How to help out without checking out
Or, at long last: splodey noises, part 3
I’ve made it back to Canada from…all of that, I guess.
Since pulling into my driveway on Saturday evening…no, let’s be real, since successfully crossing the border last Friday night, I’ve been resting up, unwinding the happenings of the end of February and most of March, fighting off respiratory ick, and being really, really grateful to be back. I saw some wonderful theatre, I saw people I love very much, I made enormous progress on getting the house ready to be shown, I had a fine Intercon. But now, I am home.
Perhaps ironically, I’m returning to my series on combatting the sense of powerlessness and despair that threatens to overtake the best of us at times like these. Ironically, because I must admit that while in the States, I too was tempted to despair, and I definitely leaned into a lot of old coping mechanisms to get through it. (Hello alcohol and its best friend, dissociation!) So I’m hoping you can hear me approaching a lot of this stuff not from a place of high-and-mighty, smug mastery of all this, but rather from my position of basically holding on by my fingernails and finding certain things helpful.
To recap: How do we survive this?
Part 1 of this series was about how to begin to find a sense of safety within your own body. This, admittedly, is a really freakin’ hard thing to do, especially for people who didn’t experience a sense of safety early in life. In part one, I talk about how the body organizes itself from birth for safety first, efficiency second. For those of us — and these days, it’s most of us — who don’t feel at all safe right now, I talk about nervous system regulation, both self-regulation and co-regulation, and how we can turn to each other and to other living creatures to find safer ground.
In part two, I talk a bit more about the “efficiency” part of safety and efficiency. I propose a three-legged stool of activity: rest, work, and pleasure. Which perhaps not coincidentally was the cry of the early 20th century labor movement when seeking an 8-hour workday. I talk about how our culture has essentially broken all three of these concepts such that most of us don’t get quality versions of rest, pleasure, or work, but I spend a bit more time on pleasure, since that’s the one our society values least, vilifies most, and tries hardest to manipulate in order to control us.
In this third part, I want to talk about how to be effective specifically in the realm of long-haul resistance. This is another three-pronged approach; what can I say, three is a magic number.
How to combat powerlessness in three not very easy steps
Something a lot of us who care about other human beings are dealing with right now is the absolute onslaught of terribleness that is this stupid coup, as Rebecca Solnit has it. With everything happening at both breakneck speed and with absolute brazenness, it’s easy to get bogged down and believe you can’t do anything. It happened to me during Trump 1.0, and this time around it’s so much worse. They’re essentially driving a tank through the United States government and seeing if anyone will try to stop them.
It’s really hard for individuals, under these conditions, to know what to do, or to feel that anything they do has an effect. It’s also easy to respond to a lot of calls for urgency and action and by god money, especially from the Democrats, as extremely too little too late.
I’m not saying that what I’m about to share is the perfect cure for this. Day in and day out, it’s all still really difficult. And I don’t succeed at keeping to these ideas myself, a lot of the time.
Still, I think that the following rules of thumb are broadly helpful in the individual struggle to get up every day, keep going, and keep feeling like your life is meaningful.
1. Curate your news
This one is probably the most crucial — and the one I’m most likely to fall down on. The news has been a firehose for years, maybe decades at this point. But now it’s a firehose that’s sometimes shooting lava, or gasoline, or water with lead in it. There’s misinformation, disinformation, outright propaganda, conspiracy theories, and even in the news that’s accurate, there’s way too much of it. We weren’t made to take in this much information from this many places, and our brains tend to shut down about it. If we’re decent people who care about others, it’s worse than that: we shut down, but feel bad about shutting down, and then become unable to act even about things we could effectively change.
Some people just decide to stop looking entirely, which unfortunately is another way the autocrats and oligarchs win. People with low levels of marginalization are most likely to just decide to check out, because we have the privilege of doing so. (Cue the “First they came for…” poem.)
The trickiest thing is striking the balance between being well informed and going absolutely mad. But while the internet continues to (mostly) exist, there are some good sources for staying up to speed that aren’t beholden to the major news media organizations, most of which have either already capitulated or have become farts in the wind.
A few news and analysis sources I’ve been looking at in my efforts not to doomscroll (not always successful)
For a run-down that tells you most of what you need to know in a single paragraph followed by short summaries, try WTF Just Happened Today? For my own part I find this big bolus of news a bit overwhelming, but if it feels better to you to know everything and get it all in one go, this is great.
Some bigger papers and magazines, like The Guardian, ProPublica, and, oddly, Wired, are still fighting the good fight.
Heather Cox Richardson writes six days a week about whatever the biggest issue of the day is, contextualized both in the present and the historical moment.
Sarah Kendzior doesn’t update regularly, but her lyrical pieces are deep and sweet and sad, and even though they’re saying upsetting things about what’s happening, they oddly comfort me with their firm grasp on the truth.
And of course Rebecca Solnit is doing heroic work, while keeping an encouraging tone.
There’s lots more, most of them independent journalists who’ve broken away from whatever sinking ship has most recently bent the knee. But the point isn’t so much a link roundup as it is to carefully calibrate:
where your news is coming from,
how much of your attention you’re allowing it to devour, and
how it makes you feel when you read it.
As long as I’m doomscrolling, reading hot takes, and seeing the same story told from different angles with different details, I’m drowning myself. The despair becomes overwhelming, the outrage spikes and fades into impotence. If I can control it, keep it to the minimum I need to be informed while also avoiding getting spun up, then I can still act.
And speaking of acting.
