Published June 6, 2025
This one will be straightforward. The letter’s in the mail, I’m told, but a person at The New York Times said yesterday that my long-term disability has been approved effective May 20. A person at The Athletic, the NYT-owned company where I’ve worked since January 2021, said the tentative return date is Nov. 1.
I’ll be on half pay. By the time my first check arrives, I will have gone a month or so without an income. Friends are helping. I paid rent yesterday.
I last worked on Nov. 3, so going back on Nov. 1 would make it almost a full year out of the editing chair. My clinic said I should be off for a full year, June to June, so I don’t know what’s going on with that. We shall see.
I would also be returning on the 45th anniversary of my father’s death. A Saturday, Nov. 1, just like the morning he died: a Saturday, Nov. 1. Not sure how I feel about that.
I’m also not sure — seven months after the election, when I rang the bell and said I couldn’t work — what’s going to happen to help me heal enough to return. I’ve been given no indication that anything has changed for the better. In fact, for me, what I’d face upon my return would be worse.
Not one person who contributed to my misery has reached out. It’s probably never going to happen. We’re counting on time healing all wounds? With more attacks on trans people happening all the time? With the call coming from inside the house? Hmm.
Some bad news
While on unpaid leave, I’m ineligible to use my FSA funds, so more than $2,000 of balance is sitting there, untouchable. I’ll be forced into alternative ways to buy what my health requires, including my gender-affirming medications.
There’s more that I’m less than thrilled about, but those are stories for another time. For now, I am going to sleep a lot. The stress of waiting for a decision on my LTD took a toll.
Just as the seven months before it did.
I still shake all the time, still spill and drop things, still twitch and lurch and stumble, still wake myself up screaming from nightmares, still hide from the world. I still hurt all over, inside and out.
Thoughts on our embarrassing leaders
There are so many lessons we need to learn. Waiting for a hero rarely seems to pan out for us. We can’t even agree on what that would look like.
I don’t know if the Trump-Musk feud is really real or just theater to entertain us while we’re robbed of so much. This is Season 5 of The Reality TV Presidency, so who knows. Neither man belongs anywhere near the White House or our branches of government.
One ugly thing about the Trump-Musk feud: It provides a glimpse into the profound emptiness at the core of MAGA. It’s all so hollow. Everything is trolling, ego, lies, conspiracy theories, shitposting. Nothing is ever real.
On the pod Rick Wilson and I dig into this
newrepublic.com/article/1962…— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) June 6, 2025 at 4:42 AM
I think about this often, how nothing is ever real, but at the same time also very real, and about how much it all appeals to whatever stirs fans of pro wrestling, among others. It’s entertainment, not governing, not leading.
That any of us have to care about the messy breakup of these two massive narcissists — and that they both individually wield such massive power — is an indictment of our political system and further proves the poisonous influence of Big Money on our democracy.
— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Citizens United is among the worst decisions in Supreme Court history.
It’s allowed billionaires to completely take over our politics and destroy our democracy.
There are days when we are reminded just how pernicious that ruling was.
Today is one of those days.
— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 1:01 PM
It took just 15 years to get from Citizens United to this
— Maria Bustillos (@mariabustillos.com) June 5, 2025 at 5:46 PM
If you don’t think all of this is by design, patiently orchestrated since even before Reagan took office, I don’t know what to say.
Yesterday while people rallied to help me pay rent and get supplies for the rest of the month, I thought a lot about how we’ll have to survive all of this. Sadly, we can’t expect any substantive help from the top. We’re not a top-down country. Trickle-down fantasies don’t happen. We have to endure from the bottom up.
No one is coming to save us. We are all we have.
Some days we are reminded of how small we are.
If you need a breather from all this bullshit, here’s a photo of Earth.
From Saturn.
We’re that slightly brighter star at centre right.
— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Most days remind us to be bigger than we’ve ever imagined ourselves.
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That’s all I’ve got. Now I have some sleeping to do. I’m still broken but hoping to heal.
Sending love and gratitude.
♥
Thank you
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Special photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.
The Day the Earth Smiled is a composite photograph taken by the NASA spacecraft Cassini in July 2013. A portion of it appears above.
Aimee Ford Foster
Hugs to you