PeopleKeeper 2-A Follow Up

Hey all,

I finally got a half-day off and thought it was time to write down some of the thoughts bouncing around in my mind. The technical term for this is idea saltation. It’s a term that I’ve just made up. ::Eddie Izzard voice:: And I’m backing it up with…this geology license I hope to get.

So here is my view for writing today:

This is actually my reality, I can't believe it sometimes.

 It’s cool and windy and mostly clear out, I’ve got a box of Girl Scout cookies and a lot of sunlight left so buckle up because I’m sure this will be a wild ride.

 

A recent photo of me, ready made for a by-line

In the past seven months (whoosh, that went by right quick) I have been working at a job I love with fascinating people whom I am happy to hang out with for a drink after work. My office works with other offices all over the country so I get to meet folks with very different backgrounds and skill sets than my own. My current work priorities for personal development on the job are:

• ·      Consistent demeanor-keeping the same quality and frequency of communication regardless of what’s happening in my personal or personal-professional life (eg. deadlines).
• ·      Learning how to actually talk to anyone- a misnomer that a lot of my friends have is that I can strike up a conversation with anyone. While this has proved true for most of the circles I have waltzed between in my life, it’s not the case across the board. Specifically: I have been learning how to interact with military personnel better. I have a lot of inherited trauma around military folks, through no fault of the people who passed it on, yet it still remains. It so happens that the branch of military my grandfather (who was an abusive ass) served is the same branch that I work with regularly for my job.
• ·     Communication!- Deadlines, expectations, duration of work, intensity of work, boundaries around topics that I feel OK talking about, boundaries when topics I don’t feel OK talking about.
• ·      Programming-I’m finally learning how to code in Python. Because it just seems like a better idea than doing everything manually. I’ve also become significantly more proficient in Microsoft Excel, which has eased some of my pain. And I mean literal pain, my ergo situation is ever-evolving and not close to being pain-free. Despite being an A+ couch potato, it seems being sedentary is not easy for me.

So that’s what I’m working on. It’s hard. I won’t pretend or assume it’s anything but hard.

In the past 7 months I’ve thought a lot about my relationships and how they are interwoven into my mental health. I work A Lot™, my availability in general has decreased, possibly a hundredfold from my availability when I was unemployed. During my unemployment I focused a lot on building relationships; strengthening, deepening, evaluating, asking a lot, giving back a lot, building my friends up, letting my friends support me.

Between personality and circumstance, I’ve always been in touch with A Lot™ of people. Once my therapist asked me to make a map so she could keep up with all the people I talked about. I got to several hundred people in visual format similar to a force directed diagram before I gave up. This was at least 3 years before Facebook. I remember people’s names, their faces, their stories, their joys, and their pain. Especially when I’m rested and focused like I was during my unemployment. Now that I’m fully employed, I don’t have the bandwidth that I used to and I’m noticing that I’m not as capable of managing all the relationships.

On top of my proving period (about 5 months of nearly back to back travel) being physically and emotionally challenging, I took on another challenge: get the first part of my geology licensure. The department of Professional Geologists in the Golden State are trying to mimic the process the Engineers have laid out. I’m certain it also behooves the geologists because it gets them more money. What this means for me, the SaraBe, is that I can take a $500 test now (3 years out of school) and then take another $500 test in 3 more years so that I can sign legal documents. The only study material available is not only boring: it’s badly written, incorrect more times than is acceptable, out of touch and really poor at explaining how to pivot one’s background in academia into industry. I am going to write a competing study guide and publish it when I have my license in 3-5 years. Testing for competence shouldn’t be an endurance test in masochism.

In order to achieve this goal of studying and taking my exam (which I took this morning) I have shifted around my life a lot. This shifting, as with all my shifts, has led me to evaluate my relationships, and check in with where I was a year(ish) ago when I wrote my PeopleKeeper post. I’m going to break out the types of relationships I’ve seen evolve in the past year, moving from negative to positive. Unsurprisingly, there will be a playlist for these categories so be sure to click on links for music. (In addition to my regular play list for the blog at large.)

Brief content warning: mention of rape and stalking. Click this if you want to skip that.

Contact Severed

Only a couple people from my original list (or people who weren’t on the list but existed regularly in my life) were people who I actively severed contact with.

