Thank You For Asking, But No, I Am Not Alright Dealing with a Trump-sized migraine

KIMBERLY MAYER - Pyragraph

Photo by Paul Mayer.

This post originally appeared at Kimberly Mayer’s blog and is reposted here with kind permission.


I have my father on speed dial. He said to call any time I need to hear that our country, our world, will survive president-elect Trump. While the nation is going rogue, I am sitting on my island in the Salish Sea thinking this is not far enough away.

On election day, I wore ironed white linen in honor of the suffragettes. And Buddhist prayer beads around my neck for good measure. We were giddy then.

It’s an awful lot like my divorce.

But I should have known. A Trump-sized migraine had preceded the election. His supporters were hiding in plain sight. Some were even hiding in my extended family.

Without ever having met, Donald Trump and I go way back.

My first husband was a narcissist, and I am here to tell you that nothing good can come of it. I don’t know how I survived, but imagine arriving in NYC in the ’70s after the storm of the marriage, arriving on my arse, so to speak. In an era when Donald Trump was the golden boy, or so he thought. Building golden towers, hideously gaudy to everyone else.

Even then I loathed him. I may have had conflicted feelings about my ex, but I was very clear on Donald J. Trump. I had a plan to walk out of any venue should he saunter in, or cross the street if I saw him coming—but of course he was always riding limos, then as now. And fortunately I was spared.

Over the years, after extensive analysis of these two men, I was able to define my feelings as a toxicity to narcissism. And so I stay away from those types. Now here it comes back to me, embodied in one of its original suits.

What to do? What to do? First I will write this. It’s as much for me, you understand, as it is a message-in-a-bottle to the world. I need to know that I can still write.

Then what? This is what it’s like after that election, when you don’t know if you can see straight, if you can find your feet, or get out of bed in the morning. It’s an awful lot like my divorce.

Next I’ll retrieve the piece that I had started to write before the election. On the Madrona Tree, and our shared DNA with trees. For someone is going to have to care a wit about the environment in this new era. Right?

About Kimberly Mayer

Kimberly Mayer received a B.A. from Emerson College, Boston, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her memoir, The Making of a Master Gardener, was awarded first place in the Pacific Northwest Writing Association Literary Contest. She recently completed her first novel, Black Angels, and is currently at work on a sequel. A Master Gardener of twelve years, Kimberly gardens, writes, revises, and runs a writing workshop on San Juan Island, Washington. Her work has been published on This I Believe (National Public Radio), and in the Pitkin Review and Minerva Rising literary journals.

2 Comments

  1. Art in the Age of Trump - Pyragraph on November 25, 2016 at 9:02 am

    […] Around nine o’clock the next morning I slopped out of bed, down the stairs and into the kitchen, just as I did every morning but the world felt out phase, even familiar things felt wrong, like when you travel to some other city and everything is just a little off, Jeopardy is on at 7pm instead of 7:30 and Channel 4 is ABC when it should be CBS, and so forth. A sort of ambient dissonance. I couldn’t bear to read the paper and was barely able to go on Facebook, I couldn’t face what had happened and at that moment I genuinely felt like I might never be ready to face it. […]

  2. When and How Often to Take a Chill Pill - Pyragraph on February 13, 2017 at 10:22 am

    […] please, friend, understand that I am not telling you to take a Chill Pill. If you’re anxious, I get it, because I am too. And if the past week was any indication of how this year will go, […]

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