Magical Thinking

This blog post is heavily influenced by a conversation I had with one Ethan Zuckerman months ago on magical thinking.

I feel like something major has been taken away from the way I’ve liked to approach the world.

For years, I’ve placed my hope and my strategies into imagining the world as if it could be something other than what it is right now. A world where there aren’t borders, where the binary is opt-in, where people are equitable, where there is hope.

To do this takes imagination. It takes magical thinking. It takes imagining and acting as if the world was other than what it is.

And of all the things this administration has taken from me, it is that. Magical thinking has been sullied. To say the world might be, or is other than what it actually is, is no longer a tool to fight the status quo, it has instead become a way to undermine a shared reality, to fight back against science through the psyche. I never saw this coming.

And I have started to feel that just to acknowledge the world in the state it is actually is, is as much of a fight as I’ve got in me most days. To imagine it better is something I don’t have energy for. Fascism is creeping, it is not all at once.

My amazing therapist has been trying to remind me that just to survive in the world right now is an accomplishment. Go team. We’re surviving.

So I’ve been watching this a lot, and trying to imagine a future I’d like to be in, grounded in the realities of today.

What is inspiring you right now?