The election coverage is giving me serious anxiety and given how long it could take to determine the results, I get the impression it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. At this point, I know I’m not going to change anyone’s mind – and after several posts advocating for abortion as healthcare I think I’ve lost most of the followers I had with opposing political views anyway.

Feeling like I have little control over the future is not a new feeling for me. So, I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I resorted to a few time-tested tactics. I am happy to report that these tactics have not included calorie counting, which has been a favorite control lever of mine in the past.

Nope, this week I have found myself doing another kind of binging and purging: the shopping and decluttering kind. First of all, retail therapy is real and while I don’t have the science to back this up but I’m sure it exists. Also, future me is going to be so appreciative when I don’t have to hunt down matching Christmas pj’s that are still carried in our various sizes because I’ve already taken care of it… before Halloween.

The decluttering is nearly as satisfying. As I switched out my summer clothes for fall/winter, I forced myself to let go of anything that didn’t get worn or wouldn’t be missed. Then proceeded to work my way through both kids’ drawers and closets.

In Anessa’s room, which used to be my office, I came across familiar binders and folders on the top shelf of her closet. Binders I hadn’t had the bandwidth to move when the room had initially been turned over. But now Anessa needed that space and in my reorganizational sweep I forced myself to take them down.

Only able to handle one major control crisis at a time, I put the binders aside and finished attacking Anessa’s closet. With multiple bags of clothes to be donated, I felt a little better. We may be on the brink of electing a felon who has threatened numerous times to undermine our democracy - but at least our closets are organized.

However, the binders, one pink the other black, were still staring at me. When Adelaide was first diagnosed, MyChart was not used by all the different medical systems she was being seen by. This required me to print out and carry all her medical records to every appointment. The binders had been all at once a comfort and a curse.

I thought about just dropping the binders in the basement to be dealt with later, but I was running out of projects to distract me and the election was still nearly a week away. I started with the folders. One contained bills and receipts from the last year of her life. I always held on to everything I’d paid for one year, just in case there was a discrepancy. When your insurance is being billed a million dollars a year and you are forking over thousands for co-pays, prescriptions and therapies you better believe you hold on to everything. I decided it was probably ok to throw these away.

The other folders contained papers I hadn’t had time to properly file away in the binders: test results, therapy benchmarking, after care summaries, and notes from our doctor about titration schedules for different medications. The binders contained more of these along with CD’s of her MRI’s and clips from her EEG’s.

I didn’t need to keep any of these, but I also couldn’t let them go.

What if a researcher needed it someday? Or something happened to Jackson and that three-hole punched information was somehow helpful? When I explained not wanting to relinquish the binders to Miguel, his analysis was much more honest.

“I get it. They are like a scrapbook of sorts.”

Yes, exactly. A super screwed up detailed scrapbook of my daughter’s medical life. Just like a photo album is a visual record of life’s joyous moments this was a record of our trauma. Proof that these horrible things happened, these god-awful things that I had no control over were real. They are also proof that I survived.

Of course, my daughter didn’t…

Ok, so not a super hopeful message going into next week’s election. Let me try that again. Regardless, of the election outcome, we will survive – hopefully, not in a Handmaid’s Tale kind of way – but life will continue. Thursday I am MC’ing an event for CURE Epilepsy alongside opera star Renée Flemming because seizures won’t stop no matter who is elected. One foot in front of the other, an inchstone at a time, we keep going.

That said…Please. Fucking. Vote.

Image description: Kelly is standing in front of a wall plastered with different posters that read, “Contact your local officials”, “Vote for civil rights & liberties”, “Engage in activism”. She is pretending to read a fake newspaper. The cover of the newspaper reads “We The People Post: Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights”. The photo is from a 2019 instillation produced by the ACLU of Illinois.