I just de-friended someone on Facebook.
I'd posted a link to an article on The New Yorker about the tragedy that is Trump's election victory, and she'd replied with this: "That's what democracy is. They voted him in. They didn't have a choice as they have had a weak president for the past 8 years. Obama's legacy."
Alright, maybe not a de-friending offence, but she'd had it coming for a while, and I didn't have the energy to argue with her. Not today.
Trump's victory is a catastrophe, and you don't need me to explain why. There are millions of words to be written on that subject, by people who are far more clear-minded and clued-up about it than I am.
Even if you think a Trump presidency isn't a catastrophe, you can't be blind to the reasons the rest of us think so. Why we despise the wave of pent-up misogyny, racism, fear and anger which he surfed cynically all the way to the White House. Why we're scared that the most powerful human being on the planet is someone who displays all the hallmarks of a genuine psychiatric disorder.
And I'm so fucked off that he's seemingly never paid a cent of tax in his life, whereas I struggle to put enough away each year to pay my relatively meagre self-assessment bill. Apparently Trump - by his own estimation - is "smart" for doing this.
So... the rest of us are dumb then? Dumb for contributing to society, for doing our bit for our country?
And people still voted for him, holding him up as some beacon for "ordinary" working people, seemingly oblivious to the scale of this insult. He couldn't have been more direct if he'd spat in their faces and laughed. And yet it was somehow spun as another example of his heroic, anti-establishment, credentials.
I'd posted a link to an article on The New Yorker about the tragedy that is Trump's election victory, and she'd replied with this: "That's what democracy is. They voted him in. They didn't have a choice as they have had a weak president for the past 8 years. Obama's legacy."
Alright, maybe not a de-friending offence, but she'd had it coming for a while, and I didn't have the energy to argue with her. Not today.
Trump's victory is a catastrophe, and you don't need me to explain why. There are millions of words to be written on that subject, by people who are far more clear-minded and clued-up about it than I am.
Even if you think a Trump presidency isn't a catastrophe, you can't be blind to the reasons the rest of us think so. Why we despise the wave of pent-up misogyny, racism, fear and anger which he surfed cynically all the way to the White House. Why we're scared that the most powerful human being on the planet is someone who displays all the hallmarks of a genuine psychiatric disorder.
And I'm so fucked off that he's seemingly never paid a cent of tax in his life, whereas I struggle to put enough away each year to pay my relatively meagre self-assessment bill. Apparently Trump - by his own estimation - is "smart" for doing this.
So... the rest of us are dumb then? Dumb for contributing to society, for doing our bit for our country?
And people still voted for him, holding him up as some beacon for "ordinary" working people, seemingly oblivious to the scale of this insult. He couldn't have been more direct if he'd spat in their faces and laughed. And yet it was somehow spun as another example of his heroic, anti-establishment, credentials.
GET ANGRY
Thing is, I get why the right were angry enough to vote for Trump. I mean, I feel utterly disenfranchised by the ruling elite. I just didn't see how voting to leave Europe, or for a billionaire with narcissistic personality disorder, was going to make our lives better in the short or long term.
Plus, I wrote something on here last year about extremes of political correctness, and why victimhood was stoking the indignation - more irritation - of the alt-right. How, ultimately, it would only fuel their righteousness. Not only the alt-right, but the just-plain-right, and those who don't even know they're on the right - the ones who are just angry and scared and frustrated, and don't even know why.
Those in America, to whom Trump's vague assertions and promises spoke, same as Gove and Johnson's Brexit lies chimed for people in our country. The silent, disaffected majority, that those of us in our metropolitan, lefty bubbles, rarely have any contact with. Well, y'know... except when I go to one of my family gatherings...
INVISIBLE MAN
As I've mentioned on here before, during my invisible years I trained to be a psychotherapist. Once every lesson we had to have something called an "experiential". The idea was for the entire class, and the tutors, to sit around in a circle, and... well... we were never actually told what it was for. That was sort of the point; us having to sit with not knowing what we were meant to be doing... and establishing for ourselves, as a group, what we used that time for.
