Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce - and politics

I am an unapologetic about it optimist by nature - I do not fight it or apologize for it.  It is not the personality many would assume about a woman who totally thinks of herself as a NYC girl yet to me to live in NY you have to be an optimist.  You have to be a complain about the weather, regardless of season, subway, traffic, crime, too many people resident who a) never allows non New Yorkers to think they in any way can put down the same things about the city that we do b) cannot really see themselves not part of the city c) are the eternal fucking optimists to get through this crazy metropolis that we live in.  If we didn't we would look like Gotham - dark, grey, dingy - but instead we always see the bat light.

As an optimist there are so many things that in the current climate are truly challenging me.  I guess if I was a believer in some faith this would be the time my faith was tested.  I actually do believe in nature and it's wonder, I believe that we have a responsibility to the planet to get serious about climate change and salvage what we can while understanding what we cannot, I believe in people and their potential and most of all I believe in kindness.

I know sounds crazy right ?? I mean not a single politician running for US President is doing anything other than beating on someone - making it seem like we are as a country in some tornado sized vacuum,  Being an optimist doesn't make me not a realist - I see the problems but I refuse to not see that we so often are working toward solutions.  The only place not doing so - because basically they stopped working for a long time - is DC.  This holds true for the rest of the world.   Governments love to tell us how we need them to fix the messes - you know the ones most of them created. They stopped actually trying to reconcile and now have found that power is pretty addictive and what is more powerful than playing ultimate deity, savior, identifier of evil in "other".

They basically stopped being optimistic -- even in America where that is a driving force.  So all of this got me thinking of a show I watch - because my mind works in mysterious ways - called Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce.  Total fluff, entertainment, helps you escape basically perfect TV show.  The premise is about when marriages go wrong, we blame the other person so much more than looking at ourselves, we try and salvage a relationship believing whatever was broken will somehow not be so if we just try one more time, we swear it is for the children that we stay together, we know we long ago stopped loving the person and if lucky just don't like them but most likely despise them.  Divorce is the ultimate pessimist - what started out as love has turned to something so ugly.  These women are amazing, beautiful, well off, living what many of us see as the dream in LA but they are not happy because all of those things are like a good gift wrap - what's inside could be a total let down.  Yet it is not all bad - they find strength in each other, in laughing at times at misery and acknowledging what each of them could have done better.  Should we not ask the same of the people in politics around the world that represent us ?? 

I like the show because it has a lot of reality in it - divorce is not easy nor is it an easy fix.  It is the necessary outcome when things just stopped working and become toxic.  The world is in a state of divorce right now - a caustic relationship between people and between humans and the planet.  We only see the ugly fights, the way to "win" by hurting one another and what we can get in the settlement.  We no longer remember that we once loved each other, that we were giddy to see one another and that in some way we promised to honor one another.  This is the ugly part of a relationship and nothing makes one meaner than hurt.  We are hurting.  Staying in a negative relationship like that will break you eventually, wear you down where you forget what you could do because you just focus on the anger of what the other is doing to you.  

The optimist in me though knows that if you do not want divorce to be the ugly winning over who you want to be, we have to let some shit go and move on.  I know real life people who have ex-spouses who dedicated their lives to trying to make them miserable.  Move on - you did not just make your ex miserable you forgot how to make yourself happy.   This is true of policies and politics.  This is true among people who are different and the same.  We need to get some serious therapy - because our world is suffering.  Much like in divorce if the couple is lashing out and making the situation a battle the people who will suffer are the children.  We owe it to our children to learn to understand that we may no longer be giddy at seeing one another we can learn to co-parent for their growth.

We need to be optimists again - to believe in each other, in science as a means to improve our lives, in nature and in the fact that we are lucky to not all be the same because our differences are what drive our evolution.  We need to divorce ourselves from negativity fueled by anger and not by a path forward.  We need to get past the divorce rancor and move on to the next phase which all about looking for how to be happy and find someone to share that with us.  All those politicians or spokespeople who look to just divide us - they are the divorce attorneys benefiting mostly from driving us to divide as they gain.  We need to ostracize the abusive people in our system and not give them a voice.  Divorce is not anything we strive for but it can be the break that frees us to be the best we can be, we just need to divorce ourselves from thinking of all the things we cannot do, or it can be the where we stop and never get beyond it, the choice is always with us.