Catch and Release

I fell in love with someone once. He was smitten in the beginning, and shy. His face would turn red when I came near him. He was nervous when he spoke to me, so much so that I worried he might like me too much. I wasn’t sure I was interested if it was going to be too easy - or if the chances I was going to crush him were going to be too great.

He stuck with it, though. He listened carefully, and showed up with things I liked that he couldn’t have known if he hadn’t been paying careful attention. That mattered to me, it made me root for him to stay calm when he stammered or turned bright red - so when he invited me to come and see him do a thing in his own element, I said yes.

I didn’t know how he would command the room or how any insecurity or nervousness would vanish when he was doing the thing he was meant to do, so when I saw that, I was floored. He knew I would be, it was part of his mating ritual. Funny how I thought I was the predator.

I’ve always been a sucker for talent. If someone is good at something - where they’re just wholeheartedly doing the thing that lights them up - I find that so appealing. I was a lot younger then, so I told myself some of the other things didn’t matter - the way his mood could turn on a dime, and suddenly he’d be sucking all the oxygen out of the room, for example. It didn’t happen often, and when it did, he’d apologize.

It wasn’t until he really had me that things started to change. Once he knew I was all the way in, his depression morphed into something darker. Conversations would take a cruel turn and he’d say a thing so gutting I’d feel it all the way down to my feet. Where was the guy who used to turn red when I came near him? Where was the guy I’d thought might be too nice and too into me to be interesting? Surely he’d come back if I was patient and kind. If I loved him a little bit harder, and tried to understand a little bit more.

He’d tell me I wasn’t hot enough for him, or I was breathing too loudly, or I needed to eat my apple in another room because the crunching noise was driving him insane. He’d say maybe I didn’t need that bowl of cereal. He’d stare at other girls right in front of me, like I wasn’t even there. He’d say I didn’t look like a supermodel in my bikini, and it was bumming him out. He’d say a lot of things I can’t believe I stood for, sat for, cried myself to sleep over, but these things happened slowly. Maybe that’s the part I need to make clear.

These things happened after a year-and-change where I seemed to be the center of his universe. Where he’d show up with flowers and tell me he was in love with me. Where he’d come running if I was upset because he’d done something hurtful, which did happen, but infrequently. He’d say he was sorry, he was an idiot, he hadn’t meant it, he’d never felt this way before. He’d tell me about his childhood, his fears, the way he always lashed out at the people who got closest, and set fire to the good things that came his way. I should have listened to that last part harder.

The bait-and-switch is not new. There are a million articles on the internet about love-bombing, but it’s reductive to boil a relationship down to an overused phrase, and there was more to it than that. There was my mother, for one, who also loved me this way. The way that always left me trying harder. I knew that people could love you and also turn on you. They could love you and knife you in the gut, the heart, across the jugular, and then laugh while you stood there stunned and bleeding. It isn’t always easy to leave.

Sometimes you’re inside a thing so you can’t see it clearly. You hold onto the good parts and tell yourself the bad parts aren’t so bad. Your friends notice you’re not okay before you do. They start asking why you aren’t doing something, why you aren’t fighting back or leaving, or telling him to leave, but they aren’t in the house with you, not always. Sometimes you do fight, sometimes you’re shocked, sometimes you collapse from the weight of it all.

Other times you convince yourself that maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your trauma in the mix, too, and you aren’t seeing things clearly. Or you think it’ll change, or he will. You know it can be better, you know this person is capable of being the person they were in the beginning, because you saw it, you were there.

You still don’t know that person was a lie. They were a construct, partly of their own making, partly of yours. A person you both wanted to believe in. Like a dating app profile, or a bio people use to get a job. Or if you’re a country, say the United States - The Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, blahblahblah. Okay, all white men are created equal. Okayyyyyy, okayyyyy, all property-owning white men are created equal, happy now? You know - those statements we write about the way we want to be seen and perceived - that might not be fully aligned with the way we behave.

In a relationship like the one I was in, you’re the frog in the pot of boiling water. You wake up after a while and you’re miserable, you don’t recognize yourself anymore, you’ve compromised the best parts of you down to nothing, and you realize you have to end it - or cease to exist as any version of yourself you understand or even like.

He got bored, it isn’t more complicated than that. I wasn’t so fascinating once he had me. Catch and release. Happens to people every day, it isn’t personal - still breaks your fucking heart, though. Some people just use you to get what they want. They might even believe they really want it. They don’t mean to lie when they say the things they say, they mean them in the moment. They don’t know how they’re going to feel once they have you - no one has a crystal ball.

But some people do this over and over and over again. It’s the only kind of relationship they have. Incredible in the beginning, exciting for the first few months they’re living the dream, and then the attrition starts. It’s a slow burn until the end, and depending on how long it lasts, the end might be total wreckage. Maybe it’s fear of intimacy, maybe they had a terrible childhood, maybe a lot of things.

