👇 NOT A TRANSCRIPT PER SE—CAPTURES THE ESSENCE OF THE VIDEO 👇
I was so fucking pissed off earlier, and now, in the time that it's taken me to figure out my stupid mic, and my computer…
I just feel defeated. But a little angry too.
I was watching
. I love Don Lemon.Don, if you ever hear this, I love you, but you just had Hakeem Jeffries on your livestream and I literally don't know what to say to the Democrats anymore.
I feel like such an idiot typing all of these angry messages into your chat, especially when your main streaming platform is YouTube. Nobody's reading my shit, except maybe the other people watching on Substack.
If the Democrats hadn't let eight Congress people die in office, leaving their seats up for grabs, maybe we wouldn't have lost the House AND the Senate.
I know it's all “what ifs”, but right now I’m tired of hearing politicians talk, especially Democrats asking, “What are we going to do?”
We have fucking concentration camps around the country, and they want to build more, and who’s getting the contracts for the food and supplies and everything? Who’s building all that shit?
That’s right! Trump appointees and his “friends”, the ones who gave to his political campaigns. Fuckers are monetizing the shit out of the presidency.
And Hakeem Jeffries1 wants every New Yorker to feel safe, but how can we feel fucking safe with ICE running around with guns?
The only place you can see this stuff is on social media. You don't see this stuff on mainstream media, so I just stopped watching it. It's all sane washed and I can't deal with that shit anymore.
There was this old movie in the 1970s, Network, where a guy opens the window and screams, “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!”
And then every New Yorker opens their windows and does the same thing.
I swear to god, if my window wasn’t painted shut, I would be pulling it open and screaming down 72nd Street.
I don't know if everybody saw that
(yes, I pronounced his name wrong in my livestream) made a very short video about an Australian journalist who was denied entry to the U.S. because of the things that he's written on Substack about protests at Columbia. Everything is being spun that it's anti-Semitic. Just because you are pro-human and against genocide, that doesn't mean that you're anti-Semitic.I'm Jewish. I think I know the difference, but maybe I don't because it seems like the rules are being rewritten and free speech is a joke. The separation of church and state is a joke. There are no checks and balances because they're all checking on the Republican side.
There's no counterbalancing and the Democrats are just saying, “Well, what can we do?”
If you ever wondered how you would react in Germany in the 1930s, here’s your chance because your neighbors are being pulled out of their houses and shipped to places with inhumane conditions.
In New York, they said that they're putting people in a holding facility that was meant to be used for a few hours and they're putting people in there for days. No change of clothes, no showers, one meal a day.
People are dying in these places and Democrats are talking about voting.
I feel like I'm living in fucking crazy town.
I'm stuck between wanting to stay and fight and use my voice, whatever little teeny voice I have to speak out against stuff, or get the fuck out.
I don't know if there are going to be flu vaccines.
I don't know if babies being born now are going to be vaccinated.
We don't have cancer research anymore. We don't have a lot of research.
People are in denial and there was a man that was tased in a Walmart. Women being separated from their babies.
I saw a husband driving for four hours with his newborn so he could take the baby to his wife who was in a detention center and she could breastfeed.
Like, what in the fuck?
It's going to take decades to recover from the fuckery that is going on.
Democrats are talking about a recession, but I don't know if there will be elections because Trump said we're not going to need those anymore.
He's not even really the one that is so frightening.
He can't live forever, right?
It’s the people behind him, like Stephen Miller2 and JD Vance3, who's the puppet of that tech guy. They are the worst.
When ICE decides that they don't want Jewish people here anymore Stephen Miller is in for a fucking rude awakening. His plan is just to deport Black and brown people, but it's never going to end there.
They’ll turn on people with disabilities and if you don’t have one, they’ll label you with something as an excuse to marginalize you.
As for neurodiversity, we prize executive functioning because you have to work like an executive in a capitalist system and people who don't have a brain that work like that are disabled in a system like this.
But it's not real. None of this shit is real.
It's just a way of “othering” people and it makes me so depressed.
There's no one stopping any of the other things that have already happened, including torture and murder, the bar is already so low, how much lower can it go?
I've been in my apartment and hanging out with my son and watching him play his video games and feeling depressed and angry. But anger is like a symptom of depression.
You may think depression is all about staying in bed all day, but I get up, I do stuff, I shower.
