Bracing for the bully brigade.

Sometimes we have to fight the same monster more than once.

Nietzsche was right — what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger.

Yes, except for bears. Bears will kill you. (That part isn’t Nietzsche. That part is just… well… bears).

Bears not withstanding, I have been thinking a great deal lately about enduring, surviving and ultimately thriving, in the face of adversity and strife.

Maybe it’s because it’s been getting colder and my bones hurt, maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I can’t see or hear for shit, maybe it was the Yankees World Series trouncing which crushed my soul into a million trillion pieces of a dream unfulfilled, or maybe, just maybe, it’s because the evil, idiot, fat-face felon, traitor rapist who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and invited his rabid, basement-dwelling, zombie incel horde to attack our Capitol, will once again be sitting his sorry, stupid, cocktail-sauce stained, saggy, syphilitic, sexual predator ass behind OUR Resolute Desk.

Yeah, it’s probably that.

It’s probably because by one of the slimmest margins in electoral history — the dumbest, least informed, most racist, sexist, and xenophobic losers got together with a Long Island landfill’s worth of flat-out fucking idiots who don’t know that TikTok is not in fact the actual news or that crypto currency won’t actually be THEIR golden ticket to hot chicks, suddenly big dicks and fasts cars, and together — that crude coalition of Qrackheads put a pathological, Putin-puppet predator back in the office he just motherfucking tried to steal.

It’s probably the fact that he’s already assembled a who’s who of the world’s douchiest degenerates, a veritable Smorgasburg if you will, of rapists, convicts, business cheats, habitual liars, gaslighters, grifters, gropers, and goons and put them and their feckless teat-sucking enablers in charge of making decisions about trivial little things like say, oh whether or not Polio gets to call it a comeback, whether social security, Medicare and Medicaid go bub-bye, whether abortion is banned federally, whether schools are closed and kids are forced to go back to working in meat packing plants, whether our food is safe to eat, our air is safe to breathe and our water is safe to drink, the literal survival of the only planet we got, and other insignificant, non-issue shit like that.

And what I’m recognizing now, is that I’ve been thinking about the concept of enduring through struggle more and more because we’ve been here before. We’ve seen this bully before. And no, he wasn’t buoyed by an exploding car making, white whale can’t jump weirdo who handed out billions to buy votes, but he is still who he is. He is still an abuser. He is still a bad guy. He is still a bully. The same bully we’ve battled before.

I know from bullies. Believe me.

And I know that bullies are beatable.

My mom didn’t teach me how to sew a button. She didn’t teach me how to braid my hair. I don’t have some heirloom recipe for her Irish soda bread. She never talked to me about boys, never lifted my chin when I was down. Never told me I was beautiful when I was in doubt. She didn’t hold my hand, didn’t read to me at bedtime, didn’t tend to my scraped knees, didn’t cuddle me, comfort me, or hold me when I cried.

She gave me her amber-colored eyes, she gave me her Irish nose, and she gave me, when I was barely four years old, via the pointy end of a high-heeled shoe, a Joaquin Phoenix-esque, inch and a half long, forever face changing, straight line scar above my upper lip.

She also gave me the only memories I have of her living in my home. Hazy, cloudy, murky visions of her hitting my sisters with a broomstick, threatening my brother with a kitchen knife, and kicking away the jacks I was playing with on the foyer floor in those gold strappy heels of hers I’ll forever know, on her way out the door, dripping in cheap perfume, aerosol hairspray and desperation, for a night on the town.

And in so doing, she gave me my original “why”, even if I didn’t know it at the time, and wouldn’t for most of my life, despite the fact that much of what I was choosing reflected my subconscious inner truth.

I really, really, REALLY don’t like bullies.

Even though I carried the scars of my mother’s abuse on the outside and on the inside, at some point in my young adulthood, once I had kids of my own, I learned to take my power back from her. I learned how to stand up to her. To stand up for myself. And I did just that all the time. It was incredibly empowering. I felt as though I had triumphed and defeated that beast.

The problem was, I hadn’t yet realized that I had been living under the thumb of a different beast at the very same time. It didn’t look like my mom and it’s tactics and traps were different, but it had the markings of a monster I knew all the same.

It was as if I woke up one morning and became cognizant of a what my life had become. Of who and what I was tethered to. And that was when I was able to finally truly see.

I was facing a bogeyman I was sure I had battled and beaten, so I knew I had to summon the strength and the courage and the will to stand up and fight it again. Or this time, I wouldn’t survive.

And battle I did. Against myself, against giving up, against hopelessness, against all the forces of the world telling me I couldn’t win. Telling me to stop fighting. Telling me to yield. Telling me to keep quiet. Telling me to accept it all. To roll over. To give in.

Every time I faced off against my bully in big ways and small, I walked away stronger. Bloodied and bruised but bolder.

Every time I was knocked down, I learned a new lesson about how to punch back harder and how to block smarter. About how to take my own power back. How to get the upper hand.

I learned how to believe that I could win.

It took a very long time and it was fucking hell, but I got there.

I have faced the same monster twice, and the second time was the last time I’ll ever have to face it again. I know how to avoid them now, but more than that — I know how to defeat them too.

And that same simple yet profound idea is true of all of us when it comes to Donald Trump.

We’ve beaten him before. We can and we will beat him again. But it will require us enduring at the same time. We will have to brace for that bully and the bro-brigade he’s bringing with him. We have to be prepared for the endless awful those miscreants are meaning to unleash.

We have to be ready to fight.

So many of us can’t look past abusers. We can’t look away. They make us so mad, so fucking mad. How dare anyone act like that?!? How dare anyone treat others in that way?!! But to see someone rewarded for it… now that’s when we hit that next gear of rage.

We have and we will again, channel that rage into action. We will, as we have before, use it to fuel our fight. Our solidarity. Our relentlessness.

We will endure, so that together, we can stop that monster from abusing anyone ever again.

We thought we had vanquished him forever once. Ultimately, for a multitude of reasons we must address and resolve, we didn’t. But that doesn’t mean we can’t now. It is in being knocked down by him and those like him, that we learn the most about how to get back up.

We are ready for this fight. We know this bad guy. We know this is going to be hell for a while. But we also know that we are strong. That we will not quit. That we will not be held down ever again.

And then we will rise.

We will rise together.

And that is how we will win.

Bullies are beatable because the not-so-well-hidden secret about them, is that they bully BECAUSE they KNOW they can’t win.

They bully because they don’t want US to know what they know about themselves.

But when it comes to Trump, there ain’t a damn thing we don’t know.

So, we brace for impact, we dig in, and we ready to fight this motherfucking melon-hued monster again. Taking all that we have learned through trial by fire, and turning it into our own power.

And then we get to the work of taking him down.

But this time, we make goddamn sure it’s for good.

Tbh, they really should be bracing for us, because they have no idea about the fight still left in us, so let’s fucking go!!!