It’s sad, but also, we all have our stuff. At a certain point, it doesn’t really matter why you’re a dick if you’re a dick. There is help, there are tools, there are people to talk to so you can make different choices and figure out what’s driving you if you want to do that work. I know because I did it. Whatever. I used to get really caught up in this kind of web, but somewhere along the way I learned it’s exhausting and not fun and not my job. You can’t do it for anyone else, anyway, even if you want to.

Life is not long enough to spend time with people who don’t have your best interests at heart, or can’t manage their own fears and insecurities well enough to avoid crushing your soul.

It took me a long time to get that lesson. That’s only one of the reasons it is so unfathomable and disheartening to be in an abusive relationship with my own government, when I didn’t choose it, didn’t vote for these people, and in fact, did everything in my power to avoid this outcome. I can’t pick up the phone and ask to have lunch, sit down and let my government know this just isn’t working out, and I think it’s time to call it.

I wish I could. I’d love to say, it isn’t me, it’s you, and I wish you luck finding some compassion and decency, but I’m out. I’d even pick up the tab. You just know these are the kind of people who’d keep calling, who don’t understand consent, who cannot handle rejection. They’re the kind of people who want you the most when you don’t want them anymore.

This relationship we’re having is not the frog in the pot of boiling water, though. This is like the time my parents brought lobsters back to the house they’d rented on Shelter Island the summer I was ten. We had guests for the weekend, my mom was pregnant, and things felt hopeful. I’d never had lobster, and didn’t plan to start then.

I’d stopped eating animals when I was seven, and realized the ducks that quacked were the same ducks that ended up on your plate. I hadn’t put it together before then, because “cow” and “burger” don’t have any relation to each other. But when I understood that a duck that quacked was the same duck that people ate, I realized the slimy peach-colored meat in weird packages at the store was once a chicken that laid eggs, and that steak came from a cow that mooed. That was it for me.

There was a huge pot of water boiling on the stove. The lobsters were alive and their claws were secured in thick blue rubber bands. I peered into the tub to look at them and they did not look happy. I had the urge to grab the tub, run down to the beach, and set the lobsters free, but they wouldn’t get far in those rubber bands, and there was a good chance I’d end up in my own kind of boiling water for trying something like that. Suddenly my stepdad picked up one of the lobsters and chased me around the kitchen, but I did not like that at all and started crying. My mother got annoyed and said, “Oh, stop, don’t get her all upset,” and then she snipped the rubber bands off the claws of the lobster he was holding.

He dropped the lobster into the pot of boiling water and to my horror it screamed and started thrashing around, but there was nothing it could do but suffer, and there was nothing I could do to help. I stood there, stunned for a second, and then I begged my mother to get it out of the pot, and she told me to go to my room. She said the lobster wasn’t screaming, it was the sound of the steam escaping from underneath the shell - but it sounded like screaming, and I wasn’t sure she was telling me the truth. When the second lobster went in, the screaming got twice as loud. I ran to my room sobbing and put my pillow over my head.

Photo by Anton Ahlberg on Unsplash

That’s what the relationship with this government is like. There have been so many terrible things so quickly, no one has time to process or integrate before the next horrific thing is happening. We’re just in a pot of boiling water, and the person in charge of the flames is a deranged, self-serving, racist, misogynistic conman who is now selling golden phones. It would be funny if it didn’t make you sick. A few weeks ago it was cars on the South Lawn, but that was before the ugly divorce. He’s selling cryptocurrency and watches and his family is doing real estate deals and they are getting richer by the day which is 100% against the law - but his supporters don’t give a shit. Same people who were up in arms about Hillary’s emails and Hunter’s laptop.

Not everyone feels this way of course, 31% of people voted for this president, and I could not tell you what percentage of that 31% is still with him, but it seems like a decent number. For those of us who did not vote for this and did not want it, it’s like being in a relationship with a person who does not care how you feel, and actually delights when you stand there bleeding. Then all their friends come around and laugh, too. Make jokes about you on the socials.

There isn’t even time for the steam to escape from underneath your shell, and there are plenty of us who don’t have shells, we just feel it all. You still have to go to work, take care of your kids, buy the groceries. I was texting with a friend this morning and I said the cognitive dissonance is so intense, but it’s the only way to get through the day. There are so many things that aren’t normal, but after a while your sense of normal has been decalibrated. Recalibrated. Uncalibrated. There is no normal anymore, and that’s how they want it - but that isn’t okay.

One of the things that helps is to remind yourself that so much of what is happening is not normal. If you’re struggling it’s because you’re sane and kind and you understand things do not have to be this way - and they should not be this way. Also, if you grew up with gaslighters and hypocrisy, it’s enraging to have to deal with this all the time, and your nervous system is probably taxed in ways it shouldn’t be.

