close out our days living just as modestly as we always had in some adorable town in Ireland or Canada or Mexico or France.

I also believed in the inherent good will of humanity.

But no longer. And worse, I mean this – it also began to dawn on me that if I spent the rest of my days grasping at ways to make myself feel safe again, what good was I to people who are less safe than me?

This country’s worship of wealth seems limitless. Quickly followed by a love of projecting a successful image. And it’s KILLING US. LITERALLY KILLING US. We elected a president because of it. We go into debt because of it. We choose our friends based on it. We endlessly post about it. I know I’m saying nothing new here – but this national obsession with wealth or the appearance of wealth is going to be our undoing. And by undoing, I mean total collapse.

Late Stage Capitalism, my friends. Everything has a price. Everyone has a price.

You see why I was in the bed. My brother calls me “Miss Doom and Gloom”.

And the personal terror I was feeling came from the absolute certainty that no one is going to help me when I need it. Social Security might be gone. Medicare, gone. And they (the ones running things) don’t give a flying fuck about me.

But certainty is a motherfucker. I know this because I have been wrong about so many things before. And it is this understanding that ultimately got me out of that bed. I don’t know what will happen. I can’t shiver and shake to the end of my days. I guess, technically I can – but I certainly don’t want to.

So in the end, you get out of bed. You start with small pleasures like this new truffle mayo I’ve discovered. You start with a phone call to a friend. You start by going to a museum in the middle of the day because you created a life with a flexible schedule. You start by pausing to watch the sun come through the living room window, creating the most perfect slash of light across the painting your mother painted over half a century ago.

In the particular is the universal. James Joyce said something like that. Maybe, if I pay attention enough to feel pleasure in the simplest of things, I’ll start find more pleasure overall. I’ll stop the shaking, keep terror at bay, and maybe live a little. Be useful to someone; that would be nice.

God I hope so. It sounds simplistic, but it’s all I’ve got.