Today I am 37. Today this blog is 6 years old.

I have no idea how either I or this blog have lasted this long. I haven’t always been the most faithful of blogmistresses. Especially not these last months of fulltime paid work. I swear I wrote more typing on my little cellphone with no internet access and no home than I do now that I’ve moved on up to the top end of the working poor. I feel like I’ve written the same things over and over again, but then I realize that my views are more radical now than they were when I first started.

I started as an agnostic, yellow-dog never miss a vote Democrat. I am now an atheist with zero love for the party of 2% less evil. You might think that cutting the string of faith in either a higher being or legacy party or a political system in general would make one more pessimistic. Oddly enough, the opposite is true. With my rising cynicism in all that is current comes a rising optimism in all that is possible. It’s weird.

There’s a saying that therapists use with abuse victims. “Once you see it for what it is, you can’t unsee it”. I think that doesn’t just apply to the individual horrors, the day to day interpersonal violence, but to the big, systemic, institutionalized ones as well.

So I went through this thing, where I saw the full measure of awful and had my core shaken a bit. You all were there for it. You all kept us fed through it. It’s a little knee-bucking. And for a while I could not see how I could win this rigged game of life. I still don’t think I can win it. But I think I can survive it.

belle hooks (who doesn’t love belle hooks, right?) talks about love being an action and not a feeling. That helps. Feelings happen to us. We have this idea that we have no control over them. And that’s sort of true (cognitive behavioral therapy says we can change how we feel). But I think of love as an active choice. I choose to love my kid and my friends and my boyfriend. And I commit acts of love