Come In From the Cold

[If you have a history of trauma or abuse you may find the following material distressing.]

Is anyone else feeling that sinking sensation in the pit of their stomach today? I am.

An unhinged ideologue is running the economy. Laura Loomer is shaping national security strategy. Musk! If you’re not feeling anxious, are you even paying attention?

But the feeling I’m talking about goes deeper than anxiety. It’s not just fear of bad policy or the next chaotic headline. What I’m feeling—what I think many of us are feeling—is something else entirely.

It’s what it feels like to be abused.

To know something dangerous is coming, and to be powerless to stop it.

I want to share a story. Maybe it will help make sense of this heaviness.

I was in third or fourth grade, deep in a Michigan winter. The cold was brutal, the kind that turns your skin raw. I stepped off the school bus and saw my father’s truck pulling into the drive.

That was a bad sign.

He was a construction worker. If he hadn’t been drinking, he’d have been home earlier. If he had gone to the bar, he wouldn’t be home for hours. But if he’d been at the union hall doing shots all morning? This is when he’d show up.

And that meant danger.

My mother—my buffer—wouldn’t be home until later.

So I did what I had learned to do.

I went behind the garage. I sat in the snow. And I waited.

As daylight faded, the cold crept in. My hands hurt. My feet ached. The only thing keeping me company was that old, gnawing sense of dread. I had known, even as a kid, that my family wasn’t okay.

Some children grow up surrounded by abuse, addiction, or mental illness and never recognize it for what it is.

I did. I saw it. But seeing it wasn’t a gift. It was a sentence.

Time is different when you’re a kid. Everything feels like forever. You don’t think, “I’m eight, only ten years to go.” Ten years is a life sentence when every day carries the threat of harm. And with that sentence comes the same weight I feel today: the heavy, sickening sense that something terrible is on its way.

That it’s already begun.

It was well after dark when I heard my mom’s car in the drive. She scolded me, told me I didn’t have the sense to come in from the cold.

But I had denied my abuser his moment.

That was a victory.

It was worth it.

That’s what it feels like living under Trump.

It’s not politics—it’s abuse.

I’ve survived worse. I’ve spent the last 40 years consciously confronting that wreckage. Processing it. Healing. Learning to live anyway.

I hate what is happening. I hate how it makes me feel. But I will live—and I will live well, as I always have.

If you have a similar history, and you’re struggling today, I want you to know:

You’re not alone.

You’ve survived worse.

Be gentle with yourself.

And come in from the cold.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby