It is Time For Our Cockroach Era

Hello. Hi. It’s me. Hey. Howya doing?

Yeah, ME, TOO. (Sobs turn into maniacal laughing.) (Slowly transforms into The Joker.)

It was a tough year before this past Tuesday, to be honest. If someone had asked me, I would have easily marked it one of the most difficult ones of my personal and professional life.

My aunt died earlier this year. Her death was shocking in that particular way of those who have spent decades cheating their mortality. In her constant illness she seemed somehow interminable. Her husband, my uncle, often joked that she’d outlive us all.

Instead we buried her in early March.

This woman, who yelled at her neighbors when they tried to tell her homosexuality was a sin, who watched Fox News because she “wanted to know what her enemies were thinking,” was a wisp when she died.

“She’d wrung every ounce of life out of her body,” my cousin had said. It had nothing left to give. And so, stubbornly fighting death every step of the way, she went.

I still love her so much. That’s the part that gets me. She’s gone, and I love her, and it just keeps piling up in my chest, like that episode of I Love Lucy at the chocolate factory, until it finally overflows, and I find myself in the middle of someplace extremely public and inconvenient, sobbing under fluorescent lights. (A naked display of grief and devotion that, honestly, she would have loved.)

By the end of the month, Rand’s father would be gone as well, so suddenly that I find myself terrified anyone could go at any moment. My father-in-law died on Easter Sunday.

“He might come back,” Rand jokes. “There’s a precedent for Jews doing that.”

In the middle of all of this, my mother broke her back, my book came out, and The New York Times decapitated me. (No, really.) This was the image they used, alongside my author picture, which they seem to have modeled it after:

The author of the piece (a woman and a fellow blogger, apparently, which feels like a particular kind of betrayal) called me “loud and irrational”, criticized my reasons for not having children, and questioned why Rand loved me. (What this has to do with the quality of my writing, I am still unclear.)

In the summer, I went to Toronto for an author event, and met up with my friend Sarah. She’d had her own hell of a year, and we commiserated over dumplings. She has been, by her own admission, in something she described as “cockroach mode.”

“Just trying to survive,” she explained, “by whatever means possible.”

To be unkillable. Like the noble trash lobster.

The first time Trump was elected, my father was gravely ill. He died not long after, and I spent the next few weeks, months, hell, maybe it was several years (who, really, was counting, aside from Rand?) staring at my computer and doing … nothing. I just remember staring at the void of Twitter and cannot recall a single other thing I did. I know that other things happened. Life chugged on, in ways big and small. My youngest nephew was born during those strange, sad years; a chaotic cannonball of a human who jettisons himself off of furniture and straight into your heart. I met people who would become some of my closest friends. Also, I probably showered at least twice. Mostly, I was just trying to get through it.

But the beauty was there, even when I couldn’t see it. It’s so pervasive, so stubborn. Even after the biggest catastrophes, the sun still rises. We just don’t notice right away, because we are too tired to lift our heads.

Now Trump is going to be President again, something which is so absurd it would be laughable if it wasn’t so awful. An actual rapist whose own Chief of Staff warned that he lionized Hitler. A man who hates women, and people with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and People of Color, who has no respect for the rule of law, and who is about to be the most powerful man on the planet. It is truly a terrifying thing.

In the wake of all of that, and in anticipation of what is to come, it is okay to be tired and terrified and utterly ruined right now. If you need to go back to bed with an entire deep dish pizza, I will not judge you.

I simply have one request of all of you: survive.

It is time to be in cockroach mode. To keep going, by whatever means possible. When someone tries to stamp you out, avoid them with a swiftness and a scurry that will haunt their dreams. They think your existence is a scourge? Then the best way to spite them is to keep existing. People will tell you “You just need to get through four more years.” This is laughable, and incorrect. Fascism doesn’t last four years. But also: cockroaches have existed for 300 million years. They do not put a time limit on how long they need to survive, nor should you. If asked, the answer should be “As long as possible” and “Up to two weeks without my head.”

For some of us, survival may be easier. If you fall into that privileged group, consider using your energy to remind others that they are precious, and beautiful, and so, so loved. That if they left the earth, grief would drown those of us left scurrying across the wreckage without them.

Stay whole. Protect yourself, however you can. I do not care what you do. If you need to avoid the news and live in a cave, have at it. Be selfish. Be angry. Buy yourself things. Stop shaving. Eat a doughnut on the toilet. Scream in to the void. Stay hydrated. Take up yoga. Give up yoga. Watch videos of animals who are up for adoption. Go adopt all of those animals. I cannot say what it will take you get through. I don’t even know what it will take to get me through. But I know that you being here, you, whole and beautiful and alive and angry, helps. Get up everyday, feed yourself, tenderly care for the vessel that carries the inexplicable combination of biology and magic that makes you you. You do not need to be happy about it, but if you can find happiness in this absolute shit timeline, fucking revel in it.

This is no small task. It is an enormous thing to stay alive when your very government is actively trying to kill you. There will be days when you will feel like it is an impossible thing. When so much will be out of your control. It will feel insurmountable. We live in a world where simply being a different race, or being trans or queer or having a non-viable pregnancy means you could die. For a lot of people, surviving in this timeline is becoming increasingly difficult.

Truthfully, not everyone will.

In light of all of this, you are completely entitled to scream “FUCK EVERYTHING,” to throw your hands up in sheer exasperation because how the fuck are we here again, but worse. The person I love most in the world just told me he’s done with hope. You can’t be mired in grief unless you loved in the first place. This is the price we’re all paying. It absolutely sucks. Get angry. Be miserable. Roam around under a dumpster. Disappear into the floorboards when someone turns on a light. Maybe try Pilates.

I’m fairly certain cockroaches have seen some shit in the 300 megaanna they’ve existed. And they keep going, as interminable as time. They’ve outlasted kingdoms and empires. They will witness the heat death of the universe (now scheduled for sometime next spring). My request is a selfish one, and I guess that’s what I’m doing to get by: telling you how badly I need you here, with me. That I need you to survive, by any means possible because I would be so, so fucking lost without you. That you make the world better by your presence. That your mere existence is an act of defiance. That you, my sweet beautiful, broken-hearted weirdo, are a goddamn triumph.

It is time, my loves, to be in cockroach mode.