In a normal democracy (you’re looking good Canada, Australia, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Uruguay, Germany, France, South Korea and Japan) your government is full of public servants, doing the work of keeping things running. It is not a dysfunctional hellstorm with people screaming at each other all day long, and the party in power taking pleasure in the suffering of the party that didn’t want any of this. This isn’t a democracy anymore, it’s a mashup of everything you get when the guy at the top doesn’t care about anything except being the guy at the top.

It’s an oligarchy, but you also have this very terrifying white nationalist/Christian nationalist/racist/extremist faction - Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, RFK, Jr, Russell Voght - the Heritage Foundation is full of people who think this way, and they are all over the cabinet. You have the Christo-fascist crew, your JD Vance, Mike Johnson, get women back to work making babies, take away bodily autonomy and abortion rights and let’s get the SAVE Act going fellas. They long for those better days when men ran the show.

They love Charlie Kirk out there, telling fourteen-year-old girls that if they go to college, their main focus should be an “MRS degree.” That’s right, parents bring their young girls to hear a guy who dropped out of college tell them the point of college is to find a husband, and their main goal in life should be wife and mother. Go fuck yourself Charlie Kirk. Why are you talking to fourteen-year-old girls, you absolute loser? Because you’re scared of educated, powerful, grown-ass women, that’s why.

I barely know what to say about Adriana Smith going through a C-section this week, how her baby is in the NICU, and how her family will finally be able to lay her to rest now that the state of Georgia has decided her body is of no use to them anymore. This is what you get when you put men like these in power, but tell me more about how we should leave it to the states.

You have Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin who don’t believe in democracy but love AI, and they say it right out loud. You have Musk, ugly divorce or not, and he crosses over into multiple categories! He’s a billionaire of course, he’s a racist, he thinks women are baby-makers, and he loves AI, deregulation, and colonizing Mars. What a fantastic crew of people to bring into the government. It’s wild that I don’t even have time to talk about the danger we’re in thanks to RFK, Jr and his love of raw milk and disdain for vaccines.

It is not at all normal for a man to hunt down Democratic lawmakers and show up in the wee hours of the morning dressed as a police officer knocking on their doors, only to gain entry so he can murder them. In the history of our country we have never had this happen before, we have never had a man targeting 45 politicians of one political party because he hates their ideology.

I didn’t know a lot about Melissa Hortman until this week, but I do now, and I am heartsick for her family, her friends, and her colleagues. What a fantastic woman. She was 55 years old - that’s just a year older than me. She leaves behind two grown children, a son and a daughter, who are grieving and stunned. Their dad was murdered along with their mom. Their family dog Gilbert was shot in the fray and had to be euthanized. Hortman was the 61st Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2019-2025.

She was an attorney, she advocated for environmental rights, abortion rights, sane gun control policies, police reform - and was the chief author of Minnesota’s solar energy standard. She was magna cum laude of everything, basically. She interned for Al Gore when she was fresh out of school. In 2017, she called out Republican representatives for playing a card game in the retiring room off the House chamber during discussions about a public safety budget bill, while two Democratic Women of Color were giving personal speeches. She taught Sunday school. She was fucking awesome and now she’s gone because some crazed MAGA man who has been infected by the poison of the president decided she did not deserve to be here anymore.

It is a miracle that Minnesota Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette survived the assasination attempt made on them by this same man. John was shot nine times, Yvette was shot eight times. Yvette threw her body over her adult daughter Hope to shield her. Hope is the one who called 911 after this despicable creature left her parents’ house. He’d already been to the Hortmans. He had no remorse. He texted his family “Dad went to war last night.”

It is not at all normal in the face of these kinds of politically motivated assassinations and attempted assassinations for a Republican senator to make jokes about the unbelievable loss of life on X. That’s Utah’s Senator Mike Lee who did that. He took the opportunity to get on X and call this carnage “Nightmare on Walz Street.” That is a sociopathic lack of compassion. Good human beings died. They have children who are grieving. A dog died you fucking asshole.

And what did the president do? Did he call the governor of the state where this unspeakable tragedy occurred to extend his deepest condolences and ask how he could help? Of course not. He decided this was the moment to insult Governor Walz, refuse to call him, and ask why he would waste his time making a call like that.

A much better question is why we have wasted our time, and given control of our country to a man who is so devoid of character or depth, or any of the qualities a good president needs. That is a classless and disgusting response, and these are not the actions or words of a leader, nor is this the reaction of any kind of decent human being. He is deficient and unfit to hold the highest office in the land which is now no longer the highest office in the land. Make no mistake about that, this man has degraded the office of the presidency, and the 31% of the electorate who put him there are complicit.

