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Goblin Week piece #2 by Jaydot Sloane

I hate writing manifestos. I refuse to be so pinned down.

I was playing “Dragon Age: Veilguard” last night, a second playthrough where I can see what happens if I make different choices (an option sadly lacking in real life), and during a sidequest for some treasure I found an ancient note that said this as part of a prayer (paraphrased from memory here): Destruction is change, and we are ever changing.

Sometimes the thing you need to hear comes from places you wouldn’t expect. 

I have no doubt things are going to be hard, wicked hard, brutally painfully destructively hard for the next few years, and I refuse to make predictions beyond that because it’s too easy to spiral into catastrophizing about it. It’s too easy to feel hopeless and give up. It’s too easy to just roll over and give them what they want because the impending struggle is going to be devastating.

It’ll be hard to live, but I know we can do hard things. More importantly, no single one of us bears this burden alone. We rest when we can, we celebrate every little fucking thing no matter how small, we remember that we are alive, immutably alive, and until that is taken away from us we can use every breath we have to be as annoying as fucking possible to the kinds of people who hate that we live.

And as always the lesson of the snail: We literally physically cannot go backwards. There is only progress, and however slow and incremental, it is still progress.

xoxoxo,

J.