A Devilish Escalation

Hello friends. I write to you from my couch, in my pajamas at 2 p.m. on a Saturday, under a blanket, with a migraine. It’s a beast - so far it has blasted through my daily medication Topamax, and the Rizatriptan I took yesterday because I could tell I had one breaking through - and even the Benadryl I took before bed because I could feel I still wasn’t okay. I was in agony all night and did the barely-sleeping “bed hustle” - then got up to drive my daughter to self-defense. In my pajamas. She did not mind, it’s not like I got out of the car.

Maybe I should try a couple of Tylenol.

Some guy on insta posted this very hilarious thing pretending to be the CEO of Auntie Faw which I’m splitting into two words and spelling weirdly because god knows if I’m already on lists somewhere (likely) - and he was telling everyone HQ was shutting down and they should come get their things. People in the comments were also funny, they were asking about what would happen to their 401k’s and if anyone had Janice-from-Accounting’s potato salad recipe. But part of me was worrying people were going to believe it, and think it was an actual organization, and not a word that means “being against fascism” which is a good thing to be against.

My migraine is probably just the stress from the fall of democracy, I’m sure I’ll be fine soon. Or maybe it was the guy who messaged to tell me he was “unfollowing” from my fb yoga business page because I was talking about politics. I guess he didn’t get the memo that I am now responding to people who feel the need to tell me they are unfollowing with pithy remarks so I can create an anthology.

“Okay, but I’m keeping that tapestry we bought in Mexico!”

Let him ponder that for a minute.

I was too tired to say that everything is politics - the way the food gets to your plate, whether you can afford health insurance, if your neighbors are afforded equal protection under the law - it’s all politics. Politics is another way of saying “your philosophy in action” - the way you think the world should be - that’s what you’re voting for when you cast your ballot.

So yeah, if you’ve been practicing yoga for a while, I sure hope you care about whether people are being harmed, and if a person who engaged in a heck of a lot of hate speech is being lionized, and if the president is declaring war on states in his own country…and also comics, LOL! It’s not just a thing you do on your mat before you go eat a kale salad at a restaurant - where the person who puts the salad in front of you could be hauled off by an unidentified masked man, thrown into an unmarked van, and lost - as in vanished. Yeah, you should care, sorry if your yoga teacher forget to mention that part.

I lost a treasured friend because he’s gone to the dark side, and I know I’m taking that hard because I don’t let people in easily, and I don’t let them go easily, either. Goodbyes are my least favorite thing, so my head is exploding and my heart is bruised and battered, but I’ve been through worse and I’ll be fine.

I was just texting with my friend Kate, and I told her I started reading an article this morning about a medication-resistant fungus that’s sweeping the country and prevalent in California and can be fatal - and I stopped reading. As in, I couldn’t tell you the name or the symptoms or what to watch out for because there didn’t seem to be a way to avoid it except to try to stay out of the hospital, which yes - especially if you don’t know how or if you’ll be able to afford health insurance in January. I don’t need to know there’s a fungus among-us.

Kate said the murder hornets must be queueing up about now, and I said frogs falling from the sky in 3…2…

I missed the podcast recording that would have gone with The Devil’s in the Details last weekend because I was moving my son into his first apartment as he starts his second year of college. So, I did a mashup episode that combined themes from that essay, and this week’s essay, Escalation, thus - A Devilish Escalation. The themes work together, and this episode is about the events that shape us in early childhood.

Those events affect the way we feel about our place in the world, our impact on the people around us, whether we feel free to express ourselves, the roles we play in the family system - and how all of that soil we grow in does not have to define us, but it does lend context if we’re trying to understand why we are the way we are.

It’s also essential to consider if you’re trying to liberate yourself from thoughts, feelings and tendencies that lead to heartache. I shared about some of my own “origin stories” and also how I stopped repeating patterns that caused me a lot of pain.

It’s about gaslighting and hypocrisy and how exhausting it is to be on the receiving end of that stuff, especially if you grew up with it. It’s about how scared I am about where we are right now, and how sad.

In any case, I’m going to “take Rufus to the backyard” - I just remembered that’s what helped the last time I had a really bad migraine. That’s the problem with pain like this, it makes it hard to think.

Sending you love, friends. Watch out for falling frogs.

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