Survival Course

some notes on what helps

Jan 21, 2025

I was raised by a real live malignant and delusional narcissist. Let me be clear that I don’t mean the "my mother was sometimes unkind or failed to be understanding so therefore I’m using the currently trendy word and calling her a narcissist" variety but the "I remove the doors from rooms so you cannot refuse to allow me access to you" kind and the "I'm waking you up at 4 in the morning because I've just spoken with a entity from the spirit realm who told me all the things you need to be doing so you can stop being such an irredeemable fuckup" kind. The kind whose solipsistic Sturm und Drang held the family hostage, together and separately. The kind that leaves a person with a bit of a permanent limp.

This taught me a few things about a few things, some of them extremely applicable in this particular historical moment.

I know about having someone sabotage your ability to depend on rules, habits, customs, even the meaning of words. I am very familiar with having my own history rewritten and with being threatened with retaliation and violence if the revisionism was questioned.

I spent much of my life having to both endure and resist a version of reality in which everything I did or said was liable to be appropriated, deliberately misrepresented, dismissed, or denied, depending on the whims of the moment. (And people wonder why I have a Ph.D. in history. I’m in it for the receipts.)

I spent much of my life with a backdrop of suicidal ideation because the only way I could figure out to truly escape that horseshit -- which coexisted with my own neurochemical dysfunction, which it turns out is untreatable -- was to go for The Swim That Needs No Towel. I haven’t done so, as it turns out, but it’s been close.

That parent is now dead and I have had a bit of time to find out who and how I am in a world where that is not my intimate reality. I consider myself fortunate.

I will be 56 next month and for the second time, a person who bears many striking functional resemblances to the parent who almost succeeded in killing me has been installed as the leader of the country I live in. It is worse this time, for all the reasons that it is. If you've been conscious for more than about an hour and a half during the last five years I trust I don't have to draw you a diagram to explain why.

Four things I can tell you about what helps in this kind of moment, thanks to so many of the previous ones:

One: Resistance is not futile. It comes in many, many forms and it may not always be public-facing or look like the kinds of public actions others are taking. You know what resistance you must mount for your own survival and so that you can help other people. You know when it’s working. Place your audacious and necessary trust in this certainty.

Two: Insist on thriving. Refuse to merely survive, to scrape by, to be reduced to the bare minimum of who or what you are. I have decided to be a kudzu vine growing up through the crack in the pavement and if the slab breaks into rubble that’s okay because it gives me more things to tangle my roots around while I keep on growing and twining my way into the world.

Three: Protect your patch. Chaos in the world beyond your doors gets amplified by chaos inside them. The resources you have to cope with what the outside world throws at you are built in private. Do what you need to do to reduce the chaos in your household, in your head, and in your circles. (Let me help with that? It’s part of the reason I wrote a book about housekeeping in spite of it all.) It is the essence of self-defense.

Four: The work that helps you persist is crucial. My work has kept me here and kept me moving forward and I continue to do it and will continue to do it. I am a working dog by nature; a dear friend refers to me as a border collie and that’s not wrong. I welcome you to join me in this work I do here at Reasons Not to Quit and at Bluesky, and I would also be happy to join you in yours. The work that helps you persist keeps the world turning for all of us.