This Can't Be It!!

On viscous cycles.

In February of this year, I published a short piece outlining the idea of a “mental health near miss”: narrowly avoiding a complete mental crisis at the last moment. Regretfully, and amazingly, my dumb brain has done it again.

I was supposed to attend a KEEN leadership training course in Wisconsin from November 19th-21st (Wednesday through Friday the week before UMass’ Fall Break). However, I got sick Monday evening in a way that ended up leaving me incapacitated from Tuesday through Sunday. Not COVID or the flu, thankfully, but a very nasty cold from some combination of my immune system being weakened from non-stop work, pushing myself too hard while skipping my normal trips to the gym to attend unavoidable (not scheduled by me) morning meetings, and e-scooting to work in the freezing cold that Massachusetts apparently gets in mid-November now.

Thankfully, because I had cleared all my classes and meetings for the rest of the week in preparation for my trip, I had only one thing I needed to get done for the entire week: grade the most recent batch of student project deliverables, a task that would ultimately take roughly an hour, but I simply could not stop thinking about. I foolishly left my laptop at work on Monday, and I couldn’t really grade the projects without it, so that first sick Tuesday went something like this:

My Brain: You should get your grading done now. That way, you can spend the rest of the week relaxing.

Me: Um, no, I literally can’t move or focus on anything right now. And I don’t have my laptop, so I have to wait until I can get into the office.

My Brain: Okay, but what if you went and got your laptop first thing tomorrow, graded the projects, and THEN recover?

Me: NO you dumb [slur], I have to rest now!!

My Brain: But what if…

…ad infinitum. My brain may have been obsessed with productivity, but my body had other plans, forcing me to take the rest that I refused to do myself.

Art by Britchida.

The fact that this has continued to happen every semester is becoming increasingly alarming. When I first started my faculty position, I rationalized my end-of-semester pain as just being an “early career thing”; I’ll crunch to get these courses made, and once I’m in a place where I’m only teaching course I’ve taught before, it’ll get easy easier. Well, it’s my third consecutive Fall teaching only Process Control and Green Chemical Engineering, and it’s not much better. I still operate on a boom-bust model, overworking myself during the Fall and Spring semesters while recovering best I can during winters and summers.

Not that students are faring much better. As I articulated two years ago shortly after the October 7th attacks, students are dealing with increased economic and political stress. More students than ever are chronically absent from class, submitting bare-minimum work, dissociating through lectures, failing to grasp simple concepts, using GenAI to complete assignments. I get why they’re checked out; just look at the posts immediately above and below this in your feed.

I should stress that I am, ultimately, a happy person (in the Zen, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” way). I’m not happy with the state of things, but I’m happy with my career, relationships, and general life choices. Not long ago, I articulated in a Signal message to a friend this exact problem:

Him (out of the blue): Hey Anna, thinking about you and hoping you’re alright.

Me: Thanks [Name], I’m getting by 💜 hope you are too!

Him: If there’s anything you need please reach out. I’m here for you, the group is here for you

Me: It is difficult to pinpoint what “my needs” are when the things I have anxiety/paranoia over are entirely systemic. My personal life is going fine. I have a stable job, stable housing, a partner who loves me, rich in person community, and fulfillment through groups like [the activist group I’m in]. My shit is locked down, everything I’m able to control is doing well. It’s the political world (the thing I can’t control) that’s going to hell and murdering people.

Him: Yes I understand it’s really hard to hold both at once

One of the Things I’m Holding is the state of trans politics in general. I’ve observed a pervasive sense among trans people that it’s just Gonna Be Like This For A While, that we are leaderless and directionless, abandoned by those supposed allies who claimed to champion our cause just a few years ago. In search of direction, I picked up Susan Stryker’s Transgender History and ended up reading the whole thing in two days. I was struck by the seemingly cyclical nature of trans politics: slow background progress for years, an explosion of movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a “difficult decade” in the late 70s & 80s (a return to conservative politics, the rise of anti-trans feminisms, HIV/AIDS), some forward progress in the 90s, trans issues taking a backseat to gay marriage in the early 2000s, and a “tipping point” in the 2010s. The book was published in 2017 but could have easily forecasted another “decent decade” (2014-2023) followed by another “difficult decade” (2024-???).