One of them was accused of being a serial rapist. I was not close with this person, I had no direct involvement in these allegations and I did not follow what/if the resolution on this series of events was. I know this person was an active organizer whose parties I occasionally attended but it wasn’t difficult for me to fade from that scene when I was on the road 70% of the time. The whole affair was triggering for me as I was much more intimately involved in something similar when I was 13 so I noped out pretty hard pretty quick.

The other person was someone whose friendship had always been exhausting for me but over the past couple years it built up to the point where they were stalking me. This is someone who I cannot avoid completely because they attend my synagogue but the leadership of the shul took care of the situation in as much as they could. This was extremely difficult for me because there were weeks where I couldn’t attend services because I just had panic attacks. PartnerPenguin was amazing in taking care of me and making sure I left when I needed to leave and breathed as much as I could. Mega props to the current leadership body for listening to me, taking me seriously and treating the situation with gravity.

The Somebodies I Used To Know

This category is a little less cut and dry from my previous category and it’s probably the category I struggle the most with. These are not people who have acutely wronged me, just more…death by a thousand paper cuts. A lot of my biological relatives are in this category. People who have occasionally made my swear allegiance or loyalty but who have never actually been interested in me as a person.

An illustration of this kind of person was someone whom I hadn’t seen in months and we finally spend much of an evening together. They asked me how I was doing and I spent care and energy into responding how was drowning in work but they were important to me so I carved out an evening to spend with them. Throughout the evening they then asked me three more times how I was doing, closing out the evening with “we should catch up some time.” This was painful, but ultimately it made me realize that listening to me was not a priority for this person and there was nothing I could do about it.

Standard Partiers

I like to grow my friendships in predominately 1:1 settings, often revolving around food, often at my house. My relationship bonds strengthen best during long-ish periods of unstructured or semi-structured time together, so I try to create such spaces. Some people like to maintain their relationships through parties (usually >10 people), touching base periodically and superficially. I am happy to attend these parties but I’ve learned that I’m not going to bank on the friendships I cultivate in these spaces to be deep enough for strong emotional support unless I supplement them with other types of interactions.

Don't get me wrong. I love partying. I just don't expect to do most of my heavy lifting in my friendships in this context. 

Neutral

Several people who I had on my PeopleKeeper list interact with their relationships in a way that I had not understood previous to trying this experiment: their partner performs most of the friendship maintenance. I have seen several pairings of people who do this. The level of emotional labor expected by society, usually on women, to maintain relationships, plan free time and keep house to have friends over shines through when I have tried to maintain friendships with people whose partner does a lot of their emotional labor. I have trouble getting in touch with some of these people. One person appeared randomly back in my life after 3 years of no contact because they were in a relationship and just…didn’t keep in touch with any of their friends. Even with my best friends, I have sometimes given up on being friends with their spouses because they just don’t put any work into being my friend in return and assume their partner will maintain that bond. But usually when I show up in person they listen to me so they are neutral to me.

Everything’s Easy/The Simcha (Joy) Bringers

I have several communities right now that I participate in regularly given the locational availability and energy level.

The first is my weekly gaming group who meet the host’s home, and usually have 10 people or less per event. We have dinner together and there is always SaraSafe food (no nightshades) even if means the host makes a separate meal just for me. Sometimes it’s tacos (we gather on Tuesday, after all) and sometimes it’s sous-vide pork cheek or <three-stroke meat engine> that have cooked for at least 12 hours. Sometimes I participate in games like <Colors, Fucking Colors>, sometimes I don’t. And it’s always OK. Everyone sees each other weekly so we generally know what’s going on in each others lives. It’s friendship on easy mode.

One thing that’s great about this group is that the two people who host recently got married and I got to see for the first time a wedding that reflected something much closer to what I want in a wedding ceremony (we’ll have one someday, I swear). The bridal party was not split by bride and groom because everyone was everyone’s friend. The women wore dresses and the men wore suits and everyone was color matched and lovely in that formality. The vows were said in a “yes, and” fashion: the bridge said one line and the groom responded “I’ll do that and this additional thing”. The officient was a friend and he made no presumption of having God involved (which worked, for this crowd). After the bride and groom exchanged vows, the audience was invited to vow to support the couple. I really liked that.

I was so full of joy and love that I cried the whole night. In fact I cried so much that salt crystals formed on my eyes:

I cried myself some minerals!

Other communities I have in this category are my shul, my other regular gaming groups, and the friends I see rarely but spend time with intensely throughout the year. And of course, my travel buddies. In the past couple years I’ve brought my “states visited” count up to 23. Here are some photos from some of the more recent trips:

The great and powerful Mississippi River

....yes....

American Victoria Falls

Buddy, your soul is supposed to stay inside your body. So's your skeleton.

Crappy quality but I did see the Northern Lights

Just a pup in -10°F being OK with life.

With the national political situation, my job being as intense as it is and interfacing with my own and my friends mental illnesses it feels extraordinarily good to have good friends and celebrate happy events. It reminds me that there is balance and that this past year has been net good.

Found Family

The best thing about being a queer adult is that the concept of Found Family is understood and, while not ubiquitous, is prevalent. My little group of new family are the people whom I can be around, no matter how we’re feeling and it’s OK that we’re not entertaining or happy. We can just be. It’s extremely freeing to have multiple people with whom I can just be my complete self.

I had a lot of negative experiences growing up where I was told that we were having family time and that would mean we would “have fun, damnit.” I think sometimes when I reflect on the nuclear family I had growing up that none of us understood how to be there for each other in the ways we needed to be supported. Instead there was a lot of shame and at time coercion to “act like we liked each other” instead of genuinely liking each other.

The intentionality I’ve brought to my new family folks is that when you’re in my found family you’re in as your whole self. That’s hard and takes a lot of work on all parties involved, so there are only a few people who hold this place in my life. I think one of the most important conversations I ever had was with someone who holds me in found family status and they explained that I had committed a transgression serious enough to cut ties unless I made swift and lasting change to my behavior. Having this conversation allowed me to see that just because this category exists, it doesn’t mean that abuse or bad behavior has to be tolerated.

A surprise for me in this past year is how big of a difference having a found family has made on my spiritual life. I am regularly celebrating smaller Jewish holidays that I’ve never celebrated before because I have the support to do so. We have more conversation around Judaism than I’ve ever had voluntarily in my life. I like the amount of Judaism I’ve worked in and I feel supported to include more if it seems right to do so.

PartnerPenguin

I am happy to announce that PartnerPenguin and I have celebrated our first decade together! 10 whole years of being awesome! The best part about renewing for an 11^th season of this show is that we jumped the shark somewhere in…like…season 2? So there’s nowhere more ridiculous for us to go. We’re still two goofballs with odd senses of humor who make each other laugh every day. We’ve learned to have arguments without putting the foundation of our relationship at stake. We have established that we’re not going anywhere so it’s OK to try new things and get out of our comfort zone. I am proud of us. I was trying to only do two comparison photos but then I did 4. GIANT, PHOTO LADEL BLOG POST FOR ALL!

Casual then-shirts read Feztival (2002) and Vader was Framed

Even our casual now looks like we're about to drop an emo album

Fancy then-Rockin' that Moulin Rouge themed Prom

Yeah, basically still rockin' the same theme with no prompts

I do hope to have some sort of wedding, probably about 3 years from now on the 10^th anniversary of us being married. That seems like enough time to ease into the idea, save, plan and decide what we want the event to be. In the meantime I’ve started wearing a ring that I feel suits me on an everyday basis. I think it looks like it fell out of a mountain and happens to fit my finger. You can decide for youself:

I am really really excited about this

In closing today, I’ll just leave you with Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” or: “I am exactly as bisexual as I thought I was.

Living Three Lives Simultaneously Pt. 1

As my wise friend Good Panda commented on my life: it appears that I am living three lives simultaneously. In case I’ve never mentioned, I straight up do not understand the concept of being bored. I can’t remember many times in my life when I was bored, and when that happened I probably went and did something else. #HighFunctioningAnxiety

I did block out this post in advance but I have a feeling that this is going to take a moment anyway. More tends to happen in three weeks of my life than does for many people in months. My plan is to visit each “life” I lead and then do some meta-analysis and State of The Brain (spoiler: it’s filled with poo and lies) at the end. If there is a part you feel would be relevant or interesting, you can jump to that part. I am not fancy enough to know how to do those hyperlink jump-tos so you’ll have to scroll and look for the bolded sections for now. Or teach me? That could work. Or I very well might just write separate posts since my days are absurdly long and I can only manage so much writing in a night. (Edit: this is what I'm doing, more posts to follow)

Life One: Sara the Geologist

Let me just start off by saying that actually working in the position I have now (woohoo, got employed!) is like…a million times easier and better than pretty much every other job I’ve had in my life. It’s like working, but on easy mode. Even though I’m out in the field this week, I’m only doing what I would consider “actual work” about 3 hours out of the 11. The rest is oversight and safety management.

