Traumatized

I’m 44 years old, and I’ve never felt this way before. For at least the last week, just living in the world kicks my flight or fight response into action, and I walk around all day feeling like I’m under threat and desperately need to take action. But there’s nothing I can do and instead I just have to keep putting gas in my car and answering emails like the world isn’t trying to kill me. It sucks. I understand where that feeling is coming from, but figuring out what to do about it is proving to be a much bigger challenge.

I’ve done my best to keep this blog/project apolitical, and so even in this post I’ll stop short of telling you who I think you should vote for or arguing that you should change your mind. A big part of the audience I’m trying to reach with this project includes people who disagree with me politically, which is why I’m raising money for the National Diaper Bank Network— I picked that charity because I assumed that, regardless of ideology, no one would be opposed to helping children and families in need. I may have been proven wrong about that, but I’ll get in to that later. This post will get into my personal ideological stances about a few things, which you are welcome to disagree with, but I’m hoping you’ll read on in an effort to understand where I’m coming from, even if you think I’m wrong.

My intense, visceral reaction to the news of the day started when I heard about the overnight destruction of USAID. I don’t think its unfair to call it that given that Elon Musk bragged on Twitter that, over the course of a weekend, he had “put [it] through the woodchipper.” I won’t pretend that I knew all that much about USAID prior to its dismantling, but I was immediately concerned about any government program being unilaterally wiped out in the middle of a Friday night. And when I read more about it, I was immediately more upset. I had heard of PEPFAR before, the program founded by President George W. Bush to combat the global spread of AIDS. I knew that PEPFAR has done an enormous amount of good on that front and is widely admired, but I didn’t know all the specifics. But then I read this article from Wired that included the detail from an humanitarian worker that, since funding through USAID to PEPFAR was cut off, 300 babies now had AIDS that wouldn’t have otherwise. This detail made me feel physically ill— the idea that someone basically found a button that would give 300 babies an incurable disease, pressed it, and then bragged about it online made me feel like I had been punched in the stomach. I reached out to a friend of mine who is a big Musk supporter to ask his opinion about it, and he responded that he was just happy someone was trying to do something to balance the budget. The idea that an intelligent person who I respect thinks Musk is acting altruistically, that a conservative Republican, the party the professes endless admiration for strict readings of the constitution, was happy about a shadow organization getting access to government buildings in the middle of the night and playing with the computers, and that someone who has genuinely convinced me of his humble religious conviction could speak so callously about children with AIDS simply didn’t compute in my brain. I spent several days just trying to reconcile it, and I think that was the real beginning of the feeling for me that the whole world was being pulled out from under my feet.

A few days later, this stress became more personal as it became apparent that one of the next target of Musk et al would be the Department of Education. Ending the Department of Education has long been a conservative goal— I first became aware of this during Rick Perry’s “oops” moment at a primary debate back in 2012, when he couldn’t remember all of the cabinet departments he planned to eliminate but DID remember that one of them was education— but it had never struck me as a realistic possibility until the last week. Dissolving the department of education would result in all control of education, including funding, to the states. One of the main things the DOE does it provide support for students with special needs— my wife is a special ed teacher, and I have no idea what will happen to her program when the DOE goes away. One of the other main roles of the DOE is to protect the civil rights of students who belong to protected minority groups. Given the political climate in my state, I have real concerns about the safety of some of my students right now and, on a more personal level, I have no idea my protections my own boys (6 and 3 right now) might need as they grow and develop a sense of themselves.

At the same time that this was happening at the Federal level, at the State level, my governor has proposed a budget that would eliminate millions of dollars in funding for public schools. This would have serious, immediate, painful impacts at my school. It would lead to larger class sizes, decreased programs and opportunities for students, and probably a reduction in staff (a polite way of saying people I respect will lose their jobs). And this is happening with the DOE nominally still in place— if all decisions about school funding go to the states, and my state has many lawmakers interested in supporting private schools, including my high performing school district, which just avoided a serious effort to create a charter school with public money, and we are already looking a budget that would cut millions from every school district in the state, what is likely to happen to my career and my students?

So, I’ve been walking around for days with all the parts of my brain that evolved to keep my safe from sabertooth tigers going full blast. I feel like I am under attack and there is nothing I can do about it, and that people I care about are in danger and there is no way I can help them. I feel like things are spiraling out of control faster than anyone can deal with. A friend of mine maintains that, since there is a strong argument that it is unconstitutional for “DOGE” to do what it’s doing, judges will start issuing restraining orders and reversing their actions. But it seems to me that the whole point of Musk moving the way he is is to make that a moot point. USAID is done, “fed through the wood chipper.” Now that a judge has found that to be illegal and told them they shouldn’t have done it, the toothpaste is out of the tube/the bell can’t be unrung/etc. And I have no idea what is going to happen next. All of this made more sense to me when I read this Pro Publica article about Russell Vaught, erstwhile Project 2025 leader and current Office of Management and Budget director, making speeches where he explained that his explicit goal was to make public sector employees feel “traumatized". He was talking about people at the EPA, but that’s how I feel as a public school teacher right now. When I looked at Mike Braun’s picture in the news with the headline about cutting millions from school budgets, my response was an immediate “I can’t keep doing this!” In this red state, it has been a solid 10 years of changes and threats of changes to public education, and every election brings with it the possibility of my career being upended in terrifying ways. I can’t keep feeling this way— I’ve been pushed to the point where I can’t keep fighting.

When I came home from work on Friday, I told my wife that I was ready to start planning a move to a blue state. That isn’t a decision to make lightly— this has been my home for almost my entire life, and I resent other people making it so inhospitable that I have to leave. Moving would mean leaving behind my dad and my wife’s parents. It would mean leaving the school that I’ve worked at for 15 years, where I’ve earned the respect of colleagues, administrators, and students, in order to start the whole thing over again in an entirely new place. It would mean leaving the house that we’ve made a home, taking the boys away from their schools, all of that. But I can’t continue feeling this way— I just can’t. So, we talked about it for a few days, made a list of pros and cons, etc, and decided to leave everything alone for a month and see what things look like in March. We aren’t going to find new teaching jobs in California or Colorado right now anyway, so we might as well let things play a little while longer and see if they are as bad as I think. Talking this through made me realize how much my sudden desire to move was connected to that same “flight or flight” response I mentioned at the beginning of the post. I can’t do anything about the threats I’m perceiving, but my amygdala insists I do something, so I end up looking at Oregon houses on Zillow. And suffering from terrible heartburn. And not sleeping. It’s not great.

Here are some things I’m doing to try and combat those symptoms and feelings. I’m putting restrictions on my news and social media consumption- I just took a 24 hour reprieve from both, and, when I checked back in, things had continued as they had been without me. I think that staying on top of the news is a way for me to feel more in control— if I understand everything that is going on, and share it to my social media followers, I am somehow fixing it (but I’m not). I’m trying to do more things with friends, so I went to a cigar bar with a teacher friend last night and watched minor league hockey while puffing a Padron. And I’m running, training for this project.

One of the main things I’ve learned about mental health over the last few years is that it an unrealistic goal to say you’re going to “cure” your issues. I don’t think that if I start playing more Mariokart with my son instead of reading the news, I will suddenly no longer be an anxious person. But I will create more unanxious minutes, and if I string together enough of those minutes, eventually things will improve. Oh, and I take SSRIs. Multiple SSRIs.

My charitable project for the National Diaper Bank Network is one of the main things that I’ve been able to stay focused on in these difficult times. If you’ve made it this far, please consider clicking the big “Donate” button at the top of the page and making even a small contribution. Thanks so much!