Night-Mære at the Chaos Palace

Let's just be there for each other, ok?

Dear fam,

What a heavy morning. It feels as though there’s a weight on my chest; I can’t breathe all the way into my diaphragm. My phone keeps vibrating with new messages, calls, notes expressing various levels of dismay and disbelief.

Me? I feel blind terror.

A few days ago, I wrote about being scared all the time for the fates of the ones I love. Underneath the fear, though, was a whisper of hope. After all, until yesterday the world could still be saved. Now, I’m not so sure.

The word nightmare comes from a Middle English word for a spirit (mære) believed to sit on one’s chest at night, restricting the breath and creating a feeling of oppressive weight. When you wake up short of breath and panicky, that’s the mære on your chest, the myth goes.

This morning, the mære on my chest is not mythical. It’s the tangible knowledge that many, many people will suffer in the next years because of what happened yesterday. People will die. This is just true.

They will be varied in every way, the people who will suffer and die. They will be Ukrainian soldiers on a battlefield who lack supplies to defend themselves and trans people who lack access to healthcare and face daily discrimination. They will be Israelis and Palestinians and Lebanese and Iranians who are caught in an unbridled conflict — a Trump win is the best-case scenario for both Netanyahu and Khamenei, somehow. They will be women, bleeding out in parking lots because they couldn’t get the abortions they needed to live. They will be journalists. They will be Black, and Brown, and Indigenous. They will be people I’ve never met, and they will be my family.

Every person who is not a white, Christian cis-het man should be very scared right now. I know I am.

Back in 2021, I wrote a piece for Parents Magazine about second-parent adoption. It’s since been taken down (maybe it was too controversial? I’m not sure), but maybe I’ll repost it here sometime. In the piece, I wrote about spending thousands of dollars so that both I and my wife could be legal parents of our then baby (now kindergartener). I wrote about the invasive process of having a social worker spend an afternoon checking if our home was safe enough for our new child, about my wife getting fingerprinted, about trying to remember all our addresses from the last 28 years, about appearing before a judge. In summation, I wrote this alarmingly prescient paragraph:

When the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, the right to marriage became law across the United States, and many LGBTQ+ couples began to feel more secure in their rights. I am one of those couples. My wife and I married the summer after the SCOTUS ruling; the decision of the justices was very present as we said our vows. While we do now have more, and increasingly equal, standing on a federal level, it’s important that we don’t become complacent. As the Supreme Court tilts to the right, key rulings (such as Roe v. Wade) are being called into question. As long as these rights aren’t legislated by our lawmakers, they can be overturned at any time. 

We all know what happened to Roe v. Wade. And the GOP seems very ok with overturning gay marriage. Not to mention rolling back gender-based protections, feeble though they may currently be. So, yeah, maybe I won’t be able to be married soon. Thank goodness we took preemptive legal action to ensure that we can remain one another’s next of kin and medical proxies even if our marriage is dissolved.

I wonder, has it ever occurred to the heterosexual couples I know that they might wake up one day with no rights?

I know families with trans kids who are wondering if they can stay in this country. Honestly, I don’t blame them. Lord almighty, what will we do?

In the coming days, I’m sure a lot of folks will write about the ways in which having a vengeful, demented demagogue at the helm of the most powerful country on earth will ripple out. This is also on my mind.

I have it on good (albeit confidential) authority that the Israeli government, for one, decided to bide their time until a Trump win. They’d let things play out, ignoring potential opportunities to end the war and bring the hostages home, and then Trump would let them do whatever they want.

To be clear: What you see now is Netanyahu and his government of criminals restraining themselves. It’s about to get a lot worse, and very fast. This is not abstract to me. Everyone I know back home knows somebody who either died or was injured or was taken hostage. Everyone I know has spent long nights in bomb shelters calming their crying children. Netanyahu wants to keep expanding this war to infinity and beyond and Trump will let him.

This will, of course, also spell destruction for Palestinians and Lebanese as well. Or, to quote the Gazan friend of my friend Tamar:

Seeing as I believe the fates of Israelis and Palestinians are inextricably tied to one another and until both of us are safe none of us will be safe — this is a disaster in every way possible. On a human level, the volume of death and devastation is already unbearable. Even one slain child is too many — and there have been so many thousands of them. On a political level, this will almost certainly doom my family to life under Netanyahu until And much more of this is yet to come.

Do you feel that? It’s the night-mære.

Some of you might remember the now-defunct Entropy Magazine. It was a pretty great place, while it lasted — an online literary magazine and community space for writers and thinkers. It was also the very first place I ever published anything I’d written.

That first essay was something I probably wouldn’t write today. It was called Why Women Artists Might Be Like Sabre-Tooth Tigers and let’s just say I have a more expansive view of gender and the world than I did back then.

Nonetheless, without Entropy (and specifically without

sarah hoenicke flores

, who took a chance on me) I would never have believed I could be a writer. I’ll always be grateful to Sarah; she guided me through that first piece with kindness. I learned a ton just from responding to her notes.

In the days after the 2016 election, she reached out to ask whether I had anything I wanted to write about the outcome. I was then, as I am now, in absolute shock, walking around in a daze. I had written something, though, and I sent it to her for notes.

The resultant piece was a short essay called What the World Needs Now, a play on the famous song by the (almost) same name¹. Reading it now, it seems so very naïve. Lord, I want the strength to believe in it today. Am I lying to myself? I don’t know.

In any case, I thought today would be a good day to republish the piece (with a few adjustments) and share with my Chaos Palace community. Will you tell me how you’re coping today? If there’s on piece of this that I still believe, it’s that supporting one another is the only way through. I have to believe there are better days on the way or I’ll just lie down and give up. Even if those better days are far in the distance, they must be coming, right?

With love from my broken, terrified heart to yours,

Mikhal

What the World Needs Now (Revisited)

November 9th, 2016 is not the end of the world. It isn’t the first time a demagogue used an existing system to take control of a country. It certainly isn’t the first time a critical mass has felt unsafe because of the hatred pouring through off of a government and into the streets. Even so, when I awoke this morning, the grief and disbelief were palpable. The hatred and finger-pointing were already rife on social media and in conversations with friends. The divide that had cleaved America had endured the long night. 

I have, unfortunately, seen this before. I came of age in Israel, a country that has been divided since before day one, amid various expressions of both implicit and explicit violence. I’ve had ample time to see how division is created, and why.

It’s in the interest of a centralized government to divide its citizens as much as possible. This division keeps the population weak and disorganized, unable to challenge a status quo that is harmful to basic rights and dignity. A disorganized crowd mills around aimlessly, while a unified one becomes a battalion of forward motion. They want us to hate each other because it distracts us. 

But unified doesn’t mean the same. It means a group of people with a deep bond. It means working together towards a common goal, regardless of disagreement, and allowing our differences to encourage growth and to challenge things we take for granted. When our discourse excludes those we disagree with we become stunted. There’s no one around to sharpen our understanding of the world around us. We need to work with people we don’t agree with, even those whose opinions make our blood boil. 

When it comes down to it, we are all people, with real fears and needs. I know that it sounds banal, but I actually believe that this is the highest truth. I only wish those in positions of power saw my family and the families of other marginalized people with the same basic humanity as I see them.

All humans want is to be acknowledged as legitimate and spoken to as people. If we ignore the fears, discomfort, and anger of others they won’t go away. They will fester and ooze poison into our society. We’ve seen what this looks like: Fear-mongering, hateful speech, violence, death.

It looks like Donald Trump suggesting his political enemies (and the media) should be shot. It looks like Palestinian-Israeli citizens being arrested for social media posts. It looks like trans kids being forcibly outed and brutalized at school.

President Elect Donald J. Trump isn’t an anomaly. He’s the result of an anger that has been intentionally stoked by power-hungry folks who don’t care about the consequences. People really do feel disenfranchised and abandoned by their government. People really don’t know who to blame, and feel as though their sense of self is being threatened, helpless in the face of a world in which they feel unwelcome.

As a queer, Jewish, liberal woman I have to summon all of my humanity to find compassion in my heart for the masses I’ve seen at Trump rallies. Many people I know have loudly denounced (or unfriended) anyone who voted for Trump as inexplicably blind to the rights of minorities, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and more. I’m looking inside myself because I believe that our task now is to explain the inexplicable. To demand that those we don’t agree with listen to our explanations as well, while continuing to fight for the rights of those who have been blatantly disowned and abused by Trump’s campaign. I refuse to take part in the hatred. That’s the only way I can see to heal the fractures.

According to Jewish tradition, God has thirteen key attributes, found in two verses from the book of Exodus (34:6-7):

ה׳ ה׳ אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב־חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת׃ נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָוֺן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה…׃

The ETERNAL passed before him and proclaimed: “GOD! GOD! a Deity compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin…”

In his commentary, the 18th-century commentator Rabbi Chaim Ibn Attar emphasizes the order of the attributes and suggests that word רַחוּם ("compassion" or “mercy”) comes first because everyone is deserving of mercy, even if they choose to sin. I’d say that’s especially when they need mercy — and consequences. Mercy to help us keep our own humanity; consequences so they stop causing harm.

Even if every damn leader in the world continues on a path to destruction, I will hold this truth before me. May it be a guiding light in the dark years to come.

Welcome to the Chaos Palace is the space where I write about ADHD, queerness, Judaism, and how to navigate the mess that is the world. You can support my work by sharing this post with others, subscribing, or just clicking the like button. Or just read! That’s huge, too.

1. This version by Dionne Warwick is the very best version. Period.