The Republican senators who continue to allow him to violate the Constitution are going to go down in history as the people who failed to be the guardrails of our democracy the way they were supposed to be. Literally looking at all of you. Where are your ethics, where is your love of country, do the oaths you take mean nothing to you? That’s rhetorical, the answer is obvious.

It is not normal for New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander to be arrested in New York City for trying to make sure immigrants are given due process outside their court hearings. He was asking ICE agents to show him their warrant. When they refused, he locked arms with the man they were attempting to detain. Immigrants in our country have a right to due process. The New York City Comptroller should not be arrested for trying to ensure an immigrant in his presence is not being denied his constitutional rights.

It is not and was not normal for Senator Alex Padilla to be assaulted and handcuffed for asking a question at Kristi Noem’s public press conference last week. It is not normal for a president to override the governor of a state and mayor of a city when they both say they do not need the National Guard or the Marines, or even more National Guard service members - and send them anyway, escalating tensions and the likelihood people are going to get hurt - simply because the community is protesting the way their neighbors are being treated.

It is not normal that a Democratic lawmaker is murdered in her home, with her husband, another is shot along with his wife, 43 other Democratic lawmakers are on a list in this man’s car - and he is not labeled a domestic terrorist - but people who vandalize Teslas are. The people who are okay with this because it’s happening to Democrats are terrifying. Truly, thank you for showing yourselves, your silence is deafening.

People will say all kinds of things - we’ve deported people before, why weren’t you upset then? First, who says I wasn’t upset then? Second, we’ve never had this before and if you aren’t in Los Angeles or San Diego or Massachusetts or anywhere masked ICE agents in unmarked vans are literally throwing Brown people against the wall and zip-tying them for being Brown - even as they say they’re American citizens and try to get their IDs out, please educate yourself about what’s happening.

It’s more than that, though. I have this belief, and I guess it’s because I still believe in people - I have this belief that of those 31% - I want to say 10% of them, maybe more? - I think if they saw with their own eyes what’s happening out here, they would not be okay with it. If they talked to the children of the hardworking people who are scared to leave their houses right now, scared to go to work, scared to go to their kids’ graduations or the grocery store because they might not make it home for dinner - I just do not think they would say, fuck these kids, and their parents, too. I really do not.

It’s easier on a laptop or phone, we’ve been trained to think of screens as places we see shows and movies, tik toks and instagram reels. These devices have such a dark side. They connect us, or they disconnect us. We all know about the echo chambers. We know about the desire for likes, the serotonin release. Algorithms are learning who we are and what we like, what we click on, what we buy, what we respond to, and what keeps us scrolling all the time. But it’s the “what we buy” part they care about, nothing else.

The Trumps, the Musks, the Bezos, the Zuckerbergs, the Thiels, the Vances. They don’t give a shit about anything but the cha-ching and the power. If rage will keep us scrolling, they’ll feed us rage.

It’s Juneteenth, or it still is as I write this. I highly recommend you listen to the phenomenal Isabel Wilkerson talk about this day and its significance here. Can you imagine a world where something of huge import happened in Washington, D.C. and it took two-and-a-half years for people in Galveston, Texas to find out? Today we know everything the second it occurs. That isn’t always for the better, but there are some things you want the whole world to know right away.

In a moment in our history when we have to remind people diversity is what makes us strong, inclusion is what brings us joy, and equity is just fucking ethics, please understand we are protesting out here because we want our neighbors to be treated with basic human dignity. And it’s always the same people who don’t want to release their grip on power and privilege. Our liberation is bound. The only people who never have to fight for their freedom or their rights are wealthy straight white men. The patriarchy is making everyone sick. The patriarchy funded by white Christian nationalists is the depravity we’re living.

These billionaires in power will burn the planet down while we scream at each other, and sell it off for parts. They’ll drop bombs because they don’t think of any of us as real or important - it’s like a video game. They don’t care about our little lives. How can anyone be confused? Look how they’re treating actual human beings, and look at the callous way they respond when we get hurt or killed. They have no feeling for us at all.

I won’t hate people. I will not do it. I will keep my distance from anyone who voted for this madness, and I will feel heartbroken, dismayed, shocked and outraged as long as they continue to support it. But I won’t hate them, even when they’re smug and rude, because hatred is the disease. Contempt is the poison. Disdain is the thing that makes you not give a shit when someone is crying in front of you.

So many people have caught the disease from the man they follow. Mike Lee has it. Vance has it - he had it already, but it will keep getting worse because he has no integrity. Hegseth has it, so does Noem. Stephen Miller has it, he’s had it for years.

You do not want this disease, friends. It’s a soul-eating disease that makes you turn on your neighbors and not care when they stand there bleeding. Don’t give them your hatred. You don’t want to be the person plunging the knife in, you want to be the kid, running the lobsters down to the ocean and setting them free.

I know you do, and I love you for it.

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