Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Faithless - 'Insomnia' (1996)

I need to sleep. I can't. It has been weeks or longer since I have been able to sleep. I have been having panic attacks for months, some that go all night. They have subsided in their ferocity for the most part, but in their wake comes a unceasing restlessness that gives me shallow, broken sleep at best, getting worse by the day as the United States election approached. I looked forward to just being able to put the anxiety behind me, but now I don't know how I will ever sleep again. I am a disabled person who is living in a Days Inn, one who has just recently come out as queer/nonbinary and who desperately needs access to medical marijuana which is not yet available where I live. I am older, 42 years old, and feel the most vulnerable I have ever felt in the wake of the worst year I have ever lived through so far. I lived through 8 years of Bush II, in anger and fear and despair and frustration. That was before my chronic illnesses took what was left of my fire and vitality. Part of me wants to cease to, exist this morning because the challenges ahead, both personal and macrocosmic seem too great to surmount. I feel an animal need to leave Pennsylvania and to go somewhere like California or Oregon (or maybe Massachusetts as a distant third) in order to gain access both to a community which recognizes the validity of non-CisHet Lives and which can offer legal marijuana. These things are of course under immediate potential assault from a Trump/Pence Administration. These are people who will ramp up the Federal War On Drugs and engage disastrously with the LGBTQIA Community at best, at worst using Federal monies for medicalized reeducation camps for gay & queer people. My ex-partner and kids live here and I am beyond broke, living on help from my mom, a Trump voter who would not possibly begin to understand the existential threat his candidacy has plunged millions of people. I am white. I am able to 'pass' as male. I don't have it nearly as difficult as people who don't have the privilege I enjoy, who are in the crosshairs of a dangerous and virulent White CisHet Christian Nationalism, people who are immigrants, who are Muslim, who are black and brown. I want to fight. I have no choice. I feel scared and alone. I was already facing the most difficult year of my entire life when this has come to pass and now everything feels just that much harder. I honestly don't know what to do. I want to sleep. I need to sleep. I can't.

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