This Is Fine

Completing the stress response cycle during a legislative reign of terror

This article is deeply indebted to the work of Emily and Amelia Nagoski. It discusses, without detail on the causes, the impacts of the current political reality on the emotional and physical health of trans folks, and how we can keep ourselves healthy when we cannot escape the stressors causing our stress.

“On Fire,” by KC Green.

Last weekend, my wife and I flew to one of the truly miraculous places in the world, and one which not enough people know about—despite the fact that it’s an absolutely unabashed tourist trap. Glenwood Springs is a little mountain village in Colorado, nestled deep in the towering red-stone cliffs of Glenwood Canyon, and it is a wonderland if you’re the kind of person who goes in for cozy, homey little towns with great food. Most folks who go do so in the summertime, which has always been a mystery to me… but, then again, I’m not a hiker.

Winter, on the other hand, is when I come alive.

Of all the things that makes Glenwood Springs special to me is the spring itself, because the town’s namesake is a large hot spring that’s been captured and turned into an series of enormous hot water pools that are open year-round. How big, you ask?

This big.

Glenwood Hot Springs. Image courtesy of the Glenwood Springs Hot Springs Resort.

There is something absolutely magical about lounging in 95-degree-farenheit—that’s 35 celsius for the rest of the world—water, warm to the point of it being almost uncomfortable, when the world around you is fiercely, even bitterly, cold.

I’d been to the Glenwood Springs Hot Springs before, but this time, for the first time, I slid into the steaming waters as the woman I am, and with my wife beside me. We went twice this trip. The first was an hour-long trip between pools, back and forth, as we played and splashed and kissed and flirted in the almost impossible beauty of the place. When we left, slowly, longingly, wishing we didn’t have anywhere else to be, it was with wistful sighs and souls eased of pain and stress.

When we came back the next morning, things were different.

I’d struggled to sleep that night, because that evening the Los Angeles Blade had published a recording of several Michigan and Ohio lawmakers publicly plotting the genocidal endgame of their trans-exterminationist crusade, cheerfully talking about how they planned to outlaw all trans healthcare, leaving millions of their countrypeople to die slow deaths. I won’t link it here, for reasons that will become obvious later, but I went back into the hot springs hoping for the same absolution I’d gotten a day before.

Instead, B— spent an hour cradling me as I wept. We clung to each other in the hot, mineral-rich waters of the springs, mostly surrounded by local retirees, enjoying the pools in the early morning before the town really got going and the place filled up with tourists. I trembled in her arms and she in mine. We wept, longing for safety. Simple safety.

And we despaired that we had to long for something so terrifically basic.

That our safety was denied to us.

All the while, around us, cis retirees laughed about their trips to Mexico, and how they could no longer trust the street cocaine that they used to buy for fun, completely oblivious to how cruel their home had become.

They look left, and you move right

There are a few places in the world today—Great Britain and the United States in particular—where institutionalized transphobia has been having a bit of a moment for the last couple of years. In both places, the national conservative party has seized upon trans people as the rotating villain of the week, a strategy that they’ve embraced in pursuit of political power for the past fifty or sixty years.

Their strategy is not new. Really, it’s the exact same strategy, deployed the exact same way, that they’ve used against gay folks, immigrants, Black folks, women—the list goes on, over the decades. They have to change the target of their manufactured rage regularly, because while their lies move fast and hot, they’re also pretty easy to disprove, and objectively indefensible; by the time people have rallied to the truth, these people have moved on to their next target of opportunity, their next manufactured crisis, and the pattern repeats.

It all goes a little something like this: you claim the target of opportunity is causing the downfall of western civilization because of poorly explained reasons (they’re big on “changing the definition of,” as if there weren’t whole books published to track and hold fast on such issues). Because these people are attacking this abstract concept—mind you, almost always one that hasn’t even existed in its current form for a century, much less since time immemorial, as they claim—they must be severely legislated against, restrained, or all of society will, somehow, fall apart.

And, to give these folks their due, when they’re elected, they do exactly that, or try to, often relying on the courts to dismiss their more wild and egregious laws. All the while, they use it as a rage-baiting distraction, which hides the tax cuts they give to the rich and the easing of regulations to the most powerful corporations in the world.

It’s called a Kansas City Shuffle. Maybe an Infraction Distraction, if you want to be really picky.

The people who elect these politicians know that the election, the issues, aren’t really about whoever-it-is who’s the villain of the week. They just think they’re in on the con, and stand to profit from it personally. Sometimes, they even do. Usually? They’re hurt by it too.

But not as much as the villain of the week.

Minority stress

When you’re a member of a marginalized minority, you know from the roots of your feet that the world is not made for you.

