The black dog

I haven’t posted on this blog for a while, at least not in length. This is partially down to our family moving home, but also that I’ve wanted to write about a particular topic, and once struck the bell cannot be unrung. Others have been braver than I, and shared their own struggles, but it’s taken me quite some time to be ready to share my own.

I’ve suffered with depression for as long as I can remember. It has nearly cost me life more than once. For a long time it was more of a constant in my life than anything else.

My earliest memories of it are as a weight that hung on me that I couldn’t shift. It’s common to confuse depression with sadness, but one might as well confuse climate with weather. I felt happy (sometimes excitedly so) while still feeling that cold ball in my chest pulling me down.

My mind twisted itself around the problem. Why did I feel this way? Along with being both aware of my own exclusion from social life in school, and completely unaware of what was causing it, I started to believe that there was something *off* about me at a much more fundamental level than suffering an illness.

There’s a page from the comic Supreme Power that struck a chord.

I took the pain that I felt as a guide. I had to try to get rid of it, and anything that helped me forget it was worth pursuing. I didn’t fall into substance abuse or the like as some people have but, at its worst, I hoped that relationships might fix the problem—because even if I didn’t accept myself, at least I’d know that someone else did. Given that this is too much to expect someone else to solve, things never worked out, and when they failed I fell back into the pit. I was certain that they finally saw the flaw in me, that I still couldn’t identify, and ran from me.

I asked friends for what was wrong with me, and they told me that there was nothing wrong with me that wasn’t wrong with a lot of people. But I “knew” that I wasn’t right. That I needed to change something fundamental about my nature. And I could never figure out what it was, so I could never fix it. So what to do?

Once I found myself on the edge of a roof terrace recalling every single step that brought me there, but having no idea why I would do so. It took a great exertion of will to pull myself back. It took medication and the enormous help of my now wife to get me to the point where I could function properly.

The only fundamental problem I had was in accepting that this is an illness.

If any of this seems familiar to you, please seek help. I have a life now I would never believe living before my illness was treated. I still have depression, but it’s managed. Speak to your doctor and try find something that works for you.

Deeper horror still

At a rally this week, Trump supporters chanted the obviously racist “send her back”, mirroring Trump’s own racist tweets on Omar and other congresswomen of color.

But I want you to look carefully at the video. Specifically, in the bottom right. A young girl stands behind the president and, as the chant begins, you can see her mouth along.

This is chilling. I don’t particularly blame the girl (her being so young), but to see such a repugnant wave of bigotry be mimicked by a child is deeply unsettling.

I’ve been feeling sick in my stomach, ever since those tweets and the ensuing shitfest that has been their defense. This is the America of slavery, Jim Crow, and the internment camps, still living and still strong in 2019.

TERF

There's been a lot done over the years to advance the rights of trans people over the world, and this is on the whole a good thing. Trans people attempt suicide at rates far exceeding the population at large. LGBTQ young adults have a 120 percent higher risk of reporting homelessness compared to youth who identified as heterosexual and cisgender. Trans people deserve dignity, respect, compassion, and fair treatment under the law. The Trump administration has been working against this on many levels, proposing to repeal protections that prevent doctors from denying trans people general medical care on the basis of them being trans.

It is undeniable that trans rights need protecting. What is not certain is how that might be best achieved, and I’m concerned about a roadblock here.

Many who are agitating for trans rights insist that one should use a person’s preferred pronouns and current name, and will claim that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men”. While the pronouns and names are matters of ordinary politeness, the last points cause me discomfort and I have yet to be convinced of their accuracy.

For most of my life, the terms “man” and “woman” meant “adult male” and “adult female”, respectively, and I had no particular prompt to consider otherwise until recent years. But here is where the roadblock exists: I’ve found myself hesitant to discuss this, out of a fear of being labelled transphobic or a TERF. Conversations about this on Twitter appear polarized to say the least, and so this fear seems a reasonable one.

Here are my questions:

• If gender is a social construct, why is self-identification sufficient? Surely one’s gender is a function of both society at large and the individual, and not something that a person has sole agency over?

• Why (for example) are trans men part of the group “men” (which contains cis men and trans men) instead of some new superset, keeping “cis men” as “men”?

• The idea of “trans” seems to assume a gender binary instead of a wider set of categories. Why is this?

I am not making any particular claims as to what is true here, but I wonder: where can such a discussion can be had in good faith? Honest ignorance should not be inescapable.

Obviously, there are plenty of bad-faith pricks out there, and it is not the responsibility of anyone to educate me. But both the idea of staying ignorant of this, or pretending to believe something (instead of simply not knowing) for the sake of avoiding confrontation, are repellant. I suspect I am not alone in this.

