Drafted April 22-23, 2026.
Revised April 24, 2026.

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Over the last year, I’ve often joked that while I can’t recommend divorce as a way to distract yourself from the state of the world, it’s a remarkably effective way to tune out all the noise. I have been a person who has closely followed current events and politics since before I could vote. In the past I’ve had multiple newspaper subscriptions and have been the go-to person among my friends to explain the latest political maelstrom. But during the early stages of my divorce last summer, it was probably the most out of touch I’ve ever been with the news.

I’ve previously talked about how my ex leaving me was one of my worst fears, and I was not wrong to fear it since it was based on precedent. So when my worst fear actually materialized, it gave me a kind of tunnel vision in which I had to tune out everything else in order to keep it together. At the same time, it also had a triage effect of putting everything into major perspective, especially around things I had absolutely no control over.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but back when I was married and I would get really worked up about what the hell the right-wing was capable of, I thought “well at least if we end up in some form of Gilead I’m married to a man who will treat me well.” I can’t possibly emphasize how much this thought makes me cringe now, but I’m also willing to bet cash money that lots of other feminist women married to men have thought similar thoughts. Even in a dystopian future, I still located my sense of safety and security in a man (wtf!!!).

The right-wing freaks continue their march to try to reshape the world in their vision. But there is a form of defiance that this holy war for patriarchy invokes in me, a refusal to allow these asshole losers to compound the pain that men have already caused in my life. I already know right-wing men and their pick me tradwives think women like me are a threat to society. Beyond maintaining a baseline of being informed, what good does it do to allow myself to imagine the full culmination of a worst case scenario? Part of the reason these lunatics gain so much currency is that they thrive off the attention and fear they generate from their psychological terrorism. Many years ago, adrienne maree brown wrote an essay that has stayed with me about attention liberation as attention reparations. She writes:

i don’t want to spend my life reacting to other people’s cycles, their mistakes, lies, or ignorant projections, or the domination cycles of those who measure their humanity in false supremacy. those things will continue. but what we pay attention to grows. so i pay attention to the places we as a species are learning, changing, getting free, experiencing pleasure and joy.

In the wake of my divorce, I have found myself growing impatient with people who constantly fret about everything in a loud and nihilistic way and are confident the world as we know it is ending. I find it hard to be sympathetic to their concerns about the world going to hell in a handbasket, because my world as I knew it already blew up when my husband left me. I haven’t had to wait for the Heritage Foundation or redpilled manosphere podcasters to enact their latest vision of exiling women to the economic margins. My unexpected divorce alone was enough to plunge me into a different housing and financial system overnight. I’m already living in a world that has already been shaped by a right-wing vision with very few safety nets for single and divorced women. I note that this kind of apocalyptic rumination very rarely comes from my single friends. Maybe we are too busy dealing with the single tax to freak out?

But I think the other thing going on here is that when I was married, I basically had a sounding board all the time for any part of my inner monologue I wanted to share. And boy did my ex-husband and I both do our fair share of freaking out about the news as a form of bonding. In retrospect, I suspect some level of freaking out feeds upon itself. Now that I don’t have someone to have a constant feedback loop of mutual freaking out, I feel some very welcome distance from how I used to previously consume and process the news.

These days I find that a stiff upper lip and vaguely stoic approach is how I’m getting through the latest insanity (or absurd resignation - the night Trump threatened to annihilate an entire civilization I ate almost a whole bag of sour cream and chive potato chips for dinner because I thought well if we’re all gonna die in a nuclear war, why the hell not). One of the things I love about being a feminist is that our own history shows us what does and doesn’t work to keep women safe, and it is never the benevolence of men. Women in community with each other are what keep other women safe, period.