Decompression.

It’s not hyperbole to say that a lot of us are feeling PTSD right now. That feeling that we don’t dare hope that things really will get better, because the last four years were so profoundly horrible. We’ve just escaped an abusive relationship, and can’t quite believe it’ll all be okay. We are afraid to feel hope, even for a second, because it might be taken away – it can’t really be over, can it?

I thought it was really amusing to see Lindsey Graham all in a huff, insisting that if President Biden wanted “unity” he could just pick up the phone and “stop this impeachment”! Lawdy, what a SNIT!

I know this was performance art for the base, because Graham’s not an idiot, and he certainly understood separation of the branches of government in the pre-Trump times. If anything equivalent had happened under Obama, he’d have been all indignant that the President would even DARE to interfere with Congress! He fucking knows better, but he’s still doing this shit. The stuff they have on him must be quite bad.

But that’s how crazy it got in four years. The idea that Biden could “do a Trump” and just treat Congress like his minions is now supposed to be accepted as the norm. Or maybe it’s just Lindsey, who spent four years as Trump’s lapdog. He must miss his master.

Watching the Inauguration I was struck by how large and loving the Biden/Harris/Emhoff families are, and also how I don’t ever need to learn any of their names unless I want to, because they will leave their parents/grandparents/aunts and uncles in DC to do their jobs, and they will go home to their normal adult lives. Nobody’s loser kids will be grifting off their parents’ positions. Though I do think Kamala’s stepdaughter (See? I’ve already forgotten her first name) may become somewhat of a fashion icon whether she wants to or not; the coat she wore got a rapturous response on Twitter.

I was overjoyed on Wednesday, dividing my time between the TV and my desk, and yesterday, we had a work team meeting online and we were all laughing and sharing favorite moments from the Inauguration, and we’d all stayed up too late to watch the fireworks. It was the first time we’d ever referred to anything remotely “political” in a work context, if loving a young poet and Lady Gaga’s performance and fireworks counts. None of us got much work done, and we laughed more on that call than we ever have. It felt joyful, and those calls never feel joyful.

Today the exhaustion hit me. This has been a long, hard slog, and the last two weeks were especially fraught, to put it mildly. I felt tired and irritable and had a hard time concentrating. I recognized this, because this is not my first time having to decompress from a situation where I felt tense all the time, hyper alert for the next bad thing.

Accordingly, I have declared this weekend Zero Responsibility Weekend. I will walk with an audiobook, bake cookies, read, knit while watching escapist something, and regroup. Decompress. The good guys won, and intelligent, experienced adults are back in charge. Everybody take a breath.