AMFYOYO

No one’s coming to save you, reframe your cognition accordingly.

Hi (No) Wonder-ers,

I’ve got a few new subscribers, presumably bots, who instead of names have random combinations of alphanumeric characters. To them I say: “Beep beep boop, comrades!”

Now, as for the rest of you lovely humans… some of you may look forward to a day when I write one of these without making a Taylor Swift lyrical reference. Today is not that day. In the 2022 album Midnights, she released “You’re On Your Own, Kid” (YOYOK). Here, she sings about waiting to be noticed by an unrequited love interest. Then, in a classically Taylor-esque twist of lyrical progression, she ends with a powerful epiphany: 

“I looked around in a blood-soaked gown 

and I saw something they can’t take away, 

cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned, 

everything you lose is a step you take. 

So make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it, 

you’ve got no reason to be afraid. 

You’re on your own, kid… You always have been.”

In a few short lines she goes from a despondent “I’m all alone” to an empowered “I’ve got this, no one can take it from me.” And for the record, this lyric gave rise to the whole Swifties Exchanging Bracelets At Concerts phenomenon. 

Very few can play the Uno Reverse card like Taylor Swift can.

My dad, who had far less lyrical acumen, put it differently: AMFYOYO (Adios MotherFucker, You’re On Your Own). He deployed AMFYOYO whenever he’d gleefully disavow himself of what he perceived to be a difficult situation. He said this to his colleagues when he signed difficult patients out to them. He said this to me when I refused to break up with my future wife, who had more melanin than his racism allowed. AMFYOYO was my dad’s way of telling someone that he’d given his last fuck about them.

Now that I have my own child, my dad’s parting AMFYOYO is all the more messed-up… which is probably why I was sadder about the deaths of Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Betty White, and James Earl Jones than I ever was about his. I could never fathom AMFYOYO’ing my own kid. It’s a cruel thing to do to a human that never asked to be born.

That said… AMFYOYO does convey the harshness of reality, doesn’t it. No one cares about you, even those arguably most obligated to do so. As I write this a sitting US Senator who is also a medical school-educated, residency- and fellowship-trained, board-certified, state-licensed, Hippocratic Oath-bound DOCTOR voted to confirm an anti-vaccine HHS appointee who will harm children and destroy public health. An executive order will dismantle the Department of Education, endangering the education of the most vulnerable children. No number of dead schoolchildren will ever be high enough to prompt meaningful gun violence action among those we entrust with the power to enact it. 

The last pretense of collective societal obligation is derelict, the last fuck given. No one owes or is owed anything. AMFYOYO. Adjust your expectations and actions accordingly.

We’ll have to make that Taylor Swift-ian jump from the “despondent and lonely” sense of AMFYOYO to the empowering “my power is mine, and was never theirs to take” sense. I bet you’re wondering about the “we” at the beginning of the last sentence, specifically how “we” fits in with AMFYOYO/YOYOK. The “you” can become a plural “we” when you, the only person capable of and responsible for saving yourself, take the initiative and put in the work of partnering up with people who enhance your capacity to save yourself (and, ideally, for whom you can bolster their own capacity in themselves). AMFYOYO should help inspire us to take maximum agency in our own lives, but needn’t necessarily amount to an isolating sense of rugged individualism. 

(Easier said than done for those whose c-PTSD comes with a side of abandonment issues.)

So yes, AMFYOYO is a harsh realization… but also strangely liberating and empowering, in the true spirit of Gloria Steinem’s “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” 

You’ve Got This,

Merrit