I prefer to keep my irl life pretty close to my chest, especially as I've gotten a tiny bit older, but fuck it I'll let you peek behind the curtain for a second.

For context, I'm a student in something Related to Healthcare™ and I'm graduating in May. There are a lot of fires going on right now, but there are also plenty of people doing the work to combat all the frankly evil shit going down right now; I'm just gonna speak on what's directly under my purview for brevity.

CDC resources and data sets are being completely obliterated in real time to the point where professors and other educators (or even just normal people trying to look shit up) have to drastically edit resources for our classes and find alternatives. The CDC is yoinking research papers to scrub out anything involving trans or nb people; even if they try to edit existing datasets to comply with whatever dumbass EOs getting penned, it will completely fuck them up. We're stuck clutching the data sets that were archived earlier in the week like a priest clutching a crucifix in an exorcism. Outside of being direct hostility acting as a leadup to physical violence to people like me, my loved ones, and plenty of people in my wider social circles, we're literally watching knowledge burn in real time 🧍‍♂️

Shoutout to the US withdrawing from the World Health Organization, cutting USAID, whatever stupid shit Musk is doing with Medicare and Medicaid, and RFK Jr.'s brainworm 🙄

I know the work will be important and that professors like to view their students as future change makers, but its really hard to not go stare at the ceiling for a bit; admittedly the dread and anxiety didn't really catch up to me until a couple weeks in, and it's very hard to count my blessings right now too. This is either the best time to graduate in healthcare or the worst time to graduate in healthcare and I sorta can't tell which one of those it is on any given day.

Stay safe, it's a mean world out there. If you're having a hard time finding a reason to live, live to spite them.