2. Narrow your focus to what you can do
Part of the reason it’s so important not to get caught up in every detail of what’s going on is because part of that feeling of helplessness is real: it’s true, in fact, that you, one person, cannot do anything about Everything. The shock-and-awe style propaganda machine we’re wrestling with is designed to make you feel that way: pulled in every direction at once, so you feel defeated and stuck and can’t move in any direction at all.
The solution is, as it always has been, to act locally.
I mean ‘local’ here in both the spatial and somatic senses. Spatially, acting locally means getting involved with your community. Somatically, it means doing the things that pull on you most strongly. This also can be translated as ‘choosing your lane.’
Acting locally
Local action can mean anything from running for city council or school board to getting to know your neighbors to organizing protests to making and sharing art, food, gathering spaces… There are many ways to get more involved in your community, and the sad truth is that we’re going to need to in order to get through this.
Indeed, it’s my firm belief that a huge part of what allowed this to happen is the systematic atomization of communities into siloed suburbs and the insane insistence on nuclear families as self-contained units of consumption. If we don’t know each other, we don’t help each other. If we’re not helping each other, we’re afraid of each other. If we’re alone, we have to buy more things. And if we’re also constantly distracted by all the horrible news from Over There, where we can’t have much of an impact, we tend not to not do anything at all.
The more we reach out — however rusty we may be at it, however awkward and frightening it may be — the more we start to build something more sustainable and resilient to shocks from the larger culture.
The other really satisfying thing about this is that it achieves what the kids these days call ‘touching grass:’ when you’re physically connected to other people, you can directly feel what your impact is.
Choosing your lane(s)
If you’re going to do things near where you live, you still have to choose what things those are, or you’ll wind up spreading yourself too thin, burning out, or being more of a burden than a help in areas where you don’t have the skills.
But the need to choose a lane is equally true whether you’re acting locally or helping out online or in more remote ways.
For example, protest movements, especially since 2020, have often come out and listed various things that are needed for the effort that aren’t putting your body on the line. Not everyone is equipped to face riot cops, tear gas, and arrest — and that is okay, because there are people who are willing and able. But other things are needed, too: people to be safety calls, people to make food, medics, legal counsel, childcare, flyering, artwork, communications, admin, donations…
All of these things are true for broader movements as well. What are you already good at? What do you enjoy doing? What volunteering or hobby projects have you done in the past that brought you joy? Everyone has something to contribute. The trick is to find your way or ways and commit to them.
The other “lane” to choose here is what area to help with. What are you passionate about? Climate justice? Housing or food insecurity? LGBTQIA+ rights? Racial justice? Labor rights? Immigration justice? Whatever it is, you can bet it’s under attack right now and needs your help. But if you try to help with everything, again, you’re going to be less effective and probably overwhelmed.
3. Practice radical joy/gratitude. Yes, really
I left this one for last, because I know it sounds corny and because I feel like it’s something a lot of white women say. “Ah yes, joy is an act of resistance!” Sure, Sharon, but if you’re not also doing the work, then probably you’re just hiding in the hedonism afforded only to the privileged. As I said in Part 2, there’s a fine line between the pleasure we require as thriving living beings, and the dissociative entertainment that keeps us from action.
Disclaimers aside, this part really is important. Just as self-care isn’t just about bath bombs and yoga class, making time for joy and gratitude isn’t just about meditation and counting your blessings in your journal while doing a colon cleanse.
What makes joy radical is doing what lights you up in spite of all that’s going on, as a respite from it, and as fuel for the fight against it. Human beings need to sing and dance, we need to express ourselves and make art, we need to hug each other and touch and (most of us) make love, we need to play. If we don’t do those things, we start to die. That’s why doing them is an act of resistance. Queer joy, Black joy, immigrant joy, neurodivergent joy — all of these things are things the fascists are trying to suppress. Community celebrations — no matter what kind of people are doing it — are dangerous to autocracy too. Human, non-state-sponsored or corporate-sponsored joy is vital. Doing It Anyway, besides being pleasurable and restorative, is resistance in itself.
Gratitude practice
Gratitude practice is also restorative, is also fuel. It’s also often what’s available when joy isn’t. Some days things get bad enough that you can’t find it in you to dance, or connect, or create. Especially on those days, the only thing available may be the internal work of naming, honoring, writing down or even just speaking aloud the things you do have, the things you’re thankful for.
Even if it’s just that you have a roof over your head, or enough food to eat. As much as I don’t follow any organized religion, I feel like there’s a lot to the notion of ‘saying grace’ over meals. It’s a moment of gratitude that’s easy to repeat in your day, because most of the time you need to eat, and if nothing else you can be thankful for your food.
If you don’t have food, and if you’re not living indoors…then I’m not really talking to you. You don’t need gratitude practice — or rather, maybe you do, but what you need more is for the rest of us to do something about the conditions that mean you don’t have food or live indoors.
For the rest of you: for the love of all that is holy, do it. Name the things. Write them down. Say them aloud. Light candles if you can, if only to say, I’m thankful for this candle, for this flame, for this light in the darkness.
Then go be the light in the darkness.
As I’ve said before, Substack is a problematic platform, and I’m reluctant to accept payment for work I do here because 10% of that money goes back to Substack, and they use it in part to boost far-right ideology and Nazis. It’s still a good place to gather readers, however, because there is still a broad user base of all different kinds of people, and it’s my hope that those of you who might be inclined to get a paid subscription will head over to Patreon to support me instead. Support there helps me to write these pieces, as well as to continue work on my fiction and other artistic projects. Also, you could have a haiku written about you.