The warning light that is fear

I read a review of an old episode of The Leftovers today. Of the many things that struck me in the piece, what stood out most was this paragraph:

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Ripley is the only human being to get on her ship at the end of “Alien”; She is alone, but the ghosts come with her. (And that movie is one of my all-time favorites not for showing that Ripley was brave, but for showing that she was afraid, so very afraid. And she did it all anyway.)

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Of course, Ripley was brave. The flaw in this analysis is the confusion of bravery with a lack of fear. But to be brave is to overcome one’s fear—and fear is not intrinsically bad.

I've been accused of bravery at times when I was not afraid. Sometimes for something as banal as buying a woman I liked flowers. Another time because, after seeing a dog run over by a car and killed, I dragged it off the quiet road so it would not be subject to further indignity in death.

In one of the many times of recklessness on a bicycle (and one of the few on a public road), I cycled between a bus and a flat-bed truck. As we turned a corner, the bus and truck moved closer to one another until there was less than a foot separating me from both of them. I was surprised, in real danger, and totally without fear. I remember telling some friends about this, and being accused of boasting about my own bravery, but my intent was instead to tell them of my worry that there was something fundamentally broken about my fear response.

We treat fear as this thing more than it is. We berate ourselves for feeling it. But fear is a valuable thing. Ripley was right to be frightened of the xenomorph. Imagine how invincible or delusional she would have to be to not fear a creature that could kill her in an instant.

In our own lives we have much to be fearful of. A car might knock us down as we cross the road. A live wire might fry us if we touch it. A hot pot might scald us. Fear can serve as a useful tool, an instinctual evaluation of one’s circumstances that forces our consciousness to further evaluate our next course of action.

And if you think of it, what is there to praise if bravery is simply the absence of fear? You might as well praise someone for having a nose as for being fearless. It is no accomplishment. But bravery is to take that fear and to say “you will not stop me!”

When I see this young girl stand up and plead her case for her own humanity, and I see her fear but still she speaks, there she shows her clear and commendable bravery.

Sometimes the warning light can malfunction, and we can be afraid of things that are of no threat. But that does not eliminate either the value of fear generally or the bravery of overcoming those specific fears. We give each other such a hard time for being afraid that we miss the countless acts of bravery we and others achieve in spite of it.

A neighbor’s flag

In September, my family and I moved from Dublin to a town in Connecticut. It’s been a mostly positive experience here, though I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the heat or the mosquitos. A friend from South Carolina thought this was amusing but, if her description of her home state is accurate, South Carolina is a dense, blisteringly hot fog where the small part of the air that isn’t water vapor is instead those irritating bloodsuckers. She may be exaggerating.

Our neighbors have been universally welcoming. Some of them have bumper stickers on their car (or door), and the occasional banner for a local political candidate. This is another change. Perhaps on game days (match days to the Irish) the odd person might hang their team colors from their windows, or put up a poster in their window. Otherwise, homes remain silent as to the loyalties of their occupants. Here, on the streets that surround our own, flags for various college and high school teams hang permanently from doorways, joining the ubiquitous stars and stripes.

One flag surprised me, at least in my reaction to it—a large Trump 2020 flag, hanging off a house a few streets over.

I won’t ascribe motives to the person who put up the flag. It’s certainly a brave thing to do in Connecticut and, for all I know, this person could be a prankster trying to get someone’s goat. Or they may be entirely sincere. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the flag, MAGA hats, and other signs and symbols of the Trump administration, remind me that I am not entirely welcome in this country.

I moved to the United States with my American wife and our two Irish-American children. Though my dealings with USCIS and the State Department were always polite and professional, processing times for immigrant visas rose sharply under the Trump administration. These processing times are also somewhat misleading—there were many other delays, additional processing times at different departments, etcetera. For example, there was a gap of five weeks between USCIS stating that the application was sent to the State Department, and the State Department recognizing it as received. All in all, it took 13 months from the submission of our application to receiving my visa.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association has characterized these delays as “crisis-level”, and they seem set to continue with the shuttering of 24 USCIS offices. Despite claiming to support legal immigration, the Trump administration seeks to dramatically reduce it. Famously, the administration rejected a 25 billion dollar funding deal for the wall, with protection for DACA recipients, because it did not include “massive cuts to legal immigration”.

The positions and actions of the administration here betray a deep distaste for immigrants, legal or otherwise. I don’t think that every Trump supporter feels this way, but I do know that they don’t care enough to severe their ties. And to wear a MAGA hat on your head, or to fly a Trump flag outside your home, is to proclaim at least your acquiescence to ostensibly racist policies.

I can only imagine how much less welcome those immigrants with darker skin than mine, or who are undocumented, must feel.