The world is too much
Please let's not bring the world to dinner
Thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. This holiday is celebrated with traditional foods and desserts … and dinner conversations about gratitude.
Ordinarily, I am grateful for health and relationships on Thanksgiving Day … at least those are thanks I share at dinner. (All of us here know I wear my gratitude proudly.) And dinner conversations are like hugs. Ordinarily.
Thanksgiving in 2025 feels different from prior years. I feel the wrecking ball that is swinging through our civil liberties and environmental protections. I feel deeply disappointed by brazen abuses of power. Daily.
Current events are relentless and triggering. Girls (children) trafficked, used and silenced. Their abusers protected behind smokescreens and privilege.
Some days, the world is to much.1
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
- from “The World Is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth
So, I offer this heartfelt public service announcement on behalf of sensitive people everywhere: please, let’s not bring the world with us to the dinner table on Thanksgiving this year.
I imagine that I’m not the only person who has a twinge of fear about this … and I cannot pretend the aforementioned topics have not triggered some of us at dinner on even our best days.
The most recent dinner table trigger happened this summer over ice cream cake. A story about two family dogs and a sexually transmitted infection (STI) was told by someone who innocently thought it was hilarious: a small, male dog had humped the leg of a large, female dog and ended up with a so-called STI.
(I call the storytelling innocent here because it was not told with intent to upset anyone … and he certainly didn’t expect me to blow my stack.)
Topic: A family male humping a family female without consent. I should have walked away in that moment.
That’s not funny, I said.
The storyteller, insisting it was hilarious, doubled-down and rephrased: Jolene GAVE Little Finger an STI.2
It’s not funny, I maintained.
You don’t get it.
I think he explained some more … I only remember being confused and disappointed. I sensed a building-up of frustration. (Another moment when I could have put down my ice cream cake and walked away.)
No, YOU don’t get it. (I spoke emphatically to communicate that I was defending the female dog with all of my might.) Jolene did not GIVE anything. Jolene’s leg was humped by Little Finger … any irritation to his penis is on him.
I took a breath. Maybe I should have taken many breaths but I didn’t because the frustration-turning-into-panic was overwhelming. So I continued:
My leg was humped on a crowded bus in Rome and if that man had any irritation to his penis afterward, he did that to himself. I did not give him anything. He took.
The storyteller looked stunned.
What did you do? he asked.
Nothing, I said. His aghast look that I did nothing while my leg was humped by a stranger on a bus was what prompted my explanation:
I froze. Being frozen and silent was my learned response in childhood.3
I reminded him that I had been molested by my father as a way to explain why the freeze response was in my muscle memory. And then I walked away.
This retelling may not reflect our exact words … I was hurt, angry and stunned that someone was normalizing assault and blaming the female who simply reacted by freezing.
Later, he said something about me not understanding that he was talking about dogs. I think I said something about triggers and coming on a bit strong.
REFLECTION:
Even now, writing about this memory is painful and difficult:
I am not ashamed that I froze on the bus.
I regret jumping on the storyteller. I wish I had just walked away. Instead, I defended Jolene’s honor … a gesture that only made sense to me.
I know this story / this feeling / this panic keeps me in that terrible moment until I release it. I am officially releasing it now … and for this I am grateful.
THANK YOU:
Thank you for reading and engaging with Old Grateful™. In this moment, I am grateful for feeling more like myself and SO deeply grateful for each subscriber to this Old Grateful™ substack.
Whether you’re supporting my work with a free or paid account, I appreciate each of you. In the coming days/weeks, changes to this substack will make engagement and Reiki simpler. More soon with my thanks.
As I type this sentence — the world is too much — I recall the sonnet by Wordsworth. I am grateful for this memory of studying English Romantic poets in college, including “The World Is Too Much with Us” published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes by William Wordsworth.
I’ve changed the dogs’ names.
The childhood abuse was not new information for the storyteller. The assault on the bus was news to him.