Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been decompensating in ways that weren’t great. I found that if I interacted with humans at all, we’d be 15 seconds into a conversation before I was off and galloping on a rant. I have called and emailed my representatives repeatedly. I’ve donated money. I volunteered at a food shelf. I ate a lot of ice cream. My energy was shooting off in every direction, reacting to every next-awful-thing. It was not sustainable.
Shortly before the inauguration, I got some good news. I was awarded a 2025-26 Mentor Fellowship in Fiction through The Loft Literary Center. It’s just like me to be making some writing headway just as a constitutional crisis and a Christian nationalist white supremacist coup come rolling across the land. Timing has never been my strong suit, but here I am. I envy people who can compartmentalize, but the personal is political seems to be intricately woven into my psyche. I am not separate from transgender people or undocumented people or black people or Jewish people or Palestinian people. I am just little further down the list. Woman. Atheist. Progressive.
Knowing that I was headed towards burnout, I went into hermit mode, cancelling all human interactions – being just deranged enough that my husband kept to himself, knowing that eye contact might mean setting off a feral snarl about how this country hates women. I let myself stew, puttering on long delayed sewing projects, reading, and cleaning already clean spaces. My meditation is organizing and cleaning. Putting order to my small world as everything unravels beyond it.
Everyone is being exhorted to protest, boycott, donate, do something. But we’ve been raised on the religion of individualism, freedom from community obligation, and the anodyne you do you, as well as an entire culture built around avoiding reality (think Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death). This may play to our favor in the end. People in this country don’t like to be told what to do. But we’re going to be in for a shock when our interconnectedness, including that with our government, reveals itself in concrete and impactful ways. If anything has been perfected in this country, it’s anger at even the slightest inconvenience (see pandemic, road rage, restaurant reviews). The key is to remember who to blame. Just kidding. That’s not particularly useful. Whoever wants to fight the good fight, let’s get together. We can hope for the luxury of arguing later.
I have enough sense to know I have no idea where we’re going to end up. So many things are going wrong in so many ways. What I do know is that there have been people doing work for decades to fight against the rising tide of inequities and injustices. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, I just have to be a spoke. I have to look for the need and be a helper.
There are lots of people, many who are experts – scientists, epidemiologists, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and activists – who are setting off alarms. It would be pointless for me to flail my arms here. All I can do is get my heart and head right – check in with my core values and continue to reach out to my community, find where there are opportunities to be useful. And yell at my representatives a lot. While I am having fits of despair and depression, one of my lingering beliefs is that impermanence is a gift. Nothing stays the same, for good or for ill. We just have to prepare ourselves to meet the moment with the skills and resources we have at hand.
Administrative Note: Due to my writing fellowship commitment, the February workshop was cancelled. I will be rescheduling it to March, announcing a date as soon as my schedule is sorted. Also, I am looking to start a small short story writing group that focuses on that specific form and provides a framework for craft discussions and feedback. Please reach out to me through my contact page if that interests you.
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