Good Old-Fashioned Hysteria

Oh my god what the fuck do we do now

It’s raining outside.

In a way that makes me yearn for a cottage on the coast of England that I’ve never even been to.

This kind of weather, this time of year—caught just between autumn and winter—makes me want to yell, “I must go to the moors!” over my shoulder to my boyfriend (who is dutifully typing away on his 21st century laptop), while donning a raincoat and boots, and flinging the door wide to the 19th century English countryside.

“Do you think this is what hysteria feels like,” I ask him, wrangling the dogs into their collars.
“What?” He says, looking up from the Amazon page of wall-mounted modem organizers he is browsing.
“Omg you don’t get it,” I reply, struggling to get my arm in the sleeve of my coat.
“Get what?”
ITTTTT.

Maybe it’s the other in between we find ourselves in—the eerie quiet of a lame duck Democrat before the unceasing storm of whatever the fuck is about to come. Now, women everywhere are doing mental calculations, a silent sort of risk analysis. The question, unspoken, is, will I know? Will I know the moment when it is no longer kind of melodramatic to throw my shit in the car and drive to the nearest Northern border? Is the point of no return marked out somehow? In red crayon perhaps?

Or is it always just too early, and then too late?

After long enough in this line of thinking, I am seized by the knowledge that I can’t just sit here typing on my own 21st century laptop. I do not want to put on slacks, get in my car, drive to Whole Foods, look at produce, pretend that we are all not slowly unraveling with our stupid phones in our hands.

I refuse to go insane with TikTok open. If I am going to lose my mind, it’s going to be the old fashioned way: on a hillside in the rain.

“Come on, come on!” I tell the dogs, who have grown up herding sheep and do not use leads, as we march up the high hill behind the house to the fields (There are no fields! The dogs absolutely must be leashed or they will terrorize the neighbors! They do not even know what sheep are!) But it doesn’t MATTER, we are going to find a hill, and climb it, and commit so fully to the delusion that we outrun all of the horrors for a little while.

“I’m on the Trump presidency IUD schedule,” I joked to a stranger at a dinner party last week.
“You know, I was just thinking that I need to make an appointment for that,” she replied. “Is that overreacting?”
A look between us, a silent calculation.
Right now, the risk analysis is falling somewhere between “hoard some Plan B,” and “start hiding money at home in case the government won’t let women have credit cards anymore.”

I read once that contempt is the surest sign that a relationship is over. A couple can overcome most difficult emotions—even hatred—but once contempt sets in, it’s usually too late. I thought about that every time I felt a flash of contempt in my marriage. When I worried in 2016 about Roe v. Wade, he said, “don’t be so dramatic.” Turns out, the feeling was mutual.

After I decided that it was finally time to throw all my shit in the car and begin driving, I realized that there were a million points of no return and none of them were all that obvious.

It was always just too early to say “it’s over,” and then too late to save it.

“Oh my god,” I say to the dogs when we reach the top of the hill. “What the fuck do we do now?” The big dog smiles up me and wags, she is just happy to be involved. The small dog looks sad, his whole world is just the moment he is in and he doesn’t like getting wet. God, how I envy these simple creatures who are never forced to know things. Or solve things. What a gift, to be allowed to just exist.

I don’t want to participate! I don’t want to keep writing emails and saying absolutely pointless shit like, “Hey, I looked over the project brief and added some comments. What is the turn around for this?” while I white-knuckle the steering wheel on the drive home, spiraling out again about whether or not I will know that it’s going to go all Handmaid’s Tale before it actually does. I don’t want to try to understand why gas prices and groceries mattered more than everything else.

I just want to sit in a house on a hill and look out at the sea. I want to watch the leaves fall off of the trees, one by one, until all the branches are like bones picked clean by the crows.

I want to be angry forever. I want to let the dry rot of contempt set in, to finally buckle under the weight of all this nuance and give in to the treacly sweetness of They Are All Good and They Are All Bad.

“We have to go back,” I tell the dogs, soaked hair sticking to my face, the thrill of my Pride and Prejudice disassociation routine beginning to wear off.

God it would be so, so easy to calcify, to give into the sugar rush of writing off half the country. But what if we are so busy being vindicated that we are missing our last chance to save it?

I don’t want contempt to rob me of everything I have become, even if it means doing the hard—perhaps impossible!—work of trying to understand other people.

I am going to be happy! I am going to watch Say Yes to the Dress on my phone in bed at night, loudly, while my 21st century boyfriend browses modem organizers. I am going to go on trips with my friends and talk so much that I have a sore throat by the end of the weekend. I am going to be a girl and not be ashamed of it! I am going to roast the chicken, set the table, burn the candles, call it resistance. Because it is. I am going to binge every episode of Nobody Wants This twice and eat popcorn that I’ve poured chocolate chips over by the handful. I am going to keep clawing my way through the day until I can climb a hillside and just fucking scream.

I am going to be hysterical, and I am going to keep existing.

“We have to go back,” I say, more to myself than the dogs this time. “But when we get home, I’ll put the kettle on.”