My uncle committed suicide his first holiday back from Harvard. He did it on Christmas day, decades before I was born, launching an already-cursed family into a holiday tradition of drunken recriminations. Things started to suck around my house a couple weeks before Halloween and were pretty well fukt through President's Day. But my third year in college I ended up alone at my uncle's house with a girlfriend and two mutual friends. I whipped out a chicken at the last minute and attempted to build a Thanksgiving from leftovers, basically. It was a smashing success and it was fun. It allowed me to reclaim the holiday for myself; I had the added advantage of a Thanksgiving with Chicken Pox where I was abandoned alone all day at the age of twelve which, to my surprise, was my best Thanksgiving up to that point. Being able to disconnect "me" from "my history" allowed me to build Thanksgiving around myself. New Year's followed a few years later. Christmas took the longest and there are still ghosts? But the more "me time" you can lean into, the easier it will be to assemble an environment that nurtures rather than drains.

I have nothing but perspective. But then, "an emotionally tolerable handle" is basically perspective.

The future is more important than the past. Where you were, where they were, what they did, what went wrong, it's all important? but it's beyond your abilities to change. If you were to Dave into your own life what would change? How would a stranger regard your situation if he didn't have all the backstory?

You can't change what you can't touch. These aren't people you hate, these aren't people you're abandoning or else you'd have moved on by now. They're people who matter to you and if you want a bridge, you have to build it. You feel differently than they do. The goal should be to get them open to your perspective, not strike a blow for your imaginary friends.

They're not bad people, they just don't share your priorities. Conservatives care a lot more about their tribe than they do about their country. Same as it ever was. "Country" is a liberal abstraction perpetuated by globalism; "tribe" is anyone who prays to the same god as you. It's not that they lack compassion, it's that they want it delivered on their lines, not yours. The hard work has always been and shall always be expanding the tribe. This has been harder among the conservatives lately because the liberals aren't even willing to agree on fundamentals like boys and girls. And trust me, they wanna vent. You might discover that by doing a lot of listening and a little talking? You'll get to watch someone dismantle the litter box hoax for themselves through a gentle application of common sense.

This too shall pass. Liberal policies are preferred by Americans across the political spectrum but Americans vote tribal nonetheless. Ultimately? everyone has to chase votes. A plurality of Americans gave a shit about the border, for better or worse, so every Democrat went hard right on immigration. A plurality of Americans give a shit about abortion, so every Republican in a competitive district had to pretend they had nothing to do with its overturning. Not gonna lie - it's gonna be ugly. We're going to lose a lot. But in general, "americans who lose a lot" tend to vote socialist. This is the ebb and flow of history and while I think the ebb is going to be unlike anything we've seen since Reconstruction, a flow will inevitably follow.

Take care of you. And let others take care of you. They wouldn't engage you in spiteful shouting matches if they didn't care.