Refresh: A look back on four years of Nasty Women by Kate Muriel.
Today, International Women’s day, marks four years since we published our first book, Nasty Women, a collection of essays and accounts on what it is to be a woman in the 21st century. While a lot has happened then, we still consider this the seminal 404 Ink title, one that not only set the foundations for years to come but also made an impact, in its own small way, across those years. With the catalyst of the collection being the USA’s presidential election, the book’s journey feels somewhat tied to the four year cycles; as such, we thought there was no finer way to mark the occasion than by turning to our first Nasty Woman.
Kate Muriel opened the collection with her essay ‘Independence Day’, which began with the line, ‘They are calling him my president, and I am scared out of my mind.’ Exploring the chasms that opened up in her family, particularly across 2016, it was a powerful account of how the headlines of politics filter through and impact the day-to-day and in their personal lives, often in irreversible ways.
In celebration that it is four! years! since this whirlwind book published, Kate has revisited her essay, and written a new one in response, which you can read below. We love it, we think you will too.
refresh
It’s November 7th, 2020, mid-morning, and I’m stuck at work. If I aggressively tap refresh one more time, either my thumb or my phone screen is going to break but I don’t really care, because I’m busy staring at a tiny map of my country the color of a fresh bruise, splotches of red and blue, and if the margin stays that close in that one state, definitely purple. It’s been four days of waiting, and I’m repeating myself to a staff who are just as anxious as I am, muttering the same things over and over again like a broken record: If he just wins here... and also here...
The news comes quietly maybe an hour later, whispered like a secret from my coworker: Biden won. I wait until a customer exits the store, and my coworker and I are alone. Then I yell so loud it feels like my soul leaves my body.
***
The déjà vu was dizzying. Almost four years to the exact day since I found out Donald Trump was going to be the President of the United States, I found out he wasn’t going to be anymore. When I exhaled after hearing the news, it felt like I was breathing for the first time since 2016. It wasn’t so much that things instantly felt different, or even that I felt like the world could suddenly change without much work and a lot of time. Rather, it felt like we were finally able to prepare an exorcism for a very particular kind of evil.
In the four years since I wrote my essay in Nasty Women about how my family relationships fractured in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, so much has happened that it feels impossible to conceive of it all. And that’s okay, because other people have already written those recap articles whose headlines read like a Buzzfeed listicle: Trump’s Top 50 Disastrous Moments You Have to See to Believe! As if we didn’t all live through it. As if we haven’t seen it all and then some more.
As if I could ever forget the way I haven’t spoken to a number of my family members in four years.
When I look back now at the essay I wrote for Nasty Women – ‘Independence Day’ - I was full of confidence in who I am, even in the wake of one of the worst experiences of my life. I still have that confidence, but I don’t think I would write quite the same essay today. It would still be an exaltation of culture, a celebration of perseverance, but the incident that inspired the essay, with time and distance, seems so much less important.
I don’t mean that it didn’t change me or that it doesn’t still color how I see my family: it did, and it does. It probably will forever. But in the four years since the beginning of the Trump Era and the publication of Nasty Women, I’ve come out as bisexual, become the first in my immediate family to graduate university, earned my way into a management position at my job, and moved to a different state in the middle of a global pandemic. None of those things came easily, and all of them involved infinitely more pain, introspection, and stress than one woman’s bigotry, even if that woman happens to be my aunt.
After all, it’s always been so much bigger than one woman’s bigotry, hasn’t it? It’s the bigotry of millions of people who, after seeing the unmitigated disaster of Trump’s first term in office, voted for him again. It’s the selfishness of people who, after knowing Trump did little to nothing to help even them, still confidently believed he someday would at the expense of other peoples’ pain. And it’s also the gentle acceptance of a new status quo by many of those who claim more liberal or leftist politics, as if we don’t still have work to do.
It strikes me as bizarre that we as Americans can still be so drunk on exceptionalism after the events of the last year. Between the murder of George Floyd and so many others at the hands of police (and subsequent global protests), the extreme mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has ravaged lives and livelihoods, and the attempted coup on the United States Capitol in early January, patriotism feels even more like toxicity. We are better than no one. We are still deep in the weeds, and back when we had the opportunity in the primaries, we did not elect a gardener.
We are sitting snugly amidst unceasing accusations of a stolen election on one side, and the false sense of security we have imagined for ourselves under a Biden presidency on the other. None of us are gaining ground, none of us are willing to cede any. Are we better off than we might have been under a second Trump term? Absolutely. Yet, if we’ve traded up, it’s hard to make sense of what it is we’ve swapped for. Bombs over Syria? A lack of consequences for the former, twice-impeached President for inciting an insurrection? Frustratingly slow progress on economic stimulus payments for people who have remained in or been newly thrust into poverty by a pandemic we can’t seem to agree on how to fight?
I’m not sure what it is we’re applauding ourselves for, but the election of Joe Biden is at best a bitter placebo, not a panacea for all of our social ills. We all, including myself, have been at times too easily placated by the idea that we no longer have to deal with Donald Trump. Yet if we hold onto that mollification, then we really are no better off. Government will remain unchecked, too many politicians will always work mainly for themselves, and by the time we see fit to stomp our feet in protest, the only thing we’ll get is the ground cracking beneath us into wider and deeper chasms. We may as well throw ourselves in.
So how do we heal while still living under these systems designed to uphold white supremacy? How do we even begin to shake off four years of Trump’s damaging rhetoric and even more harmful policies when the shockwaves are still reverberating? I wish I had the answers. I feel like I’m still hitting that refresh button, but it’s Internet Explorer on Windows 98, the dial-up isn’t connecting, and it’s making that godawful nails-on-a-chalkboard sound. Not a damn thing is loading.
In the Trump Era, there has been a lot of shade cast on those of us who have “unfriended” (or in my case, “un-familied”) people who openly espouse phobic and supremacist beliefs. People ask why we cannot simply “reach across the aisle”. It sounds nicer, sure, maybe even easier, to avoid rocking the boat with people who we once considered or maybe still consider our loved ones. However, I don’t think this is the way forward. It’s braver to maintain boundaries, more courageous to lose these ties than to risk losing ourselves. For the same reason we don’t sew open wounds shut with barbed wire, we don’t heal by subjecting ourselves to the same traumas over and over again.
In a frightening moment where time has seemingly ceased to exist, it’s a large and bitter pill to swallow that we have many years of hard work ahead of us. It’s even harder to accept that those who have harmed us are not the ones who will heal us. As many activists and revolutionaries have always said, those who hurt us will never feel bound to help us. Why then should we feel beholden to them? We owe them nothing.
In my Nasty Women essay, I reflected a lot on how it once felt like pride to be born on Independence Day and to grow up with the middle name Liberty. I was a child who suffered under delusions of autonomy I now know are false. I was a child who felt I owed allegiance to a starred-and-striped piece of cloth that, rather than liberty and justice for all, symbolizes land theft, brutality, bloodshed and authoritarianism. If the last few years have shown me anything, it’s that the child in me is well and truly gone; she knows too much now, and there is no getting her back. There is no hitting refresh. I’m not sure I’d want to anyway.
Kate is a Latina writer, rabid feminist, coffee drinker, noodle eater, smoothie maker, joy creator, ardent cat mom and avid K-pop stan. She has a dual BA in criminology and women and gender studies, loves peer-reviewed journal articles about feminist criminology and monster theory, and is working toward a TEFL certification with hopes of teaching abroad. @livedeliberate
You can read Kate’s initial essay ‘Independence Day’ in Nasty Women, available here.