Are You There God? It's Me, Unhingement.

Jesus take the wheel.

I’m baaaack! This week’s episode is brought to you by Unhingement Awareness Month, which I nearly forgot about even though I created it. Someone needs to remind me next year!

This May, put your phone down, smell the roses, and be a human being. Now, more than ever, we need to find a hinge. Whether by spreading upper-mid vibes at minimum, making a friend that doesn’t live inside a computer, or using your critical thinking skills (if you’ve got ‘em, flaunt ‘em), together we can break the cycle of cultural insanity and build a cuter world for us all.

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Hi friends!

How are we holding up? Based on my calculations, it seems like we’re all just flying out of Newark right now, spiritually speaking. I guess what doesn’t kill you makes you smoke a cigarette under the full moon and cry.

If you read my last dispatch a few weeks ago, you may recall that I had just emerged from My Week of Rest and Muscle Relaxation after my back decided to torture me, a nonconsensual dance we’ve been doing, my back and I, since the fall of 2019, which is when my life went sideways, about six months before the pandemic, because I always have to be ahead of the trends.

I wish I could tell you every single detail of what happened that fall, it is my juiciest material and I’ve had a pretty juicy life, but there is a risk of getting sued so aggressively that I would probably have to sell my first born child — burn it all down dot com — before I’ve had a chance to really see her grow to her potential. So, I will just say, I had a very stressful new job and was off my hinges over it and then my bubie died and when I got back to work from being with my family in Toronto, the baby boomer devil woman who I reported to said, and her words are ETCHED in my leaky-ass memory, “sorry about your grandmother, god rest her soul, but we really could have used you in the office last week.” Then she threw me to the wolves.

A couple of weeks later, while on a work trip in New York, my back exploded. Not literally, as far as I know, but that’s what it felt like. I was in lunatic mode, so I kept going and working and attended a gala, and even had dinner with old friends before I flew back to Los Angeles with mere airport Aleve for my pain. When I finally made it home, my back exploded again. I’ve been trying to patch it together ever since.

I have made great strides in fixing myself, because I am relentless, and also have the temperament of a working dog that needs her exercise; I must run free for at least one hour a day or I become destructive, so I really have no other choice. What laid me out this time, is that after many months of trying, I finally unlocked a part of my hip that had been stuck for all these years, and then my body didn’t know what to do with itself so it freaked out. When the good drugs wore off, I felt like all my life force had been drained, and when I saw my acupuncturist, hoping she could pin cushion my qi back to “human,” she told me that, according to Chinese medicine, the exact spot where my hip released is part of a meridian where the body stores grief that it’s not equipped to feel in the moment and that the only way to restore my energy would be to … FEEL IT NOW and RIDE THAT SHIT OUT.

If you’ve ever wondered whether the body actually keeps the score — yes, bitch, it does. Healing yourself is disgusting and it’s not linear and it never ends. I get why more people don’t do it. They’re probably better off being chronically nuts and getting a cortisone shot than spelunking to the depths of whatever is truly ailing them.

My life force is mostly back now, but this recent, harrowing visit from the ghost of traumas past marked the third time this year that I’ve thought things could not possibly get any worse. First there was fleeing an actual fire storm and then, shortly thereafter, adjusting to a new level of torment from that tangerine chaos demon who belongs in a memory care facility. I can’t believe I once questioned if we should all just go insane. At this point, in this spiral, when the vibes are giving “awake during surgery,” and even the most basic among us have finally lost it (welcome, I guess), there is obviously no other choice.

So, what do you do when you’ve reached the false bottom¹ of Unhingement for the third time in less than half a year and must, yet again, find a way to live on? You take a page from the experts in hitting bottom — the alcoholics — and find your higher power.

ineedgodineverymomentofmylife

A post shared by @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife

God is having a moment.

Pope Francis (RIP diva) died in divine timing — post-Conclave awards season, ten minutes after meeting JD Vance — and now the Catholic church seems like high camp, not a problematic boys club with a legacy of child molestation and centuries of violent colonialism under its tasseled belt. I also have beef with the Vatican because they allegedly have dirt on the aliens that, post-Mussolini, they shared with the US government yet rudely refuse to share with the rest of us. But I’m obviously still enjoying PopeTok.

The Vatican is a political institution as much as it is a religious institution, and the swift election of Chicago Pope, a pro-immigrant American who immediately took on Trump, says it all about the level of systemic evil we’re dealing with in America.

