It was feminists who had the courage to diagnose the world around them, to take the glaring light that was shining on them and turn it around to blind their accusers.
“We are not the problem,” they said, tired of being labeled anxious, depressed, hysterical. “We are not the ones to be fixed.”
So when I struggle to get out of bed, when I hear yet more stories of livelihoods lost, when I feel like I can’t bear another day of headlines and hatred, I call upon Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Simone de Beauvoir, Fannie Lou Hammer, Jane Austen, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Malala Yousafzai. I summon the spirit of the people who did and didn’t make it into the textbooks, who died with fists and fire in the air…
When I am down, depressed, and anxious, I remind myself of the irrefutable feminist mantra that guided so many heroes through their difficult days, “It is not me who is sick. It is the world!”
It is this country that claims to manufacture life, love, and liberty, but only offers capitalism, a country that was founded by slave-owning racist men who raped and exploited people to monetize and automate the extraction of goods from the ground.
It is those who held up the pursuit of profit above everything else, willing to buy, sell, and trade people, in order not to work themselves, who carry the cancer.
And now we know, we never got rid of these vile people. They merely became quiet and patient. Their children and children’s children silently crept into positions of power, slithered into courts and thrones and boardrooms, and waited for the day they could speak honestly again.
It is not me who is sick.
It is a perfectly normal, healthy, and human response to look out at the U.S. as it’s been designed, to discover the blueprints under the desk drawer, to find the coded message in our nursery rhymes, and become ill.
The more human we are, the harder it is to get out of bed. Us folks who actually care about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are sick to our stomachs. Every day.
So, let’s take a note from the women who called bullshit on The Man’s game: the origin of our maladies is on the outside. The light that shines on us is not for warmth. Politics, however far away, is always personal.
Let us revere our depression. Let us hold up our anxiety as a trophy of goodness.
For we — the ones who hurt and ache and scream — we are the healthy ones.
We are alive. We are wonderful. We are strong. And, should the moment call for it, we are dangerous.
However horrible we feel, it is not us who are sick.
It is not us who are sick.
It is not US who are sick.
It is the world.