There’s a bit of “Zen” to be found in the fact that all things come and go, that trans progress trends upwards and right now we’re just in one of those periods of difficulty, that if we just tough it out, we’ll be okay again in a few years. Then again, there’s a much darker thought: is it just going to be like this forever? A decade of progress where we’re allowed to be visible, followed by a decade of conservative backlash where we go back underground, back and forth for the rest of human history? Is it just a law of the universe that every two steps forward must be met with a certain number of steps back? “Two steps forward, one step back” is tolerable, “two steps forward, three steps back” is not.

We should definitely question the idea that visibility inevitably leads to backlash (along with the entire idea of “inevitability” in general). Many trans people have critiqued the “transgender liberalism” of the 2010s, its emphasis on visibility and legal recognition above “material needs” like sex changes. This is usually framed as “white middle- and upper-class trans people vs trans people of color and/or the working-class”, and I can’t disagree there. Hypervisibility has led to increases in deadly violence among trans women of color in particular (I would have written my requisite reminder-essay about this on Trans Day of Visibility this year, but I was sick as a dog on that day, if you remember). I recognize the follies of the DEI Industrial Complex and have long lamented how much of trans discourse is led by online teenagers and non-transsexual queer people with Master’s degrees who lead corporate diversity trainings using The Genderbread Person, both groups seemingly consisting of white people whose biggest issues are that their uncles won’t use their pronouns (and not, you know, homelessness).

Still, I have to wonder: is the relationship between the visibility & violence of this new period (2014-present) correlation, causation, or coincidence? Consider all the things that have happened since the early 2010s that have happened totally independently of trans people’s rise in visibility yet led to this right-wing moment: social media becoming a dominant source of news for most people, Trump having his first term, the Citizens United ruling, Gamergate and other backlashes to pop feminisms, numerous right-wing conspiracy theories coalescing into QAnon and gaining national momentum, to name a few. It might not be a law of the universe (on par with the conservation of mass) that every step forward for a marginalized group must come with a backlash; maybe trans people just had bad timing? Besides, all the education and visibility of the 2010s seems to have worked: a majority of Americans are now pro-trans, it’s just that the anti-trans minority opinion has a disproportionate amount of power due to gerrymandering, money in politics, manufactured consent, and other systemic problems. The anti-social, anti-human strains of conservative thought are propped up by the incentive structures of the current economic system, along with the billions being poured into the (largely astroturfed) right-wing online media ecosystem.

One anti-doomerist meme I keep seeing pop up again and again online is the sentiment that “this can’t be it”. How stupid would it be for humanity to go through ten thousand years of history just to end now? How dumb would it be if we all just gave up because challenging capitalism is “too hard”? There’s 8 billion of us and only a few thousand billionaires, how could we lose? Indeed, it would be an incredibly unsatisfying ending to a movie about our species if we all just gave in to gradual degradation of everything we love. Nobody would watch a movie where the good guys can’t save the world because, you know, we’re all on our phones too much or whatever. However, we don’t live in a movie, and that means there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that it can actually end that way if we let it. The good news is that we get to write our own ending; we can always choose differently, we can always make things better.

All human suffering, this whole damn patriarchal capitalist system, is human made. Which means it can be remade into something better. As the year comes to a close and we start looking backward, I hope we can all get a moment to re-evaluate what’s working and what’s not working. This can’t be it, and it won’t be it, if we can get our act together.

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Currently Reading

• How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University is a new book by Perry Zurn about the history of trans activism at the Five Colleges (Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and UMass Amherst, where I work). It’s great from what I’ve read so far; will report back later.

Watch History

• An excellent, extremely personal cautionary tale on Kratom, the drug that’s currently getting countless people addicted in the form of “Feel Free”.

• A breakdown of all the things you pay for with money when you don’t have community.

Bops, Vibes, & Jams

• Just as I started preparing my Album of the Year list for 2025, I was hit with an absolute smash that may just take the title for #1. THE BPM by Sudan Archives is a dance album dripping with pain and queerness. Fav tracks: all of them.

• Please enjoy my Ultimate Holiday Mix on TIDAL. Drop Spotify in 2026!

And now, your weekly Koko.

Koko the cat, posing in the winter sun.

That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.

In solidarity,

-Anna