Nazis and Numbness and Emotional Support Cheese

and why we can’t let “Fuck Your Feelings” become our new national anthem

In the small town where I’m currently living, it’s mostly quiet. You hear cows more than anything else. But yesterday, calls of “Heil Hitler!” were an unwelcome addition from the 20 masked demonstrators waving Nazi flags just outside of where an Anne Frank performance was taking place.

These are likely the same people who, when Trump came to visit, dusted up a few white supremacist demonstrations here and over in the next town, too. 

I took in the most recent news while leaning against a wall eating my second mozzarella ball in just as many days, watching them play the same videos again and again, fuzzy and yet also so clear in their intent.

Most days, I go for a walk and pass a house with a flag that says Trump 2024 - Fuck Your Feelings in my country’s colors. It’s just a few houses down from the guy whose truck has a decal of a United States map with Fuck Off, We’re Full written inside the border, pushing against the edge to emphasize their point.

I wondered if either were among the demonstrators.

As I ate my ball of emotional support cheese and noticed a growing numbness spread through my body, I wondered why the people on the TV seemed surprised. I wondered why they weren’t connecting the dots, even though a rise in hate crimes occurred after the last time Trump was elected, too. Sure, there’s always an uptick in such crimes around elections, but isn’t it interesting that since 2015, actually, they’ve doubled?

The news switched to a new topic, and I walked upstairs. I sat in my desk chair and wished I had more cheese even though I had a stomach ache. I paused. Breathed. Realized it wasn’t about the cheese. Not really.

It was about not wanting to face the growing sorrows of the world that continue to arrive as unwelcome, masked visitors. Day after day after day.

I picked up my phone and texted my friend:

there were nazis in howell yesterday protesting an Anne Frank event and I’m eating snacks, and by snacks I mean an entire mozzarella ball, like the really long ones, not the round ones

I then texted her a beautiful photo of the moon with some tree limbs as a way to soften the text a little and remember beautiful things, too.

After some back-and-forth and more photos with moons and talk of cheese and sorrow, I feel different. I guess I just, feel. Some connection, some warmth, some sadness.

And then, it’s followed by gratitude. Weird, right? 

But maybe not? 

Because if I—if we—don’t feel, then we can act inhumanely. We can excuse just about any horror, especially when we’re also getting clobbered with Othering messaging nonstop. We can watch people commit hate crimes or be murdered or separated from their children and traumatized and just shrug it off unfeelingly and scroll to a puppy video because the motto of the moment is literally Fuck Your Feelings.

But by fucking our feelings, by ignoring or demonizing them or practicing other ways of non-feeling (including giving in to the endless, strategic dehumanizing messaging), we opt out of what it even means to be human. To be a feeling, living, breathing, aware being.

I’m grateful for my grief because it means I’m still human.

It means my body and mind are still communicating and able to hold space for it all.

And then, sometimes not.

That’s when I eat a shit ton of cheese or watch something mindless, because sometimes, it is too much. Sometimes, we need a break. Sometimes, we absolutely need to back off from feeling the weight of everything all at once and binge-watch Bridgerton for the third time (…this year).

Sometimes, shutting down protects us temporarily and may even be life-saving.

But we can’t stay that way for long without it taking some kind of toll, one way of another. We have to find ways to keep coming back—to ourselves, to each other, to our humanity.

The day after the election, I couldn’t get out of bed for an hour, wading in the gunky depths of dread and paralysis (which even my snoring blue pitbull couldn’t touch). The only thing I could think to do was text a friend and ask if we might co-host a grief container that night, to which they replied yes, and also:

We were made for these times.

I smiled when I read it. I felt a pang of warmth, like a hand on my back. A reminder. Because We Were Made for These Times was the name of a book we’d read by Kaira Jewel the year before in a reading group I made up (because I wanted a place to feel my feelings). It’s a small yet powerful guide on ways to meet life’s challenges with wisdom, resilience, and ease.

It’s hard to imagine the ease part right now, but I do know that that night, when almost 30 people had RSVPed to a grief gathering we put together in 8 hours, we all faced our lives head-on by sharing and processing our grief and letting it transform us instead of letting it destroy us or shut us down—to a painful experience, yes, but also to all else that is good, all that is kind, and all that is real.

That hour was so powerful, and the need was clearly so great, that we decided to continue freely offering these gatherings weekly on Wednesdays.

If you, too, need a space to grieve and connect, come join us from 7-8:15 pm EST by registering here. We’ll be leading them through December 18th.

Whether it’s grief or anger or both or something else that feels too big or too much, consider the following words by Kaira Jewel, and then come meet us in a place where you can show up as you are and witness others doing the same, without judgment.

“Once mindfulness recognizes anger, it begins to accept it and give it space. We open to our experience of anger and allow it to be here. We generate compassion for ourselves, recognizing anger is a part of us so we don’t want to reject or judge it. However, accepting anger doesn’t mean we give it freedom to cause destruction.”

-Kaira Jewel Lingo, We Were Made for these Times

May we continue to find ways of reminding each other that we were made for these times, and that we don’t have to do this alone.

With care,

Katie

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