Thoughts on a day that sucked less than I thought it would...

 It's twenty to eleven in the evening and I just dried my eyes from tears of relief, but also disbelief. 

From the day it happened, I would consider myself having been a part of a very large group of people who believed that the person who knelt on the neck of a man until he died was guilty, in some description, of causing his death. The fact that this was ever potentially in question has irked me, but no more than it has irked many others. I say irked because I'm trying not to swear. There have been, and rightly so, many impassioned opinions, towards the murder of George Floyd, and though the verdict today was, in my opinion, the right one and my initial reaction was one of relief, and a feeling of victory in a system I wasn't confident in, a little bit of distance from that moment - and it is only a very little bit - I can see why there is a lot of cynicism towards the verdict. It is a victory, and in some ways, it is a massive and monumental victory, and in other ways, it is a very small victory. It is a band-aid on a severed arm when it comes to trying to heal the anger towards what happened and also towards trying to solve the problem. 

As a cis, white female living on a different continent, this verdict is something I could feel pretty good about and then think of 'the issue' as put to bed, dealt with, done and something we can move past, we as a world, as a global society, as angry people on Twitter or other social media, but a big issue with doing so is that doing so is part of the larger problem. 

Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd until he was dead. As a police officer, Derek Chauvin felt empowered to use whatever force he felt was necessary in order to subdue a potential criminal. George Floyd was powerless to fight back. The crowd were powerless to fight back. The brave young woman who filmed the events was powerless to do anything other than document what had happened to George Floyd, who at the very heart of it all, did not deserve to die. There will be those saying that it was Derek Chauvin's fault. He made errors both as a person and as a police officer, grave errors, and he needs to be held accountable for those errors. There will be those who say that the police are institutionally racist and that the police's use of force is disproportionate. There will be those who say that society is racist and that this contributed to George Floyd's death. I don't think any of these statements are wrong, and to try and state one as the reason that George Floyd is no longer alive is disingenuous. If we choose just one of these points, the others are ignored and there will be more deaths at the hands of police officers. There have already been more. I believe the number was 63 during the course of the trial. 

I don't believe that Derek Chauvin got up that morning and decided he was going to kill someone. I don't believe there was an active process in his mind that said 'this man is black, I should kill him' when he knelt upon George Floyd's neck but was the fact Floyd was black a factor when Chauvin was assessing how aggressive or compliant with the arrest Floyd was being, almost undoubtedly, was the fact that many of the crowd who gathered around the incident were also black a factor when Chauvin assessed what would happen with the crowd, I believe it would be naive to think otherwise. Was there more that the other police officers could have done? Of course. Is Derek Chauvin one bad apple, I seriously doubt that. 

There is no answer at the end of this blog. There is no answer at the end of the trial, yet, and I think only history will be able to judge what this day came to mean, but if I can offer a bit of advice: Be Present. Wherever you are in the world, be aware. If you can only follow the example of Darnella Frazier and film something happening when it doesn't seem right, do it. If you can use your privilege to protect someone or to shield them, do it. People are more than the sum of our differences. 

Reasons I Don't Want To Write During Lockdown

 There have been a few reasons why I haven't wanted to write during the current UK lockdown and surprisingly one of them has actually been a lack of time. Juggling life (or dealing with the lack of one), work and assistance of other people as well as socialising with the family I live with and a few other things, it's somehow felt busy despite not actually knowing what I have been doing for the past year, but it's not even that which is currently making me not want to write. Currently, it's my completely scrambled vocabulary. 

I occasionally, in the non-COVID affected normality, make some great gaffs where I use a word and then either think it was the wrong one or completely forget the meaning of the word I just used. I thought it was mainly when I was speaking, but no, it happens regularly when I'm typing as well. Previously they were an odd but amusing occurrence and they were, probably at most, weekly. These days, it is not even weekly, but hourly that I completely lose the word I am trying to get to and can't recall it, or my mind is reaching to recall a word and it kind of does a Groot from the second movie; if it's in the vague vicinity, we'll give it a shot. No prizes for guessing what the last word in that sentence turned into, though I think that was just a bog standard typo.

An example of what I mean was the quiz I was a part of this evening. The answer was wrong anyway (it was actually Pulp Fiction) but I was trying to think of the name of the film Reservoir Dogs, but what my brain spat at me was Riverside Dogs. It's close. It is body of water-related, has similar letters and is a similar length, but no, the film is not called Riverside Dogs (especially not because we were talking about Pulp Fiction, but even if it was Reservoir Dogs...) 

With this happening a lot, I'm assuming it's because my brain is under stress. There's a global pandemic going on; stress feels like an appropriate response. I have a few 'life goal' things happening, and still, stress feels like the appropriate response. Writing, though often cathartic, is likely to lead to me putting more stress on my poor, fragile, broken little mind and I am worried about what that kind of stress is doing to my body, and to my mind. It's certainly not helping my anxiety levels, but I know stress contributes to other things as well, so when I feel like writing, I write and when I don't, I don't get too up my own butt about it, because there's a lot going on that I need to be stressed over, or I can't help but be stressed over, and I don't need to give myself anything extra. 

I have set myself a goal for this month of around 10,000 words and quite frankly, I'm not too worried if I don't make it. Whilst it would be nice to add to my NaNoWriMo lifetime total, I'm most concerned about keeping myself happy and healthy for the moment and everything else needs to come secondary to that. If it doesn't fit with the goal of being happy and healthy, it has to be less important, or it might have to go.