This God vs. Trump theme actually kicked off on Inauguration Day when Reverend Mariann Budde took the stage, looked right into Trump’s beady, snake oil eyes, urged him to have mercy, and then refused to back down when he disparaged her viciously. Trump is, of course, famous for his bankruptcies: financial, spiritual, and moral. His supporters are a rag tag group of soulless people, some of whom just worship money above all else so they’re chill to overlook his cruelty for a tax break. The rest? Mostly “Christians” who think he’s some sort of prophet sent to slay the Hillary Clinton monster and save America from trans athlete immigrants who are eating cats and stealing jobs from aborted babies or whatever the narrative in his demented death cult is these days. Imagine explaining irony to someone who believes that Mar-a-Lago is in God’s country.

I’m a woman who has a lot of opinions, so organized religion is off the table in my search for a higher power. Which is fine, because I’m a Jew, and our spiritual traditions are so ancient and vast that you can choose your own mystical adventure. Plus, being irreverent is sacred in our secular culture.

a family heirloom and a spiritual text.

I’ve known since I was a child that sitting in a synagogue is not for me. When I was ten, my grandfather died unexpectedly, and my father found comfort in Judaism’s beautiful traditions around mourning, which meant that he made me go to synagogue almost every Saturday for a year. I was OK with it, because I turned it into a BYOB experience where I brought my own book, hid it inside the prayer book, and caught up on my reading as old people with bad breath sang in a minor key around me.

It’s worth noting that while his death turned my dad toward God, my grandfather was an atheist. He was a third generation Bundist, part of a group of secular, leftist Jews who spoke Yiddish, loved culture, and were known to do crazy shit like eat ham sandwiches on Yom Kippur and be heavily involved in the Russian Revolution and resisting the Nazis. His higher power was activism, which is always a worthy North Star if you have the stamina for it. And his legacy is why my family won’t disown me for saying — at a time when Jews advocating for peace are being called anti-Semites — that killing children is wrong and that intentionally starving every Palestinian in Gaza is not a military tactic to free the hostages, it’s genocidal, and in stark contrast to tikkun olam, a core concept of Judaism that translates to repairing the world through our individual and collective actions.

It’s the Age of Unhingement™ and not even God is exempt.

they’re not.

I think that true spirituality — based on love, compassion, and a connection with something greater than our social media presence — is the force that can nourish the hungriest parts of us and create the meaning that we need to get through this one wild and wretched life. It’s the antidote to a culture that begs us to abandon ourselves, abandon our planet, and worship our little hand computers while we descend further into madness. Unless, like a growing number of people, you think your higher power is communicating with you through ChatGPT. Then, namaste to you, because the way this year is going, an AI-based religion will probably be here soon.

As for the rest of us, well, this is a pivotal time for human consciousness in that we desperately need to raise it so we don’t get swallowed whole by technology and fear.

In my very first newsletter, I asked:

Do we get our shit together and try and fix something … everything … before it’s too late? Or do we just succumb under the weight of climate change, economic chaos, and unhinged occurrence after unhinged occurrence, until we welcome our new AI overlords and enter the optimized reality they have created for us from ingesting our old Pinterest boards?

And after thinking about it for a little over two years, I am ready to answer that first question and say YES. We need to transcend. Like, literally, what other choice do we have? The alternative is getting exponentially closer and I’m not about to go down without a fight. Also, so much of the content on Pinterest now is AI-generated and I think we deserve better than to be plugged into a matrix that’s full of slop.

I’m going to find my higher power and at least try to rise above, even if I feel like digging deeper one more time might kill me. Spoiler alert: It never does.

As Octavia Butler wrote in Parable of the Sower:

All that you touch

You Change

All that you Change

Changes you

The only lasting truth

Is Change

God is Change.

So, even though the wrong kind keeps coming uninvited, and I have no clue how we’ll actually fix any of this, and I get so impatient when I turn over every single stone on my path and even the biggest, shiniest ones reveal nothing underneath, change will be my higher power. Because, at this point, change is our only constant, and that’s why it’s the one intractable vessel that I am willing to pour my faith into.

Nothing is permanent, and this shit, too, will pass.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Please enjoy this photo of Nottoway Plantation House, built by enslaved people in Louisiana, burning to a crisp earlier this week. Referred to on its website as a “resort” — it was also a popular wedding venue for amoral psychopaths.

Play us out, Usher.

1. Baby, there’s no bottom. 💔