Some Notes To Self: How To Try When Everything Sucks

What can we do when the whole world is on fire?

I originally jotted this down as a note on my phone to share on Instagram. I wrote it largely for myself and my close friends, but I'm publishing a half-polished draft here in case it helps anyone else.

If you're bothered that this post is unrelated to pop culture, skip it and wait for the next one. There should be three other newsletters coming soon.

If you're shocked by my values – which have quietly been a part of me since I was a kid at my local library, a teenager volunteering with my youth group, a college student working at my school's gender justice center, a writer spotlighting marginalized filmmakers – get over it. What's happening in America right now impacts everyone, regardless of their personal relationship to politics.

It's very hard to want to do anything this week. The full-court press method the Trump administration is taking to suppress resistance, hurt people, and dismantle a century’s worth of public systems is, unfortunately, working on me at this moment. I'm overwhelmed and feeling helpless, and I can't even keep up with all the news anymore. I tuned out for two days to deal with Storm Éowyn, and it feels like 10,000 terrible things happened in that time.

But I've been thinking a lot about what we can still do to make a difference during this time in history when our brains feel like they're about to break. By "we" I mean every person I know – every person who's willing to try, not just self-proclaimed activists and leftists. Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. Stick with your local community. If you don't know what to do right now, look into what immigrants, queer and trans people, pregnant people, disabled folks, older folks, kids and teens, people of color, and poor people need within a 10 mile radius (or further, if you're rural) of where you live. In most but not all cases, someone else will likely already have built the framework to help, so all you have to do is jump in and join. If you don't have the bandwidth to research your local mutual aid groups and support networks, I'm happy to help you get started.
2. Everyone is going to be impacted by the new changes to federal employment and labor protections. Check in with your friends and family members who might already be impacted. Talk to them about how they're holding up and, if they’re miserable and feeling the moral dissonance, help them weigh their options when it comes to civil disobedience, malicious compliance strategies, or leaving their job if needed.
3. Stop wasting precious time trying to convince people who will always hate you that they’re wrong. Think of what Toni Morrison said at a Portland State University address back in 1975: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” This is true of pretty much every type of hate. Move past the urge to explain yourself again and again to people who do not care. Arguing with trolls is not activism.
4. Build resisting fascism into your daily life. I'm still trying to follow the schedule I came up with for myself the week after the election - educating myself with a documentary, article, book, or podcast on Sundays, sharing mutual aid resources on Mondays, resting up on Tuesdays, contacting reps and signing petitions on Wednesdays, checking in with loved ones on Thursdays, donating what I can on Fridays, and using my specialized skills or showing up for in-person events on Saturdays. I often do these things out of order, but try to do each one each week if I can.
5. Let yourself feel joy. Eat good food and hug someone you love and pet a dog and go look at the sky and put on your favorite movie or trashy reality show. Don't feel guilty about feeling good, because feeling good is a form of self-preservation and there's no way in hell we'll all get through this by feeling bad all the time. 
6. It's also crucial that you don't let your guilt over feeling good when others are suffering keep you from taking action. Don't shame yourself so hard for trying to feel okay or tuning out the news that you don't end up trying to help others at all.
7. Similarly, don't shame yourself so hard over your past opinions or points of view – or stubbornly stick with them long after they've started to feel untrue to you – that you fail to show up for your community members now and in the future. You can change your mind at any time. You can be a more helpful or loving or non-judgmental person beginning today. People across the political spectrum might be both justifiably and unjustifiably pissed at you, but change your mind anyway.
8. Get your mental health right. Don't put off that meds adjustment or therapy intake you've been meaning to do a second longer. This isn't just to protect yourself from the depression and despair that’s on the rise, but to help keep you in fighting shape. Before I started attending therapy and taking anti-anxiety medication, there is no way in hell I would've had the energy, calm, or sense of level-headedness to be posting this right now.
9. Don't think only of solutions within the boundaries of what you're allowed to talk about on social media, because most social media is an overt and obvious tool of fascism at this point. Meet people in person, think outside the Twitter community rules box, and don't let your activism live only in one digital place.
10. That being said, keep being outspoken online. There's power in numbers, and the more people there are constantly voicing strong oppositional opinions and sharing crucial, vetted information, the less easy it is to censor, censure, or otherwise stop them.
11. If you don’t see yourself as an activist or a political person, yet you still want this nightmare to end, familiarize yourself with Slow Factory’s list of 20 different roles that play a part in collective liberation, and pick one that resonates with you. Play to your strength, whether it’s cooking or IT skills or photography or explaining your point-of-view to family members. Don’t discount what you’re good at, and don’t force yourself to take on a role that doesn’t work for you.
12. Get out of the habit of worrying about saying everything just right, because it too often stops us from saying anything at all. If I had stopped to worry about covering every single angle of the world we’re living in today for this post (some topics I left out for brevity’s sake that you’re welcome to talk to me about include recognizing personal privileges and disadvantages, being justifiably pissed at the people who made this happen, targeted boycotting, taking off your America-centric blinders, and sharpening your media literacy skills), I once again would never have shared this at all. Expect bad faith readings of whatever you do by virtue of the way the internet is, but don’t perpetuate them for sport, and don’t let your fear of bad faith readings or uncomfortable blind spots stop you from continuing to share resources and support.
13. This one should be obvious by now, but: stop thinking politicians are going to save you. Yes, even that one.
14. Look to examples from the past to see how people have survived before. Remind yourself that marginalized people have always existed and will always exist, and cannot – will not – be legislated or hated out of existence. Say this to yourself again and again and again.

Do the best that you can as often as you can for as long as you can. I won’t say “we’ll get through this” because I have no idea what the future will look like. But I know that we all can – and should – try really fucking hard to get through this. Thanks for reading.