So 2016 is over. If anyone is interested, let me recap my year of pain and he'll and sadness.
This year an abnormally large number of celebrities died. Most were just "oh that's sad, I feel badly for their lived ones". A few really mattered to me and made me sad, but didn't utterly shatter my wotprld. One in specific broke my heart beyond all measure more than any other.
But there were other deaths this year, not of celebrities, that gutted me more. A self loathing asshole shot up a nightclub and tried to blame it on Muslims and I list a dear friend among the over 50 killed. A warehouse nightclub was set on fire and I lost two more friends to the flames.
This year was my first full year of out living my only grandchild. I have still not quite figured out how to cope with that. I'm not sure I ever will. I know my mom has somehow figured out how to live her life with two of my brothers in urns in her closet. I'm not there yet. I had only just figured out how to get on with my life after losing my fiance and my stepson 11 years ago. I don't know how to move on from my grandson too.
This year I buried three rats and a big fluffy dog. I decided I will not accept anymore rescues unless the alternative is unthinkable, because I'm getting really tired of burying my furbabies.
This year someone I love but who was dating someone else, someone I have kept my feelings to myself about and just supported and been a shoulder for whenever I was needed, had their heart broken by an emotionally abusive gaslighting coward, and in my insecure paranoia as I've given them space and time to heal, I've begun to feel like they subconsciously blame me for the breakup and are beginning to slowly push me away. And I'm terrified to say anything about, both because I don't want to derail their pain by making it about my feelings, and because if I'm wrong and just being paranoid it would hurt their feelings. (Worse, if I'm not being paranoid and I'm right and I say something, they might confirm it and ask me to stop talking to them). I hate my anxiety and insecurity, making me all stupidly paranoid when I just want to be there for them and help them.
This year I suffered the fifth physical assault rooted in transphobia of my life, and the second in which a stranger felt my being trans justified using a fucking boxcutter on me.
This year a tantrum throwing buffoon bought an election in my neighbouring country and I am utterly terrified how much worse 2017 is going to be for my yank friends of colour, of queerness, and of varying genders, and for the rest of us who will be hurt by the aggressively stupid capitalist bigotry of president Babyhands. This year white bigots used that victory to justify open acts of racist violence. The new year will only get worse.
This year I watched the world only care when white people in France were murdered while ignoring thousands more brown people in Syria and Sudan and other places getting bombed and butchered and slaughtered. I watched people who never tave a flying fuck about homeless military veterans and queer youth before suddenly use them as an excuse why we shouldn't shelter brown foreign Muslim refugees. "Oh we can't shelter them, we need to worry about the veterans we suddenly care about!"
This year was absolutely horrible in so many ways.
And this coming year stands to be a whole fucking lot worse.
But at least this coming year my daughter is coming home. So I'm going to focus on that as best as I can and hope the rest sorts itself out through the activism of myself and everyone out there like me who refuses to shut up and ignore everything broken in the world that needs our voices to fix.
So happy new year. Never stop fighting for something better.
Not now. NOT EVER.
