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# While the lege rests, I churn.
- URL: https://bayou-city-sludge.ghost.io/while-the-lege-rests-i-churn/
- Published: 2025-01-18T23:53:42.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-07T22:48:29.000Z
- Description: Might as well write about my Big Feelings. You can skip this one.
- Author: Sara Cress
- Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1794091451356, #Import 2026-11-07 22:47

As was agreed upon last Wednesday, the Texas House and Senate adjourned Thursday until next Wednesday, and that feels appropriate. I don’t know about yours, but my world still seems shut down. Like none of us have been able to really get this year started. The fires. The freezes. The pending MAGA takeover. TikTok about to get yoinked from the youths’ precious hands. I’ve had two long work contracts come to an end, so I don’t have much to do every day but read the news, go to the gym and worry about what my future looks like.  
  
I’m going to need more work soon or I’ll go crazy. And broke.  
  
The general vibe I’m getting is that we’re all bracing for Monday and the horrors to come. We’ve had this dead zone of time to silently shake and stare into space. It’s the same trauma response I have to the threat of flooding since Harvey — I have a hard time moving, thinking, doing. Time slows, nothing feels real. I watch noted sexual abuser and alcoholic Pete Hegseth get praised by a Senator for being a “breath of fresh air” in his hearing to run the U.S. military and I dissociate further.

I am wiser this time around. I know how to take better care of my brain. I know that you can’t take every (any?) comment Trump makes seriously. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Etc. etc. Not being as active on Twitter has helped some. Yet, the news keeps coming and the dread remains.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/51/6d51d957-e70d-452f-8661-3823af319edd/content/images/2026/11/e1b3fc9e-cf8d-4e34-add5-74f445b89baa_1021x1130-1.png)

I don’t know what I fear the most. Is it the return of hourly chaos? Rights we have fought for, voted for, enjoyed, being overturned? More climate disasters that we refuse to take seriously? Economic collapse? Cruelty toward the most vulnerable? War? More and deadlier pandemics? The end of a federal government? [This guy](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.qE4.4N4c.ZIVFuiFPnxjU&smid=url-share&ref=bayou-city-sludge.ghost.io)? It’s a rich tapestry of terrible possibilities and they all run through my head at once, making me sick.

I dread another Texas legislative session in the same way. The first couple of days, our legislators are shaking hands with each other and basking in tradition and ceremony that goes back decades. Watching it on the livestream, you can convince yourself that our representatives are all just people trying to do the right thing. But when some of these people start [tweeting](https://x.com/BriscoeCain/status/1880650286265721301?ref=bayou-city-sludge.ghost.io) or you find out what they believe is the right thing, the semblance of union falls apart.

I’m a straight white woman living in a wealthy area of Houston. But that’s not who I am, really. I grew up in Pasadena. I was raised in the Southern Baptist faith. My mom stayed home, my dad was a car salesman working at a dealership on Highway 225\. It was a paycheck-to-paycheck life that relied heavily on credit card debt. I could see the refineries flaring off poison a few miles away at night. Our street flooded regularly. I went to school next door to chemical explosions that rattled the school buildings. The air was rancid, even on nice days.

I will always be that vulnerable, worried girl watching the glowing night sky from our driveway. And that’s why I care so deeply about the people affected by what the Texas legislature does. Our state government has the power to help struggling families, to house and ensure healthcare for our poorest residents, to fully fund public schools, to regulate industries that have polluted our communities for so long, to protect our well-being and livelihoods. But it doesn’t do ANY of that.

Instead, it creates barriers and intensifies pain. It imagines problems that don’t exist. It tries to go back in time and make me a good, Christian girl. But that went out the window the third or fourth time I listened to *Closer to Fine*, and how do you legislate that? (I shouldn’t ask.) They try to minimize or erase your existence. To tell you, an adult, what to do, how to think. To bombard you and erode you with messages that you’re doing it all wrong, that you’re a bad person. That you’re a bad parent, or don’t know enough scripture to parent your child. That you’re an bad teacher trying to corrupt children. That you ask for too much.

I am a failure to Texas Republicans. A childless, wanton atheist, they want to legislate me into submission.

Try me.

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