In a thousand little everyday ways, you have to make a little extra effort, deal with someone being an insensitive jerk, be held to a double standard, or be placed in a double bind. These thousand little trouble-points, these thousand stressors? We live with them every day, and they’re magnified more and more when you’re multiply marginalized—that is, you’re not just trans, you’re trans and Black or trans and disabled or trans and Black and disabled, and so on. Each layer of needlessly exaggerated struggle makes your life that much harder.

The extra baseline stress that you have to live with just because you’re a member of a minority is called, appropriately, minority stress. And it has some pretty brutal consequences. Much higher rates of mental health problems—an increase of 56%. Higher illicit substance use rates. Higher rates of being disciplined or fired at work.

Higher rates of chronic disease.

Higher rates of death.

Because stress isn’t just a feeling. It’s a chemical reaction in the body, and the chemicals involved are not good for you long-term. Unmanaged, chronic minority stress cuts about as much off your lifespan as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

And that’s from when things are just… passively not made for you. When the world suddenly becomes actively hostile?

Things get much, much worse.

The stress response cycle

We’ve talked about the stress response cycle before. In a nutshell, it works this way: something happens to put stress on your body, whether that’s going for a light jog or fleeing from a hungry tiger. Loads of things put stress on you. It’s a normal part of life.

When you’re stressed, your body triggers the fight/flight/freeze/fawn (4F) response. Your brain releases a cocktail of chemicals, the most important of which is cortisol, into your body. Those chemicals prime your body for quick, active response—the sort of response that could save your life if whatever’s triggering your 4F response is Truck-kun or something just as instantly-deadly. Regardless, that thing that’s causing the stress relents, you finally get to exhale, and your body needs to flush those stress chemicals out of the tissues of your body, leaving you ready to respond to the next stressor.

It’s this last part that can be surprisingly tricky, believe it or not. You see, human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, apex persistence predators. That means that we evolved to chase things down until they collapsed from sheer exhaustion, knock them over the head with a rock, then carry them back to our encampment to be shared with our families.

And then, our evolutionary plan was to lie around for a few days, enjoying the feeling of being fat and happy.

Human bodies are not very well-evolved to handle a constant avalanche of stressors. We’re not chipmunks. For the overwhelming majority of our evolutionary history, we survived by lazing around, then going for a long jog after some hapless prey animal for a day or two until it fell over and died. That was how we survived, all the way back to homo erectus.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that we have trouble completing modern stress response cycles, given that history. The problem is, when you can’t complete those stress responses, you’ll find yourself in a state of chronic exhaustion, irritability, and with mounting cardiovascular, digestive, and immunoresponse problems.

That’s called burnout.

The Nagoskis

Around this time a couple of years ago, I was wrestling with burnout that I couldn’t get past, and I stumbled across the book Burnout, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. And then, I found their Feminist Survival Project podcast, which is basically that book, except more gender-inclusive and in much more detail.

And free, which is even better. I do, for the record, very much endorse that podcast. It helped me a lot.

Burnout (and the Feminist Survival Project, but Burnout is quicker to type), if you haven’t read it, would be easy to dismiss as just another woman-focused, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, self-help pile of glop… except this one’s different. Unlike self-help books, Burnout is focused in the biochemistry of the human body.

And it names the cause of chronic stress: patriarchy. Not men, mind you. Patriarchy, as a system that harms us all.

All those tiny stresses, those microagressions, the ways the world is made to harm us. Those million little unnecessary pain points around the world, the double-binds and painful bullshit. They’re the things that cause burnout, because we can’t escape them. And then the book makes one other really, really important argument.

You don’t need to escape the cause of your stress to complete the stress response cycle. Which is important, because patriarchy isn’t going anywhere without a long, hard fight. The point, rather, is to ready yourself for the next fight. The next flight. The next time we need to gear up.

These things, the Nagoskis argue with considerable research evidence behind them, are ways to complete the physiological part of the stress response cycle:

1. Get up and do something physically active, whatever that means for your body. Twenty minutes of elevated heart rate and then relaxing afterward, especially when the source of your stress isn’t physical, helps tell the monkey part of your brain that the immediate danger has passed.

2. Do deep breathing exercises, like box breathing. Actively controlling your breathing, especially when you’re feeling that stress intensely, simulates the end of a physical workout and tells your body that the flight part of the 4F response is over. Again, it’s all about tricking your monkey brain.

3. Spend time with friends. Social interaction doesn’t happen when you’re running for your life. Doing so takes the emphasis, in your brain, off of survival and onto everyday things, which again tells your monkey brain “now is not life or death.”

4. Laugh. Really, really hard. The reason stand-up comedy is so beloved by many is that it brings up shared, common traumas in a communal way that allows us all to laugh, hard. This is a way of simulating time with your friends when that might not be possible or practical.

