I’m all too familiar with the spiral Anne Wheaton describes here. The stress of the news, coupled with the kitchen repairs and impending divorce and new job and old job and milestone birthday…they all wrap around the next two and a half weeks.

Why being separated from my kids has probably shortened my life. It’s been almost 11 months since the water heater died and almost 12 since my youngest and I last talked.

I’m still here, hanging by a thread, and Lachesis only knows how long it truly is.

Perspective tells me that those extra years that I got, that my mom didn’t have, were spent trying to make things better for my kids under ever increasing amounts of stress.

Election Day…my birthday…feels like a deadline. A point of no return.

You might be able to turn off the news, turn away from the ongoing horror of murder, false incarceration, and outright lies, but I feel them in my bones. There’s no middle ground for me.

I am here to bear witness, for as long and as much of the coming dark as I can.

I won’t take my own life, because there’s no place else to go, but every day I feel that much closer to its end.

The news has a visceral effect on me. I feel it all. I don’t know how people go through their days tuning it out.

I can’t do that. I refuse to pretend that there’s such a thing as the Alt Left. That concentration camps are okay because people are here illegally. That the justice system isn’t rigged. That our Election process isn’t broken. And that Republicans aren’t almost exclusively to blame for all of it.

You have friends who believe every one of those things, that Democrats are evil, greedy Jewish bastards. And you’re still friends with them.

How?

Why?

I’m heading to work shortly. Again.

Just another day.

One day more.