So that’s one thing: the hours are long. They usually involve doing skilled labor that either involves thinking a lot or management/logistics/planning skills. One of the weirdest things I’ve had to do so far was research pee and poop for a day. Turns out sewers are dangerous on top of being gross? Who knew.

While taking lunch is required (yay, legalities) we have to make up our time and bill 8 hours each day. This means that my days are typically 9 hours long in the office. So far the field days have been “short” in that they’re only 11 or so hours. It’s only Tuesday and I’ve put in 23 hours, including transit to my site. PartnerPenguin has commented that it’s exactly what I wanted, several hours more per week than I wanted it.

One type of mindset shift that has been hard is the concept of  “staying billable.” In academia there is a disproportionate burden placed on the shoulders of the professors to bring in grants enough to support the lab running. In environmental consulting people are a lot more…open about talking about money. It feels like the veil around actually living in a capitalist society has finally been pulled back. Instead of this mysterious thing shrouded in shame and misery, it’s a shared burden. There is this concept called utilization-everyone needs to try to make as many of their 40 hours a week billed to a cost code. It is impersonal in some ways, but it also spreads the responsibility of staying in business on everyone, not just one professor. Obviously I am a mere peon and my manager shields us well from pressure Up Above so I have little idea what that’s like. But the firm I joined is quite large so the supply chain is long and the contracts are large. I’m working on several DoD contracts and they’re pretty cushy.

Definitely one thing I can get behind is that I’m finally not the only woman in the whole office who cusses. My manager (loosely, she just makes sure I have work to do, she doesn’t actually supervise me) dropped the f bomb at our “get to know you” lunch. I have never felt such automatic comradery.

Yeah, that’s another thing I’m not used to. I’m not managed. Like, at all. I’m not micromanaged. My “manager” has even commented that it’s OK if I contact her less. Holy shit working in academia/government was a horrendous nightmare compared to how work gets done in industry. I’m assumed to be competent. I’m allowed to ask questions. No one gets judgey or annoyed when I ask too many questions. And then I’m encouraged to ask more questions to clarify. A supervisor on one project called me on Thursday last week because I hadn’t checked in all week on a thing due on Friday. It wasn’t a long conversation, just said what I’d accomplished and what I predicted I could accomplish by the deadline. She said I did the hard part and thanked me. And then we hung up after 15 minutes. Like…that’s it.

Related to that project: Did you know that there is a poisonous newt in Idaho? Along with rattlesnakes, bears and wolves they are the deadliest animals in the state. If I ever go there I might have to make up a newt based nickname.

Another friend who pivoted from academia to industry put it this way:
“I thought I would miss the rush of doing original research, of seeing things that nobody had ever seen before and figuring out puzzles that nobody had ever figured out yet.  Part of me does, but I found that part offset very quickly when I realized that my employer thought that what I was doing was inherently and obviously valuable, and paid me without me ever having to justify my work by writing grant proposals.  I hope that you find the experience equally rewarding.”

The hardest shift for me has definitely been the shift from Poverty Mindset to Safety Consultant Mindset. I feel like this might be difficult to describe but I will try:

The site I’m working at right now is investigating an emerging contaminant that is currently ubiquitous. It’s the thing that makes Teflon nonstick. It’s in sunscreen. It’s in GoreTex. It’s in anything that’s possibly waterproof. Because of its ubiquity combined with low testing limits, there are bananas absurd preparation methods for this field season. Someone in the field made the uncomfortable observation that we have more of this stuff in our bloodstream than we’re testing for so to some extent we can’t actually be blank slates for sample prep.

What has this meant for your regular, average, everyday Sara? Well, the requirement on clothing is that everything is natural fibers, eg. cotton, wool, linen (ha! Noooope). Ha! 100% cotton does not exist for women with curves, so Target would have me believe. I have since learned that field folk prefer Duluth or Carthartt but fuck spending that much money on clothes before I got my first paycheck. I only had one-ish pair of acceptable pants at the beginning of this whole thing so I bought 3 more pairs of pants, 4 new bras (they are terrible, I hate cheap bras with a burning passion), several new pairs of panties and a set of wool long undergarments. The kicker: I had to wash them 6 times before I went into the field. The worse kicker: my Laundromat is 5 blocks from my house. And I have had pitifully little time to go do this sort of chore so we’ve paid for fluff’n’fold.

