My apocryphal chalkboard had been sitting there empty since Fall of 2024, ever since my father died and Trump got re-elected, at which point I stopped setting cute little messages for myself…because, who the Hell was I kidding? What was the point? I had written “BELIEVE” on it in big, emphatic letters the night of November 5, 2024. I got up in the middle of the night and erased it. The chalkboard stood empty, after that.
The last few years I’ve been in purgatory; going around in circles and getting nowhere. I’ve had an extensive checklist of personal matters that need attention, one I’ve been thwarted from addressing for 3 years while dealing with personal health problems, sick pets, dad being in and out of the hospital before ultimately dying, and pushing through crippling anxiety while watching the country fall into fascism. The long checklist still looms before me, daunting as ever. But I realized the other day that for the first time in a long time, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. A few key things are finally in place. And I’ve made enough incremental progress on my extensive checklist of to-dos that there is finally some forward momentum. I’ve been so impatient to be done with this awful chapter of my life and move on to what’s next, and while I still have a ways to go—you can see the finish line from here.
What’s more, I sense a change in the wind. I mean on a cosmic, collective level; the tides are turning. Warehouses are burning. The people are starving and ready to eat the rich. This fascist administration is imploding due to a combination of incompetence and a loss of support. People are excited about how well the democratic socialism experiment is working out in NYC. More and more people are waking up to the reality that Republicans only really support the interests of wealthy white men and nothing else. The death knell is ringing for the PatriarchyTM. Once the full details of all the Epstein files get out—and they WILL eventually get out—it’s over. Even the pearl-clutching white women who’ve been content to carry water for the patriarchy while it rapes and murders them can’t stomach that same patriarchy raping and murdering their children.
I’m a bit scared to put this out there and tempt fate; but this Spring hosted multiple events that brought us together in shared moments of pure joy, which seems like a harbinger of better things to come. If I had to put a timestamp on the moment we shifted into a more hopeful timeline, I think it started somewhere in the middle of Benito Bowl (I’d embed the video but it’s copyrighted by the NFL).
And then there was this:
And so the chalkboard stood there, empty, for a year and a half. But a few weeks ago…
mandymelodies.com 