Sometimes it became a sort of group therapy session. Other times it was used to settle grievances between classmates. Some seemingly just used it as an excuse to draw as much attention to themselves as possible, and try to show off to the tutors.
The goal, as I understood it, was to wear us down over time, to expose the real us... and to get used to displays of raw emotion from others. It took a long, long time to reach that point.
Even at the end, when I felt my training wasn't for me, some insisted on wearing a mask, trying to be as politically correct as possible, feigning empathy and compassion, to the point of insincerity. Being a good psychotherapist, as I understood my training, wasn't always about being nice and saying what the other person wanted to hear.
Others in our experientials just played the victim week in week out, seemingly comfortable in that place... enabled in this charade by the hollow compassion of everyone else. I grew to despise it. Even now, more than three years since I quit the course, I still get angry when I talk about it.
Eventually, I'd had enough. I started calling out the bullshit - the incongruence, we called it - as I saw it. It made me unpopular.
"You used to be so compassionate and caring," one classmate once told me (albeit, only because I'd chosen not to help her write her end-of-year essay that year, as I thought it might be better - given that she was training to work with vulnerable people - if she had a go at writing it herself for once).
I saw honesty, openness, and dealing with the confrontation that I'd begun to instigate, as part and parcel of the training. A therapist who can't handle confrontation, or cope when faced with difficult emotions, or see through the surface of their clients, has no place being a therapist.
Bottom line though: the touchy-feely-ness of it all just got so cloying and fake after a while. It got under my skin, and I found it uncomfortable being in a room with people who seemed so resistant to the personal development which is crucial to be a good therapist. You have to toughen up. I felt I was becoming more real, more me, and I became increasingly uncomfortable around those who - I felt - were projecting a false self.
To be a psychotherapist - again, a good psychotherapist (frankly, it's a piece of piss to qualify; you just have to show up) - you have to know who you are. You have to be able to be the bad guy, and be ready for what you face when you raise uncomfortable truths, as you see them.
But believe me... it doesn't make you a lot of friends.
Thing is, I get why the right were angry enough to vote for Trump. I mean, I feel utterly disenfranchised by the ruling elite. I just didn't see how voting to leave Europe, or for a billionaire with narcissistic personality disorder, was going to make our lives better in the short or long term.
Plus, I wrote something on here last year about extremes of political correctness, and why victimhood was stoking the indignation - more irritation - of the alt-right. How, ultimately, it would only fuel their righteousness. Not only the alt-right, but the just-plain-right, and those who don't even know they're on the right - the ones who are just angry and scared and frustrated, and don't even know why.
Those in America, to whom Trump's vague assertions and promises spoke, same as Gove and Johnson's Brexit lies chimed for people in our country. The silent, disaffected majority, that those of us in our metropolitan, lefty bubbles, rarely have any contact with. Well, y'know... except when I go to one of my family gatherings...
INVISIBLE MAN
As I've mentioned on here before, during my invisible years I trained to be a psychotherapist. Once every lesson we had to have something called an "experiential". The idea was for the entire class, and the tutors, to sit around in a circle, and... well... we were never actually told what it was for. That was sort of the point; us having to sit with not knowing what we were meant to be doing... and establishing for ourselves, as a group, what we used that time for.
Sometimes it became a sort of group therapy session. Other times it was used to settle grievances between classmates. Some seemingly just used it as an excuse to draw as much attention to themselves as possible, and try to show off to the tutors.
The goal, as I understood it, was to wear us down over time, to expose the real us... and to get used to displays of raw emotion from others. It took a long, long time to reach that point.
Even at the end, when I felt my training wasn't for me, some insisted on wearing a mask, trying to be as politically correct as possible, feigning empathy and compassion, to the point of insincerity. Being a good psychotherapist, as I understood my training, wasn't always about being nice and saying what the other person wanted to hear.
Others in our experientials just played the victim week in week out, seemingly comfortable in that place... enabled in this charade by the hollow compassion of everyone else. I grew to despise it. Even now, more than three years since I quit the course, I still get angry when I talk about it.
Eventually, I'd had enough. I started calling out the bullshit - the incongruence, we called it - as I saw it. It made me unpopular.