Now how does this affect poverty brain?

New clothes are a dreadful necessity that must be avoided at all costs. Buy clothes at thrift stores, discount stores, Walmart, Target, or just wash your current clothes cunningly to disguise the lack of diversity in wardrobe.

Counterpoint:

I absolutely refuse to risk exposure so I need to commit to making sure the breakthrough time on my clothing is as long as possible. This means new clothing. And I need my boobs to have some sort of support too, so I need more than 2 bras total.

This battle in my brain keeps coming up because I have been trained that only the cheapest option in any situation is ever acceptable, no matter the time cost. My “manager” actually told me in an email that my time is more valuable than trying to get a truck on Sunday so I didn’t have to pay for Saturday. I almost cried. I have very very rarely been told by an employer or manager that my time or skills are valuable.

Somewhat to satisfy my poverty brain, but also to satisfy making sure all of my food needs were met adequately: I have become the Hobo Queen of the Quality Inn this week. I brought a rice cooker, a slow cooker and the room has a microwave. This was my dinner tonight:

and this was how I rigged all the dishes I’ve been doing:

I have been preparing all three meals a day in my room. Though…I did discover that the hotel has biscuits and gravy at breakfast.  Yum. I think I’m still going to make myself oatmeal. PartnerPenguin has been perfecting the art of slow cooker oatmeal. Here’s his/our recipe:

3/4c (or 1/2c) steel cut oats

3/4c (or 1/2c) milk

3/4c (or 1/2c) water

Raisins

Strawberries

Cinnamon

Poppy or flax seeds

Put all ingredients in a Pyrex bowl thing. Place in a slow cooker with water enough to meet the sides of the Pyrex but not overflow it. Cook on high for 6-8 hrs. It creates enough of a double-boiler to cook the oatmeal well but keeps the great texture of the steel cut so eating isn’t too tedious.

So yeah. That for breakfast, sliced meats and cheese with pickles, veg and fruit for lunch and meat of some sort for dinner. I think I’m going to expand my meatsies prep and go full 50’s housewife and get into microwave cooking. We’ll see.

Anyway. All this prep has been an absurd amount of time commitment.

The final thing that’s difficult about my new job is how normal everyone is. People have functional families. They certainly encounter challenges but from what I’ve heard they are all very tame. I actually thought such a thing was fiction but multiple people have talked about events transpiring that I imagine can only happen with functional families. They certainly encounter challenges but from what I’ve heard they are all very tame. I caught myself mid-story today because I realized I was so poor when I lived in a house with a gas leak for a month I kept my head down and was just thankful for having a roof over my head instead of being concerned about dying from the accumulated natural gas in my bedroom. They just don’t seem to have stories like that. And I don’t know yet how to temper my life to seem more normal than it has been. More on this topic later.

To some extent it is nice that a lot of people are much more normal than me-in regard to anxiety at least-because they set the standard for what kinds of actions and levels of chill should be approached in a given situation. But it’s pretty mind-boggling. Though in some cases I am grateful to listening to my AnxietyBrain: it has prevented me from being phone-less for a week.

Overall I am loving the job and loving the work. I get to do weird research. I get to read policy documentation. I get to do Quality Checks and tell people where they fucked up, but like…they asked me to point it out and also I’m nice about it? I get to be outside and I got a <safety mullet> for my hat. Thanks to this job I have rad long underwear that I’ve avoided buying for my whole life.

Ok. I think I need to shower and make my food for tomorrow, despite that I definitely have more to say. I think I’ll make this LiveJournal-esque and say that I’ll come back tomorrow and talk about my other “lives.”

P.S. Here are some photos from the field:

Me, in field gear. Minus Safety Mullet (just bought it today, this was taken yesterday)

No babies in buckets. Needs to be stated, I guess.

Tren fren. It's a special freight line that branches off the national line...for some reason?

Volunteer melons! Because watermelons like composted sewage? Anyway they're fuzzy. I'll let you know if we try to eat them how they taste.

Yeah, this is just insanity pants cheap. Oatmeal costs at least $1.00/lb by us.

And because I’m feeling silly and un-original tonight, y’all are getting one of the best videos on the Internet. 

Thanks, Obama

I am sad. I am almost done, but not quite done, with mourning. Today I am writing this piece as my own small act of protest. Tomorrow I will act bigger. But this is my act today.

