And on top of it all I don't know how to just *recover* anything. I feel like I'm standing on the edge and it's taking all of my effort to keep from falling off, forget about making headway. I'm exhausted and I don't know how to make it better.

Like yes, I get it, my trans ass is on the firing line at the moment. Good times. I'm just trying to survive as best I can right now. z.z Work's being difficult now; after two and a half years they finally decided that a laptop that I have admin privs on was a bad idea so that's apparently on me

This is awfully coldly said, but what I'm *feeling* is a gross amount of shame and guilt when someone tells me I've gone over a boundary, and then I retreat hard. The guilt likes to stay around, so it'll keep me pulled away for a while. I'm a bit messed up about it all, apparently.

Not a request for attention or sympathy, just me trying to say 'hey something's up'. It wouldn't be useful right now one way or the other because all the crap that's going through my head feels both right and logical, and if it weren't that I was aware of the depression right now I'd just run.

I don't know the exit condition, honestly. I don't know how this stops. Authoritarians tend to not give up power, and when it's threatened, lots of heads roll first. All I can do is say that suffering is going to be the coin this country functions on for a long while, and it sucks.

And everyone, liberal and conservative alike, will simply point at those under them and say 'at least we're not that bad off' even as they struggle to make it from month to month. Isn't that what's currently going on, after all? It will just become more and more people saying it.

I don't exactly have a lot of hope for the US in the next decade. Authoritarian regimes do not prosper on the whole; they serve only those with power to consolidate it at the expense of everyone else. They've been subsisting on white supremacy here for as long as this has been a country.

That's my personal concerns, though: you'll also see the rollback of diversity incentives across the board, undoing the work put in for the past 70 years for racial equity. The old tricks of redlining and such will come back into play, because all the tools to stop bad actors will just stop.

So why am I rambling with all of this? I don't exactly have a lot of hope for the upcoming election in this country. In all honesty, I'm probably going to lose my health care as federal agencies are instructed to not engage in trans supportive care because 80 years of use is deemed 'experimental'.

And the old arguments will rise up. "Think of the people that won't be saved if we do something now." "It's your fault; if you weren't so greedy for rights we wouldn't have lost." "You shouldn't have pushed for more; you chased away voters." Our suppression is always somehow our own fault.

I mean, don't get me wrong here. With conservatives in power, liberals won't do anything meaningful to prevent the pain. They'll file court cases, of course, they'll click their tongues in disapproval, but at the end of the day, the politicians and their supporters will look down on minorities.

And there's no shortage of people there willing to enact those principles. So what I'm afraid of, at the end of the day: that the tribalism shepherded by both sides of the majority political system will backfire on the only ones who aren't for making life difficult for minorities.