5. Hug someone for longer than you think you should (with their consent). Physical affection means connection, community, safety, and protection to our monkey brain. It means primal safety. Our brains are deeply, deeply keyed to seek gentle human touch. When you hug someone for a long while—twenty seconds or more—you’ll probably feel their posture change, shoulders loosening or their neck relaxing, after a time. That’s their body physically releasing their stress response.

6. Make something artsy. Paint. Draw. Play music. Write. There’s a reason I write Stained Glass Woman articles, even when things are hectic. Creative self-expression allows our bodies to externalize closely-held emotions, and then re-integrate them into ourselves.

7. Cry. Hard. Human behaviors exist for a variety of reasons, but sadness and crying exist for only one: to get help from other people. And it’s something we can really only do when we’re not in crisis—just think of the last time the world turned upside down for you. You panicked, ran around, did stuff, but you didn’t stop and cry until there was a lull, did you?

And, in combination with all of these things, there’s one more thing you need to do:

Step back and rest.

Five-alarm fires

When you’re made into the villain of the week, terrible things seem to come at you from every side, all at once. News article after news article, angry white cis guy after angry white cis guy, all shouting in your face that the world is ending, it’s ending because of you, and you’re the one and only person who can stop the disaster they’re trying to create. It’s all hands on deck, all the time, and even if you fight all the fights, you might lose anyway.

You’ve felt that, haven’t you? The crushing pressure of bill after bill, law after law, all meant to crush the trans community piece by piece. The sheer overwhelming hatred and helplessness of it all.

The simple fact of the matter is that you can’t live like that. Nobody can live like that, and I mean that on a physiological level—the constant avalanche of stress chemicals will literally tear your body apart if you try.

The thing is, you don’t need to live like that, facing the unending hate like that. You’re allowed to, and you should, step back from the onslaught and have a little private joy, a little quiet. We can’t respond to every fire as though it were a five-alarm fire. Some problems are big. Some are smaller.

If every sentence has an exclamation mark, no sentence has an exclamation mark.

That’s not a call for a right to comfort—that’s white supremacy, and I won’t tolerate or promote it here. But the thing people forget is that so is perfectionism. Victory, for us, doesn't mean preventing every discriminatory bill from becoming law. It means turning public sentiment so that the people behind this crap stop trying, the same way they stopped trying to outlaw gay folks and Black folks and so on. Stopping everything we can? Absolutely. But in medicine, if you treat the symptoms and not what's causing them, the patient never gets better.

That means that don’t need everybody to show up for every fight. We need people to show up for the fights that they can fight, and in the ways they’re physically and emotionally able to fight.

And we need them ready to fight to win when they do show up.

The root of the problem of burnout, of minority stress, is that human beings didn’t evolve to live in a world of constant, unremitting stress. We’re built to have stress and rest at turns, and our bodies haven’t evolved mechanisms to cope with that constant stress input; when we’re forced into those situations, entire biological systems within us begin to fall apart, going into states of total collapse if we don’t tend to them.

If you’re going to fight for a better world, you deserve to survive to see it, hale and hearty and whole.

Because, if nothing more, you’ll fight harder for a future you believe you’ll get to see.

When everything is terrible

I’m going to be frank for a moment here.

The world is in a very bad place right now.

Flowers, as they say, are blooming in Antarctica. Global fascism is on the rise. We’ve given up on minimizing the devastation of COVID-19. Human rights are on a measurable backslide. The rich are more powerful than they’ve ever been.

And there are multiple ongoing genocides, around the world, happening right now, in plain view.

I get the panic. The sense that everything good is slipping away forever. I've felt it too. A part of me is afraid it’s right.

But I cannot believe that this is how it all ends. I cannot believe this is the end of it all, that we came so close to building a more sustainable, equitable, and kind world, and then lost it all. I refuse to believe that.

If now is the critical time, then it counts more than ever that we show up to the fights for our lives with all the strength we can muster. That means rotations, of the tired stepping back to rest and recover while fresh faces step into the spotlight.

This isn’t going to be a time of our lives any of us remember with unconditional happiness. For a lot of us, it was the time we were able to come out to ourselves, to transition, to blossom into selves we’d always hoped for. Times filled with joy and hope and possibility.

But also, with terror. The hatred of millions.

We’ll have lived through that. Have to carry it with us, forever. Even the most joyful among us will carry a bittersweetness because of it.

The world made a meme out of Green’s “On fire,” the dog sitting in the burning room, ignoring the fire around him. “This is fine,” he said, and we laughed because we all felt like that too. We resonated with his helplessness and willingness to let things burn. After all, what can we do?

Not nearly as many people saw the follow-up comic, where the dog panics and starts fighting the fire.

Or the end, where he sits in the charred, empty room.

And cries.

Hard.