It’s Everything

I wrote this piece 3 days before Donald Trump’s Inauguration and, like the rest of this post, I had so many feelings that it was hard for me to actually finish it. In the coming months this will continue to be something I struggle with while working on my writing, but I love this blog and want to continue to write so the struggle will be mine to bare.

I haven’t written anything all year. No New Years blog, no end of year rant, it’s all just been nothing. Granted the year just started but I’m not suffering from a prolonged bout of writers block, something I’ve experienced before, but rather an inability to process the vast array of emotions going through my head in conjunction with the myriad of things going on in my personal life.

Of course I’m talking about President Elect Donald Trump. Every time I think I can write about something without commenting on the giant orange cloud looming above the American people I am reminded that everything ties back to it, and even the little triumphs in my personal life are minuscule to how big everything else feels right now.

I’ve even tried writing a whole blog post just about my feelings surrounding Trump and the Obama shaped hole left in my heart after the election. I tried, and I failed, to summarize in 2000 words or less what it has all meant for me being a young, black woman watching this all go down from behind the lens of someone our future President cares nothing about. I sit here and try to write and my brain stops, and just short circuits while an image of Donald Trump pops into the forefront of my mind with the words, “cannot compute” in bright bold SnapChat sized letters. It is the background noise to everything and I honestly can’t hear or make sense of anything beyond it.

Because I want to sit here and talk about moving my life into the city. I want to write about the sweet sweet lemonade I’ve made myself after the crazy disastrous lemons life handed me last year. I want to write about the insane commute and my attempts to start dating and cooking and writing again, but I can’t because all I, or anyone else, can think about is how close we are to pending doom and if that doesn’t suck the life right out of you than I don’t know what does.

I’ve wanted to be sensitive to the fact that there is just so much out there in regards to the emotion behind this election on both sides. While I’m a stanch Democrat, I don’t hate republicans, I don’t blame the people who voted for Trump and I can’t begin to understand the frame of mind one would have to be at to think putting DJT in charge of a whole country was a GOOD idea. I didn’t want to write about my disbelief or my shock or my anger because reiterating other peoples emotions is not a relief for me the way writing is suppose to be.

But really, what is there to say when you have so much to say? What is there to write when so much has already been written? All I do all day is think about how I can use my voice to speak up, but I’m at a loss for words and I’m just as emotionally drained as everyone else in the world right now.

And there are moments when I feel defiant and powerful and want to push through the noise and create real change; which is where my personal life somewhat intersects in all this. The foundation that defines who I am and where I want to go is so clear and so sturdy. I feel strong as a person but weak as an individual. I find myself crying intermittently throughout my week as I let the gravity of what’s happening wash over me. I keep thinking that the political landscape is playing in the background of my personal life when in reality, my personal life is playing in the background of something much much bigger, and I can’t ignore that.

And I want to so badly. I want to be that twenty something who just comments casually on the state of the world and gets fired up talking to distant relatives about the importance of Obamacare and then dives back into her phone world swiping away and taking Snapchats of myself with varying animal themed filters. That’s the world I intended to write about when I started this blog, and it’s also the one I’m still currently living in within a world seemingly going to hell.

And it’s all sad, and lonely, and happy, and exciting, and exhilarating, and disappointing, and infuriating, and inspiring, and hopeful, and hopeless, and everything in between. It’s heartbreaking, but filled with growth and promise but also terrifying and unstable with so many unknowns. It’s everything.

So that’s why I haven’t written in a while, and you know what, I may not for a long time. I will try to, of course, I will always try to be the honest and open me that I have always been when writing about my life in the context of LIFE. There will be stories of small personal victories along with big societal setbacks and it will be as described through my eyes, in this skin, in this time in my life.