"You used to be so compassionate and caring," one classmate once told me (albeit, only because I'd chosen not to help her write her end-of-year essay that year, as I thought it might be better - given that she was training to work with vulnerable people - if she had a go at writing it herself for once).
I saw honesty, openness, and dealing with the confrontation that I'd begun to instigate, as part and parcel of the training. A therapist who can't handle confrontation, or cope when faced with difficult emotions, or see through the surface of their clients, has no place being a therapist.
Bottom line though: the touchy-feely-ness of it all just got so cloying and fake after a while. It got under my skin, and I found it uncomfortable being in a room with people who seemed so resistant to the personal development which is crucial to be a good therapist. You have to toughen up. I felt I was becoming more real, more me, and I became increasingly uncomfortable around those who - I felt - were projecting a false self.
To be a psychotherapist - again, a good psychotherapist (frankly, it's a piece of piss to qualify; you just have to show up) - you have to know who you are. You have to be able to be the bad guy, and be ready for what you face when you raise uncomfortable truths, as you see them.
But believe me... it doesn't make you a lot of friends.
SNOWMAN
So... I kind of get some of the anger of the alt-right.
Y'know... "Generation Snowflake" (and I hate that term) can be annoying. Millennials can be annoying. "Social Justice Warriors" (another horribly snide term) can be annoying.
A lot of us over here... well, we appear to them over there to be a bunch of smug, intellectual, lefties, who think we're better because we profess to care.
I mean, it annoys me when people play at being a victim, because I fear it draws potential help away from those who could really do with it. It just feels like attention-seeking. Yeah, beneath that there's often a cry for help, but sometimes the best medicine is a metaphorical roll of the eyes, or some tough love. People need to be enabled and empowered, not kept in a ditch and thrown scraps of compassion.
But nobody really wants to hear that... thus, I get the anger I've faced from the liberal side when I've written about subjects such as, say, Gamergate. Yet, every time I did... it was because I feared where we were headed. I stupidly thought I could help.
And here we are now with a Trump presidency, and what I feared was going to happen to the world has happened. The flames of the alt-right were fanned into a forest fire by how cloying and irritating some liberals can be.
DREW ME
What drew me to psychotherapy training in the first place was a need to help others.
I wanted individuals going through a tough time to know that they don't have to be alone. To tell them that they're not wrong for feeling stuff. That just because they might've messed up something in their lives, it didn't make them a fundamentally bad person. I believed - I still do - that if you scratch away at us we all have the same basic needs. Which, I know, is defaulting to the touchy-feely me that nearly became a psychotherapist.
Yet I also know I'd much rather live in a world that was politically correct, and full of people who are basically just begging for a hug, than Planet Trump, where you're mocked for being a woman, overweight, disabled, Jewish, Muslim, black, Hispanic... or for having feelings, for being vulnerable.
Now, with Trump's ascension to the throne, I've reached the same point with the so-called alt-right that I did back in my counselling training.
I know I pissed off a lot of people when I wrote about Gamergate - a symptom of the same climate which has bred a Trump victory - because I tried to take a middle ground.
In doing so I had to bite my tongue a lot. Things I wanted to say went unsaid. I was misrepresented, understandably, by those who felt my lack of criticism for one side or another was tantamount to condoning it. However, it remains a can of worms that I don't intend to open up again.
But I'm done. First Brexit... now this?
I'm angry. I'm confused. I'm upset. Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck the alt-right. Fuck Heat Street and Breitbart, and the Republican Party, and the Tories, and UKIP, and Britain First, and The Sun, and The Daily Mail.
I don't believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist or a sexist, any more than everyone who voted for Brexit is a racist. Yet there are lessons to be learned here about the deeper meaning of all this, about how so many of us were vulnerable enough to be hoodwinked by the power games of rich, charismatic, men.
However, rooted somewhere in Trump's victory and in Brexit is an ugly, stupid, animalistic, selfish, tribalistic, part of humanity, which shuns empathy, shuns caring, and can't see beyond its own skin. I don't want to be associated with that, even in error.
So... I kind of get some of the anger of the alt-right.
