the personal is political

Some day, somewhere, somehow, I will live in a world where I don't wake up hacking up a lung every morning, and where I don't continue to hack up a lung throughout the day.  It'll happen.  I have faith like that.

In the meantime, aside from growing increasingly grumpier, life progresses at a happy pace.  Work has entered a slow patch, which means I fill my days with catching up on all the shit I had to throw to the side in the breakneck race of summer, to try to at least come up even when the next frenzy hits.  Coming up even is an impossible dream in the legal field, but everyone needs their castle in the air to keep them going, and catching up at work is mine.

Something lovely, something incredible and fierce, is happening, these days, a phoenix from the ashes of the hopes that died when a minority of Americans elected a lunatic head of a lunatic party and started to dismantle our democracy.  Women are done.  We are done with being assaulted.  We are done with being disbelieved.  We are done with being belittled, discriminated against and talked down to.  We are done with being silenced.  We are done with being boxed in.  We are done with being powerless.  I am watching a transformation happening in which I take a sort of exhausted, enraged pride.  It would have been so much better under Hillary.  But we're still making it happen.  Even under these increasingly inauspicious circumstances.

The personal empowerment is exhilarating.  I am seizing everything I can, without compromise.  For the first time in my life, I would rather be single than give up one modicum of my agency and personal power.

The personal is political.