​Horcruxes

The election feels like a long time ago from this side of the holidays.  The initial shock has worn off, but I don't feel any better about it.  It took me a couple weeks to get my head above the waters of post-election malaise.  I managed to keep my hope intact all the way through election night by completely ignoring all news in every form.  I had a great night sleep.  Then I woke up the next morning, heard the news, and cried a lot.

For me the hardest part about the national result is seeing just how many people thought it was a good idea to vote for that guy despite knowing exactly who he is and what it would mean.  I already knew the rich and powerful would rather I didn’t exist, but they were mostly faceless shadows of capitalism.  Now I know the people trying to take away my rights are by and large just regular folks trying to get by and live normal lives.  And those people blame people like me and people I love for their wretched unfulfilling lives instead of blaming the jerks who actually create and maintain the economic and environmental situation we currently find ourselves in.

During the rest of November each idiot appointed to an important position was yet another reason the government will function even less well than it already doesn't quite function.  I can see clearly various aspects of my personal and professional life will become more difficult after January.  I am not looking forward to all the extra labor.  It’s already quite a lot of effort for me to just exist day after day.

I'm not sure exactly how to be in the world anymore.  When someone greets me with a polite “hi, how are you,” I can’t just say “fine” given the ever-present full bodied feeling of impending doom.  And I can’t assume most folks I encounter are alright after seeing that so many people prefer to persecute certain kinds of people rather than work through their own internalized bullshit so we can all have nice things like healthcare, housing, and human rights.

I have leaned-in to self-care and community organizing as an antidote to my despair.  I have also made time to remember that our local election results were pretty great.  I’m looking forward to seeing how the new city council structure plays out.  I’m grateful to live in the place I do and I feel a whole lot less safe visiting people I love in certain other parts of the country.  I am coping by expressing my support for justice and care causes much more loudly.  And of course I’m noticing things, making connections, and writing about it.

Sometimes a phrase emerges that perfectly describes a particular experience or cultural phenomenon.  Unfortunately sometimes the person who brings us that perfect phrase is a deplorable human being, as is the case with the term horcrux.  In the seven-part teenage wizard series written by the notoriously TERFy English transphobe, the villain splits his soul in an attempt to reach immortality.  He hides each soul shard in a container called a horcrux, which protects the bit of soul outside his body.

It seems to me that many Americans have created their own emotional horcruxes.  Not by the act of murder as in the book series, but by an equally soul-splitting act: dehumanizing others.  In order to treat a fellow human being as less than human, you must give up a little bit of your own humanity.  This is a well documented consequence experienced by people working as soldiers, prison guards, and the like, most famously revealed in the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971.

Conservative ideology and colonization have disincluded many ways of being human and marked them invalid, uncouth, or evil.  But a bunch of those black, brown, queer, trans, fat, feminist, disabled or otherwise liberated people keep existing and persisting and going to therapy.  We keep healing and remain as living evidence of the abuse and neglect we survived.  And that means the perpetrators of all that abuse can’t go serenely about their lives without any reminders of the harm they caused.  Which is a good thing because when we hurt each other the only way for everyone to move forward healthfully is through accountability.

When one person has abused another (accidentally or on purpose), the fallout can go a couple different interpersonal directions.  If the abuser takes accountability, they can seek repair and assist the other person’s healing journey.  This is the best version.  If the abuser does not accept responsibility for their words and actions, there can be no repair.  When I have witnessed or experienced an abuser refusing accountability, that also often results in the abuser wanting to completely remove the abused person from their lifescape.

Once abuse is identified and the recipient demands a different dynamic in order to continue the relationship they become living evidence of past misdeeds.  Someone who is not interested in making amends and would rather forget they were cruel or pretend it never happened can't have a person around who was there and who knows they did.  Slather on some perfectionism culture and it all goes down hill: if you can never be wrong, then when you are you must disguise it.  And if there are people who were there and can tell the story, then you have to make those people wrong instead.

In broader society it seemed like we had made some progress when President Barack Obama was elected.  As with every time we see a first that shouldn't have to be monumentous it felt like a solid step in the right direction worthy of celebration.  Unfortunately the backlash was like woah.  An inoffensive leader every which way you considered him, President Obama was supposed to be a breath of fresh air in the Washington halls of power.  But short-sighted and self-interested politicians on "the other team" made it their mission to stand directly in his way no matter how much their constituents would have benefitted from his policies.

Then came the orange menace and made everything louder and ruder and completely wrecked any guise of decorum.  Now it’s so bad that the mental gymnastics required to justify support of such a horrific rich-guy-turned-politician have become the conservative horcrux.  In the book series, one professor explains the horcrux is possible because “killing rips the soul.”  Dehumanizing another person (or entire group of people) also rips the soul.  The orange believers have done some truly fucked up things to create their horcruxes and they are not about to stop over the next presidential term.  Their souls are torn to shreds.

It is possible for someone who has created a horcrux to put their soul back together, but it requires remorse.  “You have to really feel what you have done” and in the series it is said that most people die of the pain.  The further down the path of dehumanizing others the more work it is to come back.  But it's still worth it.  I don't believe there is ever a point of no return from hurting your fellow human beings.  You may have to spend the rest of your life rebuilding what you destroyed, but that's better than continuing to make it worse.

Before the election I thought there was a small group of very wealthy and powerful people who wanted me and people like me to stop existing.  I thought most regular people were only going along with harmful policy because they had been duped by the snake oil salesperson in orange.  I thought most regular folks alive right now wanted equality and liberty and justice for all, even if they didn’t understand the systemic reasons why we don’t have those things currently.  Then the votes were counted on Tuesday.  And now I have to ask you all to identify your horcruxes and do the work to resolve them.  Make yourself whole.  Help others heal themselves back to wholeness.  That's the only way forward.

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Information and Inspiration

• TicTok: sweeper698 - 11-7 Its been a rough week.
• Al Jazeera: Donald Trump’s motley cabinet is getting a bum and a dumb rap
• Instagram: alokvmenon - Grief and the Gender Binary
• The Mend Project: Holding Abusers Accountable While Maintaining Safety For Victims: The Accountability Model of Courage
• The guardian: ‘This is not time for retreat or apathy’: Black women dissect Harris loss
• The Audre Lorde Project: Breaking Isolation: Self Care and Community Care Tools for our People