What's Taxing Me

And I don’t mean the filing deadline.

I’ve been trying to find the right word for what this moment feels like.

The specific, physical, cellular feeling of living inside this particular chapter of American history. The one where you wake up and reach for your phone and something new has been broken or threatened or taken, and you haven’t even had coffee yet.

The word is tax.

Not the filing deadline kind, which is today, BTW… hope yours was less painful than the country’s. I mean the other definition. The one that doesn’t get enough airtime:

A strain. A heavy demand. A burden.

That’s what this is. That’s what this administration is. An endless, relentless, deliberate tax on our attention, our energy, our nervous systems, our ability to think clearly about anything else. And I believe that’s not accidental. Overwhelm is a strategy. Paralysis is the point.

I refuse to be paralyzed. But some days, it’s a close call.

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I moved to the Las Vegas area last March, which means my activism looks different than it did in Portland, Oregon, where I lived for years. Portland has always had a certain infrastructure for resistance. You knew where to show up, who would be there, what the drill was, and the drills were frequent and large (though often blown way out of proportion or completely misrepresented in the media, but that’s another story).

Las Vegas is different. It’s not a place commonly thought of as Protest Central. We’re not really on anyone’s radar, and if we are, it’s more as a place to strike (as in a target), not a place TO strike (as in protest). But Nevada IS similar to Oregon in the sense that, like Multnomah County that houses the Portland metro area, Clark County, which consists of Las Vegas and its surrounding entities (Henderson, Summerlin, etc.), is also still mostly blue, while the rest of the state of Nevada, much like Oregon… is not.

But the other thing that’s different is the desert, at times, has its own particular way of making you feel like you’re shouting into a void.

And yet.

I found Indivisible Las Vegas. I show up to protests. I call representatives, mine and sometimes ones who aren’t mine, because at this point we are all in each other’s districts when it comes to what’s at stake. I use whatever platform I have to amplify what’s happening, to make sure the people in my life can’t look away, to be a person who does not let the enormity of this become normalized.

And still. Still. I always feel like I’m not doing enough.

That feeling, that chronic insufficiency, that sense that no matter what you do the scale of it dwarfs you, is also a tax. It’s what they’re counting on. The gap between the size of the problem and the size of what any one person can do is designed to exhaust you into giving up.

I’m not giving up. I don’t know how many seasons we have ahead of us of whatever this “Handmaid’s Tale The Last of Us Walking Dead Civil War” real life spin off we’re living in, but I’m not giving up.

Not willingly. Not ever.

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Here’s what I keep coming back to: what does fight even mean right now?

It used to feel clearer. Show up. Vote. Donate. March. Call. And yes, all of that still matters, all of that is still necessary. But there’s something else being asked of us now that doesn’t have a clean verb attached to it. Something about staying awake without being consumed. About bearing witness without being destroyed by what you’re seeing. About finding a way to hold both the urgency and the long game simultaneously.

I worry we won’t ever have a fair election again. About what this country looks like a year from now. I think he is going to get people killed. Let me rephrase: he is already getting people killed. And that number, that toll, that tax, is going to skyrocket.

What I also know is this: silence is a tax too. The kind you pay with your integrity.

So I'll keep showing up. I'll keep calling. I'll keep writing, here, and everywhere else I can. ”Make art in the face of fuck,” as Lidia Yuknavitch has said, including in her remarkable conversation with the luminous Jane Ratcliffe.

Because the opposite of paralysis isn’t certainty. It’s motion. It’s the next right thing, even when the next right thing feels impossibly small against the scale of what we’re up against.

Tax. Toil. Strain. Heavy demand.

Yeah. That’s the word.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

P.S. I made my graphic today from a selfie with my Nope hat — my girlfriend makes these and a bunch of other great ones (FCK ICE!), find her on IG to get one for yourself.