Sorry, We Can’t All Just Go Insane
Shall we get our shit together then?
Before we get into it today:
Hi! I’m Liz and this is Burn It All Down, the internet’s foremost source for whatever I feel like saying.
Today’s newsletter is the third part of an accidental series. In 2024, I announced my pivot to sanity. In 2025, I suggested we should all just go insane. But, like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our zeitgeist. Mere weeks into 2026 and insanity must be swiftly abandoned before we lose all good that remains.
Second pivot to sanity is now underway …
♫ do do do do do do do ♫
What a brutal start to January. The classic “new year, new me” mass psychosis didn’t even get a full week to have its way with us before new levels of state-sponsored murder and violence made everyone insane.
Classically, I would say more about that, but hearing the word “cancer” changed the aperture on my worries and the murder cells are still on my arm. Then, three days after I flew back to LA from Australia (a country that is an appropriate distance from Donald Trump), I rocked up to an unrelated doctor’s appointment clearly marked, “General Surgery,” oat latte in hand, as if I was getting my bangs trimmed and not having surgery that would knock me on my ass for two weeks.
I can’t think globally when, locally, I was so recently shanked in the back by a 95-year-old man.
I already can’t with this year, which is fine, because suddenly, like so many white women who spend too much time on the internet, I follow the Chinese zodiac. Despite what my algo thinks, Lunar New Year begins on February 17. By then, I will be done surgically shedding my skin. I’ll bid farewell to the Year of the Snake and be ready to receive the Year of the Horse as it gallops on in. If that doesn’t take, Western astrology offers us a third fresh start, the equinox at the beginning of Aries season on March 20 (the dawn of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and fall for my beloved Aussie readers). If neither of those take, we’ll have to wait, but on the evening of 9/11/26, Rosh Hashanah will usher us into 5787.
We’ve got options! And in the meantime, while I wait around to have another surgery this month, I will be tranquilized.
I video chat with my psychiatrist twice a year so I can keep microdosing business meth, and as luck would have it, we had an appointment scheduled a few days after my shanking. I told him all about my dermatology disasters and he told me that I had come to the right guy and then wrote me a generous Xanax prescription. The three-hour nap I had the next day under my heated blanket healed me enough to go on.
Midway through last week, unable to clear my noisy head with a nice “Jack Black,” which is what I call a very long power walk around my neighborhood because I often cross paths with Jack Black who is out doing the same thing in a full tie-dye outfit, I decided I’d like to be put into a coma until my next surgery is done and the good doctor tells me my melanoma has been disposed of.
I’ve read Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s trash fiction masterpiece, at least five times since I was a teenager. The Swiss “sleep cure” clinic that aging showgirl Jennifer North checks herself into, where they drug you unconscious until you’re ready to be roused, skinny and refreshed, has a special place in my heart. Valley of the Dolls is a campy-ass artifact of the 1960s, but the dream of going to sleep and waking up cured from what ails you is timeless.
A Swiss clinic is not in my budget, but I am no hero. Twice last week, when spiraling hours began, I took a tranquilizer and made myself a sandwich in the style of Stevie Nicks, who, in 2014, recounted the highs and lows of the eight years she spent on Klonopin. Her words are forever with me:
I was on Klonopin. It’s a tranquilizer. You’re tranquil. I stayed home in a really beautiful house, watched a lot of TV, and ordered from Jerry’s deli.
The way I optimistically underestimated every single phase of this surgery needs to be studied. I got the stitches out on Friday and literally had a yoga class booked for Saturday. When the very kind nurse told me to give it another week (at least) because the incision is still healing, I had to click cancel in the ClassPass app and come to terms with my insanity.
Because I recently had too much time to commune with my wounded inner child, I can confidently tell you that underestimating the horrors ahead is a lifelong theme for me. My optimism is immortal, even when I assume, in the pit of despair after another disastrous gap between reality and my hopeful expectations, that it has finally perished in an act of mercy. I still think better days are coming despite all accrued evidence. It’s not a bad way to be; it gets me pretty far. But delusion is not a viable coping mechanism with everything going on.
These are hard times and they keep getting harder.
Evil motherfuckers reign, a shattered mirror passes for reality, the planet is melting, people are dying, we all have our own shit to deal with, no one knows what to do, and the ones who claim to are monetizing a brand online. We wonder, after a new version of normalcy has been eviscerated again:
What’s the right way to react?
How can we resist?
Where are we headed?
Will any of this get fixed?
Solving the world’s problems is not the job of everyone with a phone. A good first step toward sanity is admitting that you have no control.
I don’t claim to have the answers. I’m not a politician (lmao) or a community organizer or a dude pontificating on CNN. I’m just a broad with a blog who feels cultural shifts and knows from voluminous personal experience that nothing will change until we stop spinning out and take our power back. We have a lot of proof now that wanting things to be different and complaining about it on the internet is not a viable pathway to social progress. In fact, all of our posting has become a hindrance.
There is a psychological phenomenon, a byproduct of social reality, that has been widely studied and repeatedly proven: Telling someone your goals makes following through on them less likely to happen. When you want to achieve something, anything, there are steps that need to be taken and work that needs to get done. Ideally, you’re not satisfied until the necessary work is complete. But, when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, your brain gets a flood of those nice, happy chemicals we all adore, and then, because you’re already satisfied with yourself, and recognized as a doer in your community, you’re less motivated to follow through on what you just declared publicly.
A 2009 study, led by a psychologist who devoted his entire career to this phenomenon, found that when the goals we publicize are directly related to our sense of identity (hello, personal brand) the outcomes are even worse.
Constantly publicizing our political grievances and the rush we get when people engage is keeping us frozen. Our brains get tricked into thinking that a goal was achieved and they stop investing energy in an endgame. The hit from views and likes is potent and instant. Change takes time.
I’m not saying that we need to stop posting. We need to share information and experience communal catharsis which still very much happens online. But we have to figure something out, at some point … right?
So, toward sanity we shall sail, even if we must (again) find new ways to navigate against these never-ending headwinds. If we all just go insane then we forfeit our minds, our hearts, and our beautiful spirits to the darkness. The darkness doesn’t deserve us and we can’t let the fascists, the bastards, and the [insert your own ongoing personal catastrophe here] win.
I’m not going down without a fight. I can’t help that I’m like this!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz