I did a thesaurus search on the word “tired” for the title of this post because I knew tired wasn’t quite the right word but my brain wouldn’t work well enough to come up with anything more appropriate.
Other front runners: hackneyed, threadbare, knackered, bleary-eyed, bushed, haggard, weary… but when I hit exhausted, well that pretty much sums it up.
My Dad is alive and that’s awesome because 10 days ago the doctors were telling us that it wasn’t looking good. But he turned a few corners and, while he has a long recovery still ahead, he’s on the mend. His health hasn’t been great over the last few years but this was an unexpected emergency that no one could have predicted and the scramble to be with him, keep everyone updated on his condition, manage and negotiate visits, make decisions for him, track down his professional contacts, and, like, eat and sleep was more than I actually thought I could handle during a time of such uncertainty. Big shout out to my sister for being the only teammate I would be able to work with under such circumstances.
My brain has obviously been swimming with some intense thoughts, not just on life and death but on the re-emergency into a life that I haven’t spent much time engage with in recent years. While my Dad was busy staying alive, my sister and I have been swapping out staying at this house and taking care of the cats. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the hospital with him, and not doing a lot of the things that I have been focused on in recent years: gardening, being a parent, being frugal with money, etc. There’s nothing like an emergency situation to rip you from your dedicated focus and make you flail around in the loving embrace of capitalist culture while trying to stay afloat. The experience has reminded me that you really do need to be “emergency free” in order to be able to focus on opting out of capitalism.
It’s also the first time that I have interacted with cops in a long time. While they were pleasant enough to deal with, I suspect I (and my father) would have been treated differently if we looked different or if he lived in a different neighbourhood.
I also couldn’t help but feel overwhelm at all the moving pieces in the hospitals. All the staff with their specific positions and focuses, all the materials being used to save lives like drip medicines and disposible plastic gloves and automated patient beds and monitors and millions of other complex items that I’m sure I couldn’t even list if I tried. Intensive care units are the model of complex systems designs to manage chaotic situations and I found that I was completely overwhelmed by the complexity when we first arrived. I have a lot of big thoughts about that complexity and it’s necessity that I don’t think I’ve fully formed yet.
And then of course the major news from the US about the overturning of Roe by the supreme court. There’s a lot of big feels there and a lot of messaging out there that feels uncomfortable, both from an enby perspective and an anarchist perspective.
Katie Mae from Chatterbox Press brought up a great point in her stories that really resonnated:
The point isn’t that we shouldn’t take action, but that action like activism shouldn’t be necessary. All this energy should be about providing care, not fighting for the right to provide care.
I’ve nudged around in previous posts that my views around “rights” are different from the standard view and probably controversial. Controversial enough that I won’t dive in to deeply with this disaster so recent and my brain still so fried.
But I do spend a lot of time pondering the intersection of human rights, government imposition, availability and access, and personal responsibility.
More on that another time.
For now, though, if any friends or friends of friends or complete strangers need to come camping up in Ontario, just give me the word and I’ll come pick you up.