I am new, by comparison, at being an adult. I have lived and voted under one administration. When Obama got elected, I was living in a housing complex where the lease passed from person to person, you never called management, even if someone OD’d and you had to call the cops. My neighbors lent me a bright green mixing bowl to mix scone batter because I couldn't afford luxuries like mixing bowls. But I'd be damned if I didn't make celebratory scones in honor of my first act of democracy, voting in the general election for the first Black president.

Obama has been my president as I struggled through my own health crises and understood better why my parents health crises contributed to their bankruptcy. Obama has been my president while I scoured, interviewed, petitioned in some cases begged to have access to housing after my initial family home was lost to foreclosure. Obama's stimulus package hit about the second year I had a “real” job out of high school and I used the funds to pay for textbooks.

In the past couple years, it has been my friends turns to experience the costs of having to choose between health and housing, financial stability or going to the ER. When their mom (or primary care provider, or spiritual leader) tells them “Oh it's fine sweetie, it's just in your head,” they listen. And it's easier to listen to what they know to be abusive language because it's cheaper in the short term to listen to this advice, keep one's head down and drink some more tea.

Obama’s healthcare reforms have led, in some ways, to this getting better. I am sad and scared and worried that there is a real chance my friends will die without it. Someone related a story to me recently about being in a room with a speaker trying to get the participants to calm down. “Stop ‘freaking out’” the speaker said. “We got through the Reagan administration just fine, we'll get through this.” The person relating the story said, “Not everyone did.” The person relating the story works for the AIDS foundation, who still hold a moment of silence before meetings to remember who they are working for, who is not among them to work.

I didn't live through Reagan. But the ease with which the general populace has forgotten how many gay men died of AIDS due to Reagan’s ignorance touches my life. It touches my faith community.

More than that, one of my grandparents was nearly executed in WWII. Plenty of my community members had grandparents who were sole survivors of the camps in Europe. I visited the mass graves of all the dead from the Budapest ghetto while I was in Europe. 6 weeks, the ghetto lasted. 4000 dead. How how how how HOW are these events so far from the present that we don't collectively remember them? How are there people who don't believe it happened?

We easily and comfortably forget marginalized people’s casualties to the point of allowing them to potentially happen again. But even if registries don't happen, even if camps don't happen, that doesn't mean “we’ve” won. People won't die immediately due to lack of healthcare. People won't die immediately as climate change gets worse. It will mostly happen to the invisibly huddled masses.

The first victims will be the homeless. But who cares, homeless people die every year due to exposure. They the main demographic who does. Yet the homeless demographic is more intricate of a population than “yelling crazies” who were dumped by cuts of the healthcare system. A very large portion of today’s homeless population belong to the LGBT community. The current administration just deleted https://www.whitehouse.gov/lgbt , rendering that community nationally invisible. The current administration advocates for "conversion therapy" creating toxic environments for LGBT youth to even come out. Setting the stage for a new wave of LGBT homeless youth, going into increasingly harsh political and physical climates.

The next set of victims will be Native people in the Northern hemisphere or poorer folks living in rural areas in the Southern hemisphere. America doesn’t really have the best of relationships with the mainland Native tribes, I can’t imagine there will be much in terms of emergency relief acts as more and more Inuit tribal folks are displace. This is just the beginning.

Obama has been my president while my friends and I got married, including my friends with same gender partners. It was only three years ago I celebrated with thousands of people in Oroenpaz City at the repeal of DOMA.

Obama has been my president when I worked at The Lab on The Hill, funding basic science so that American citizens could benefit from things like clean water and air. The engineering team at TLoTH work actively with NASA for space missions and inventing things for space. There, employees were committed to being good stewards of the nuclear stockpile, making sure that no one sent off a nuke just because they were extra grumpy with China that day. All of these people’s jobs now could be in jeopardy.

As Trump gets sworn in today, I acutely feel a chapter of my adult life coming to a close. That chapter where I can be quiet, complicit, or invisible is over. I can’t allow my straight-passing relationship obscure that I’m bisexual. I can’t allow my white skin to suppress the voices of those with brown or black skin. I commit to supporting art made by my friends. I commit to supporting art made by women, transfolx, Native and African-American people.

And, as my grandfather described me in a memo to the college Math department where he teaches: I commit to being a Women in STEM activist.

I commit to saying what needs to be said.

Even if this terrifies me.