Y'know... "Generation Snowflake" (and I hate that term) can be annoying. Millennials can be annoying. "Social Justice Warriors" (another horribly snide term) can be annoying.
A lot of us over here... well, we appear to them over there to be a bunch of smug, intellectual, lefties, who think we're better because we profess to care.
I mean, it annoys me when people play at being a victim, because I fear it draws potential help away from those who could really do with it. It just feels like attention-seeking. Yeah, beneath that there's often a cry for help, but sometimes the best medicine is a metaphorical roll of the eyes, or some tough love. People need to be enabled and empowered, not kept in a ditch and thrown scraps of compassion.
But nobody really wants to hear that... thus, I get the anger I've faced from the liberal side when I've written about subjects such as, say, Gamergate. Yet, every time I did... it was because I feared where we were headed. I stupidly thought I could help.
And here we are now with a Trump presidency, and what I feared was going to happen to the world has happened. The flames of the alt-right were fanned into a forest fire by how cloying and irritating some liberals can be.
DREW ME
What drew me to psychotherapy training in the first place was a need to help others.
I wanted individuals going through a tough time to know that they don't have to be alone. To tell them that they're not wrong for feeling stuff. That just because they might've messed up something in their lives, it didn't make them a fundamentally bad person. I believed - I still do - that if you scratch away at us we all have the same basic needs. Which, I know, is defaulting to the touchy-feely me that nearly became a psychotherapist.
Yet I also know I'd much rather live in a world that was politically correct, and full of people who are basically just begging for a hug, than Planet Trump, where you're mocked for being a woman, overweight, disabled, Jewish, Muslim, black, Hispanic... or for having feelings, for being vulnerable.
Now, with Trump's ascension to the throne, I've reached the same point with the so-called alt-right that I did back in my counselling training.
I know I pissed off a lot of people when I wrote about Gamergate - a symptom of the same climate which has bred a Trump victory - because I tried to take a middle ground.
In doing so I had to bite my tongue a lot. Things I wanted to say went unsaid. I was misrepresented, understandably, by those who felt my lack of criticism for one side or another was tantamount to condoning it. However, it remains a can of worms that I don't intend to open up again.
But I'm done. First Brexit... now this?
I'm angry. I'm confused. I'm upset. Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck the alt-right. Fuck Heat Street and Breitbart, and the Republican Party, and the Tories, and UKIP, and Britain First, and The Sun, and The Daily Mail.
I don't believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist or a sexist, any more than everyone who voted for Brexit is a racist. Yet there are lessons to be learned here about the deeper meaning of all this, about how so many of us were vulnerable enough to be hoodwinked by the power games of rich, charismatic, men.
However, rooted somewhere in Trump's victory and in Brexit is an ugly, stupid, animalistic, selfish, tribalistic, part of humanity, which shuns empathy, shuns caring, and can't see beyond its own skin. I don't want to be associated with that, even in error.
POSTSCRIPT
Incidentally, the person I mentioned at the top of this article, who I de-friended? I met her while training to be a psychotherapist.
In the middle of the quiet reflection part of our experiential she'd go and lay on a table, making a song and dance about a "bad back", or would get up to open a window because she was "too hot". She would gossip about classmates - including myself - behind our backs. And when I first started seeing my current partner, she did all that she could to stoke the insecurities I was feeling about the new relationship.
Why did I ever accept her friend request in the first place?
I guess I didn't want to hurt her feelings...
We now live in a world where Donald Trump is president. Once again, I'm done biting my tongue.
Incidentally, the person I mentioned at the top of this article, who I de-friended? I met her while training to be a psychotherapist.
In the middle of the quiet reflection part of our experiential she'd go and lay on a table, making a song and dance about a "bad back", or would get up to open a window because she was "too hot". She would gossip about classmates - including myself - behind our backs. And when I first started seeing my current partner, she did all that she could to stoke the insecurities I was feeling about the new relationship.
Why did I ever accept her friend request in the first place?
I guess I didn't want to hurt her feelings...
We now live in a world where Donald Trump is president. Once again, I'm done biting my tongue.
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