Here's What I'm Not Gonna Do This Time
I will not be derailed.
Our six-year-old daughter, who was born halfway through that guy’s last term, was bummed he won. “But at least he can’t run again,” she says. If elections continue to exist, she’s not wrong.
Perhaps because of my horrific car crash five days before the election, I entered this week with an eerie clarity and calm. Here’s what’s rattling around my brain.
The next four years (and beyond) are going to be absolutely terrible, and we have to assume every asinine thing they have proposed will happen. Time to update vaccines and passports and any family paperwork. And… fluoride… treatments? God, they are morons. But they execute their idiotic plans.
I was so anxious and frightened when pregnant with our daughter, as the ramifications of that presidency were becoming clear, that I turned to Transcendental Meditation. It worked. And this app works — I’m not going to argue with anyone about it, or talk anyone into it, and nobody ever believes me, and then when people do it, they are changed. It lifted 90% of my anxiety in general, and now when I feel a wave I know how to neutralize it. I can’t change the facts of our lives, but I can make sure my nervous system doesn’t feel like it’s constantly on fire.
I am not giving this f*cking guy or any of his team of evil sh*theads one millisecond of my attention. My internet filters are in place, and the apps are off my phone. I will read the news once a day — the facts will continue to be the facts, but the panic is contagious, and he preys on it. Again, protecting the nervous system. All I care about right now is community and family and keeping my perhaps-foolish heart wide open to help people who need it, however they need it.
I don’t believe all those voters are evil people, although they have unquestionably made an emotionally fraught decision that has now enabled a tsunami of evil deeds. I believe a lot of them are pawns in a losing game, and that misinformation and rhetoric speaks directly to the hearts of people who are flailing—
addressed this beautifully yesterday. I also think that this country has underfunded education for a reason. But the fantasy of this bizarro Superman Savior dude is (overwhelmingly) what the country wants, and that needs to be assessed with clear eyes.I am pretty tired of people telling us to organize and resist, although of course we will keep doing so—I am wondering where exactly we are supposed to find the energy to take useful action when the people whose job it actually is keep messing this up. Bernie Sanders spelled out the state of the nation with breathtaking clarity yesterday, and if nobody in Dem leadership wants to listen to the alarm he’s been sounding for nine billion years, I can no longer have any patience or empathy for them. They are simply not meeting the metric. The thing this joker and his henchmen have figured out is making people feel heard, then swooping in and enacting whatever their insane agenda is. So why aren’t we doing this? Pop star endorsements and continued ridicule cannot be the path forward. Fixing what’s actually broken is.
It is a heck of a time to be writing a book about connecting with joy, but it’s exactly what I need to be doing right now, and I will continue to share crumbs here. I am still—stupidly, gladly, by choice—filled with love for everyone. And I’m telling my people as often as I can. Sending on some of that love to you.
xo
<3
Thanks. All great ideas for not getting caught up in their world.