
A Letter to My Therapist
It’s obviously been a rough couple of days in terms of the news. I can’t help but think that — assuming nothing actually happens — we’ll remember this period the way our parents remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I have to say that doesn’t comfort me. Whenever they do a retrospective documentary, the line is always, “Most Americans never knew just how close we came to nuclear war.” And if we think we’re this close, then what do people inside government who know think? By way of a clue, Lockheed Martin reports that prime ministers and defence ministers across the world are asking it about their missile defence systems. Furthermore, reliable rumour says that in the lead-up to a nuclear war, the government would likely kind of slyly plant “how to survive” information into the news media, of the type that’s currently running on CNN with some regularity. (That said, there’s no reason they couldn’t have come up with that on their own — anything to fill the 24-hour news cycle!)
And of course, even if we avert this somehow (and heaven knows what that would even look like at this point; Trump’s idea of respect is that the world fear his mighty might, so he’s unlikely to quit sabre-rattling even for the sake of all humanity), there’s all sorts of other things to worry about, from the imminent possibility of an equally apocalyptic government under God’s Favourite Servant Mike Pence, to the decent likelihood that we will cook ourselves to death even as we achieve global peace and harmony (which historians judge unlikely — the peace-and-harmony part, not the climate change part).
Heck, the world is changing for the worse every day, and nobody seems to be interested in changing the trajectory. There must be happy people in power somewhere, who think this is all great, or there’d be louder noises to stop it. Really, what I’m hearing is a lot of Trump supporters cheering the world’s newfound “respect” for us — although, at long last, I’ve realized that they, like he, equate respect with fear. (Of course they do. You “respect” your daddy because your daddy has the belt, not because he’s worthy of it.) Now, that’s not the whole story — there’s some fun racism in there as well — but it’s a hunk of it. And that doesn’t even really touch on the role of religion… America has deep pathologies that it cheerfully refuses to do anything about.
As far as doing anything about it myself, I haven’t heard about an anti-nuclear march, or I’d go. My anxiety is through the roof; I went to bed at 7:30 and woke up at 2:00, and then stayed up till 4:00, worrying. (I did floss, though. Little victories.)
If there’s a single silver lining in this for me personally (again, assuming nothing really changes drastically), it’s that I’ve been given a little bit of insight into how I operate. I’m realizing that I’m obsessed with preparation — not in the “prepper” sense, I’m not panic-buying Chef Boyardee or stockpiling potassium iodide (more on that later), but I feel like I need to be prepared for any direction my life could take. In happier times, this manifests in my fear of finishing scripts without a complete outline (which, of course, I’m unable to complete, lest it be wrong). Now, it’s causing some serious aggravation, because I am understandably troubled by planning for the unthinkable.
That said, such planning belies an obsession with my desire for my life to go as planned. I still think: how would I get to Canada? Would there even be a Canada? Would it be worth it? Would writing be worth it, if no one was around to make my stories into films? Would I be useless? Would I have the guts to kill myself before it got really bad, or would I remain, planning to the end, trying to reorganize my life around radiation sickness, unable to choose death because there might be a chance of another, better outcome, somehow? Is that a form of optimism?
Planning does occasionally translate into achievement — I took that English test for emigration, after all. Other times, I don’t follow through on plans at all — I haven’t bought any potassium pills, even if maybe at this point that wouldn’t be paranoid… because I worry it would mean I was paranoid. (I also haven’t written jack in a couple weeks, apart from, as usual, these essays.) But I wonder if there isn’t a nugget of something in there that could help me — some way to believe I can achieve my dreams, but without requiring that I know the exact layout of the path ahead of time.
If we survive, that is.