But I'm not living my best life, that’s for sure. I just feel paralyzed.
I don't know what to do and I acknowledge the extreme privilege that I have. I have this deep shame that I'm not good enough, and then all of that other stuff comes up. There's this core inner wound that I can mask most of the time but when I'm working really hard and I can't achieve my goals that voice inside says, well, that's because you suck, you're broken inside.
Nobody believes it but that's how I feel.
I think, if I was better, then my husband wouldn't have died.
I should have…
I could have…
I would have done more…
Everybody leaves.
Well this took a turn.
I was originally so angry about everything that's going on and not knowing what to do and I guess it does come around to just feeling helpless and broken and worthless.
When you see people being treated so horrifically, and devalued as human beings, it's heartbreaking. It's a lot to carry.
It’s scary out there.
Unfortunately I have the ability to turn it in on myself, I think a lot of people do that. We turn it in on ourselves and say, “If I was better… If I worked harder… If I shouted louder… Maybe if I had a tantrum, then I could do something.”
I have a lot of writer friends who have been publishing books and I'm really excited about that.
Midlife Private Parts is a series of essays edited by
and . My friend, , has a wonderful piece included and so does .If you can't commit to a full book, like my brain can't right now, these stories are wonderful. I'm very much enjoying them at the moment.
And I ordered a whole bunch of
’s new book Proof of Life. Hopefully they will be coming soon. I would like to do a giveaway because I can't read fifteen copies of the same book. I've thought about leaving them around the city with encouraging messages inside.I'm going to do that too for
’s new book, The Incredible Kindness of Paper, which is coming out August 12th.That's keeping me busy because I can't seem to write my own shit, so I just delight in other people's stuff and celebrate them.
And then I wonder if I have ulterior motives? Am I helping other people in the hopes that they'll help me?
I try not to think that way because you're sure to be one hundred percent disappointed if you only give to others with the expectation of getting something back.
Most people don't get anything back.
I hate that I'm afraid of what's out in the world and not being able to do anything. Decision making is very hard. Should I move? Should I stay in New York? Should I be traveling? I didn't even put my son in summer camp this year.
In August it will be four years since my husband Steven died. I feel like I've been three other people since he's been gone.
I’m nostalgic for the women I used to be, the ones Steven will never know.
It feels like I'm doing worse as the years go by. I was so dissociated the first couple of years. I didn't allow myself to think about him very often. I just kept going, running, and doing all the things.
When I finished one thing I jumped to another.
I wrote a book4 which comes out May 5, 2026.
There's a lot of personal stuff in there.
I want to say I have zero shame, but I'd be lying.
I’m ashamed that I wasn't sad enough or that I didn't miss him enough in the first year.
It's all really caught up to me.
I had cataract surgery, although they weren’t super bad.
My vision was just really bad but I've been wearing glasses since I was eleven years old.
I thought I'd be so happy. I thought I'd feel so lucky to never wear glasses again, but it’s not the way I thought it would be. Yes, it’s amazing, but it's sad at the same time because it's different. It's like a part of me is gone. It feels like I’m also grieving a loss.
Someone was recently congratulating me on my literary achievement, which I'm excited about, but also nervous.
I want people to read my book, but then I don't want people to read it. I want to promote it, and then I don't want to promote it.
That's why it's easier for me to pour into other people and be really happy that they're doing all the things. Then I can sit back and relax while they do all the scary shit and put their heart on display.
I see my friends doing really great, and I wonder what it will be like for me.
Ugh, I hate being self-absorbed like this.
It's much easier to be really angry about everything that is going on in the world.
I don't like to scare people, but the only way we’ve ever stopped the worst from happening is by starting wars. People who are in power don’t just say, “Hey, we’re giving it up.”
America has always been on the winning side of world wars, but not this time, if it comes to that. I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
I've been talking, talking, talking and I don't have anything else to say.
I did have an idea though.
Years ago I watched The Real Housewives and there was this one in New Jersey, Teresa, who flipped a table.
I thought, “I’m so pissed off I could do that!”
But I had my computer and my water on it, so it was just a fantasy.
Minority Leader of the U.S House of Representatives. Congressman representing the 8th District of New York.
Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
Trump’s Vice President of the United States.
Widow in the City, A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups,
COO of The Stable Book Group; Publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress
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