How Are You?
I know we don’t know each other, but I wanted to ask you, how are you? Everyone seems to be in a different place.
I ranted the night of the election, shouting a parade of horribles at my husband as he did the dishes and remained silent. He processes differently. As I lay in bed, I committed to deleting Twitter. It was a cess pool, and the advertisers returned. That was definitely a WTF moment.
I moved to Threads, and engaged on Blue Sky. I am starting over, building a community on social media. It is not as hard as I expected, though it will take time. It will definitely impact my reach and growth of my Substack and podcast.
Friday, I tried to do some tasks. I rested and doom scrolled on TikTok over the weekend. I definitely didn’t feel well and I am not too proud to say I didn’t shower either day. I managed to go for a 30 minute run on Monday, much shorter than normal. I showered. I went back to bed. Tuesday, after waking, showering, making coffee and grabbing a wholly inadequate breakfast, I approached my desk. My Twitter data arrived, I gleefully deactivated and deleted the app. I think I need to smudge the phone or do some sort of cleansing ritual because I have spent the better part of a decade clicking on the icon. Then, I set to work on this new Substack. I completely forgot about the journal I intended to start, sitting open on the other side of my desk. I didn’t eat lunch.
Now, I feel remarkably calm. There is a steady drip of announcements, each more looney than the last. For example, I considered the military’s response to a purge. I even joked with a social media pal, a veteran, that I was concerned I was finding joy in watching the choices and what is about to unfold. (He wasn’t concerned about my reaction; he also didn’t think the military would stand for the plans.)
I can’t explain my response. In 2016, I was among those desperate to find a solution that would reverse the result. While I am concerned about the fuckery during this election, and have read posts from people who are contacting the wrong people, so I posted instructions, I am not desperately searching to try to fix the problem.
Maybe it is because I did all I could do? I completed the assignment. Everything is out of my hands. I have no intention of complying with ridiculous directives should they emerge. Not to be morbid, but if I ceased to exist because I refused to obey, I’d volunteer as tribute to save others. I’d be calm about it.
I turned 25 twice in October and that’s a pretty big birthday, particularly for women. I lived 50 years under a democracy trusting that the government would function. For many of those years, I didn’t know what the government was and when I did, I didn’t think about the government at all, until I was in college. Up until 2016, I took on blind faith that the people elected weren’t disloyal to the country. In 2020, I was grateful to be back to dull, working government so I didn’t have to think about the next crisis. Now, we are positioned like a seaside home, sliding ever closer to falling off a cliff into the ocean.
There is no safety for me under a dictatorship. I am a woman. I have disabilities. I need health insurance and medications. I am not “employed”. I am on radio and writing things that would piss people off. There is nothing about my life that is secure. Yet, after the initial reaction, I am not afraid. My head is searching for why.
Social desirability was a metric I measured in a study I conducted. It measures how likely you are to bend to the will of others, and in my study, particularly bend in a way that you know to be wrong, so that you will be seen favorably. For grins, I took the assessment. On a scale of 1-16, I was a 3. There are no assigned meanings to the scores. You have to read the scores in relation to the other study participants and other data points. But it is fair to say that I am less likely to bend to the will of someone in power, who behaves unethically. I stand up to injustice.
President Biden is still in office, and I think that could be part of why I am so calm. I shared with my husband some of the appointments expected, and my husband told me he was not looking forward to “being sucked back into the blow-by-blow horrors-of-the-day routine […].” I am not staring at the tube listening to the cable news narratives. That is definitely different.
Does that mean everything is perfect? No. I seem to be in this weird place where time has slowed. Am I alone in how I am feeling? Let me know in the comments.
Whatever you are feeling and doing is the right thing. We don’t know each other, but if no one has asked you how you were, I wanted to make sure I did.
Thank you for reading and I look forward to writing more for you.
PS: If you want to know where you sit on the social desirability scale, let me know and I will share the assessment with you.
Dr. Tracy A. Pearson, J.D. is a legal, political and cultural analyst, and researcher, who appears weekly as a Contributor on the SiriusXM network, SiriusXM Progress Channel 127, on John Fugelsang’s Tell Me Everything.
She is an expert in implicit bias, investigations, corruption, abuse of power, and law, and she appears on various networks explaining complex issues in simple ways. You have seen her on NewsNation, Cheddar News, Fox5DC, NOWLIVE from Fox, KNX LA, Los Angeles’ longest operating talk radio station, and other ABC, NBC and CBS stations.
Dr. Pearson is currently writing a book based on the first study on implicit bias in workplace investigations and which is cited in the California Labor and Employment Law Review.
She is the host and Executive Produce of the podcast What We Don’t Know with Dr. Tracy available on Apple Podcasts, Patreon, and YouTube, and with free samples anywhere you find your favorite podcast.
Follow her @TracyExplains on Threads, Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin, and more.