Feeling unsettled

I’m feeling unsettled because so many things are, well, unsettled.

I should be feeling joy because my husband beat cancer and Biden won the election. Yet there’s also a great deal of fear that I’m feeling, both about the election and my own health.

The fact that Trump hasn’t conceded the election confirmed what we all knew: that he wouldn’t go quietly, he wouldn’t do the honorable and mature thing. Frankly, I don’t think he understands the concept of honor.

But I’m unsettled because I think it’s worse than just a tantrum. I fear that he’s going to pull a Constitutional coup instead. Van Jones lays out how this would happen and I hate to sound alarmist but I see a lot of signs shaping up in that direction.

I know that I probably sound paranoid. I should be celebrating (at least in spirit) Biden’s win along with my friends who are doing the same. But I’ve felt all along since hearing the news of Biden’s victory that I would only celebrate when Trump actually leaves office.

I don’t think America’s brush with authoritarianism is over just because we voted it out by a narrow margin. I feel like we are very much in the battle for the future of our democracy and it doesn’t feel like that battle has been decisively won yet.

The other thing that leaves me feeling very unsettled is the runaway transmission of Covid in this country and in my state in particular (we’re number one!)

I know that 95-97% of people who get Covid survive. The thing is that, after meeting with the UTSW neurologist who believes I have excessive blood clotting factors and a predisposition to strokes (both of which are also possible outcomes OF Covid,) I’m not so sure that I’d survive if I caught it. I’m not sure that my husband would either, as he hasn’t been off chemo long enough for his immune system to rebound.

On top of all this, I’m finally accepting my diagnosis as real, in a way that I never did when they said it was MS. And now I’m fucking terrified. Strokes can happen at any time and I never know when the fatal stroke will hit me. If I lose my ability to walk right or use my hands properly, well, that’s already happened, and I rebuilt as much as I could. But there’s no guarantee that the next one would be as mild.

I don’t want to have this disease anymore. I don’t want to be living in this Covid hellscape under the rule of a potential dictator. I want to go back to feeling like I’d never get worse, that we could just make Trump go away, that the next pandemic was not actually long overdue but still years off in the distance. I miss going to concerts and having meals in restaurants with my husband and not worrying about everything. I wonder if those carefree days will ever return.