When I look online, I can see that some people respond to a time of overwhelming crisis with an “OKAY, IT’S BEEN 24 HOURS, CRYING’S OVER, BOOTS ON THE GROUND, HERE IS OUR 20-PART COMPREHENSIVE GLOBAL ACTION PLAN.” It is good to have those people. That is not the kind of person I am, or the kind of person I live with. Some of the things we are doing at our house:
• Removing a bunch of Personal Eating Rules, for the time being. Some of us normally eat keto, or low-calorie, or low-salt/fat or whatever, and right now we don’t have the bandwidth to handle What Just Happened AND food restrictions. I felt similarly in the early days of the pandemic.
• Resting more, when possible. Going to bed earlier and sleeping later, when possible. Lounging around more. Treating ourselves as if we’re recovering from a serious illness.
• Not Thinking About It, when possible; Thinking About It Later, when possible. Letting it sink in slowly and from a certain distance, to avoid mental devastation. Avoiding catastrophizing about What Could (and Likely Will) Happen: there are too many of those, and running around in panicked hyperventilating circles isn’t going to help. Trying to think of the future as unknown, and still including the possibility of good surprises, EVEN IN THIS TIMELINE.
• Skipping some chores, where possible. Some chores truly must be done, and some chores make life harder if they’re put off; but some chores will be fine if they wait awhile past the time they would ordinarily have been done. Imagine if you lived alone, and had the flu or broke your leg and couldn’t clean the bathroom floor for awhile: all would still be well. But you’d still have to have to figure out the litter box no matter what.
• Doing some tasks, in cases where those tasks relieve stress. Pick that empty cardboard box up off the floor and take it to the garage: the cats are done playing with it, and breaking it down and carrying it out takes 60 seconds and gets that box out of my sight/way. Place an online order for the taco powder: it feels silly because I could buy it in a store if I went out of my way to go to that one store where it’s the one thing I buy—but also I could order it online right this second and then I can cross that errand off my to-do list.
• Medicating, when possible/needed. I have a prescription for a mild sedative. I hoard them, because my doctor gives me so few tablets per year; but this is the sort of event that makes me wonder what I’m hoarding them for if not for this, so I am using them sometimes.
• Looking into other countries that might be better places to live, and might be open to accepting United States citizens (this is some of the kids, not so much Paul and me; some of my friends say their kids are doing this too).
• Replacing our large campaign flag with our large equality flag.
• Bringing treats to work. I brought a big box of doughnut holes (I ordered a box of 50, and the cashier gave me more like 65-70) and we all stood around the box for the half hour before the library opened, eating one doughnut hole after another and talking about how we could hardly cope, and it was so therapeutic. Even after the library opened, we kept visiting the box like birds at a feeder, saying “I’m just going to have one more.”
• We’d already signed up back in October to sponsor two children through our local service organization’s Christmas-supplementing program, and we were assigned those children the day after the election, which was wonderful timing and felt like a small counterbalance to the immense badness so many people just voted for. And now I can divert some of my attention to thinking about which combination of the items on the wish lists I want to fulfill, and looking through as many pages of options for each item as I feel like, and that is a pretty good thing to focus on. (We got two little girls this time, and the parent noted “GIRLY girls–pink/flowers/butterflies” on the form. I have received an enormous gift.)
• Donating money to organizations. The ACLU. NPR. Wikipedia. Etc.
• Watching calm TV. Reading calm books. I had a fiction book in my library pile about women who acquire superpowers along with menopause and use it to fight evil, and I can’t cope with books about fighting evil right now. I don’t want to feel riled by the descriptions of the types of evil I suspect these women will be fighting, which we are going to have to fight in real life without superpowers. I am reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett instead (I have heard complaints that “nothing happens,” which sounds perfect, and I love Ann Patchett’s writing and she can write about cleaning bathroom floors for all I care); and I finally read a book I got for Christmas called Extra Helping: Recipes for Caring, Connecting, and Building Community One Dish at a Time, by Janet Reich Elsbach, and that was very much the right thing: lots of talk about using food to take care of people who are ill or grieving, along with relatable references to how the author began focusing on this in 2016.
• Trying to think in terms of what we can do to help/support others. I have heard so many times, in so many contexts, that turning outward can be a huge help—particularly when turning inward is all misery. I don’t mean just the big things we may need to work on in the future, I also mean things like can I bring my co-workers some doughnut holes, can I bake my friend some brownies, can I send my friend a card/email. The Extra Helping book I mentioned in the last paragraph had a lot of good stuff about how you can find your OWN ways to help, the things that come naturally to YOU: we don’t all have to bake bread or make phone calls, we can do the things that work with our own skills and inclinations. Maybe some of us make and deliver a huge pot of soup to a grieving family, and others of us go through the grocery store and fill a basket with bakery muffins and little yogurts and a frozen Stouffer’s lasagna and drop THAT off. You don’t have to feel bad that you don’t know how to make soup and don’t want to make soup and don’t know how to transport soup and don’t have a big soup pot anyway.
• Trying to get some fresh air and exercise. Some of us are inclined toward vigorous burn-off-the-rage exercise, and some of us are inclined toward convalescent/recuperation/restorative exercise, and some of us are going back and forth depending on mood. I’ve recently started pelvic-floor therapy (more on this another day), and my homework this week involves taking huge belly breaths (and attempting at the same time to “relax the pelvic floor,” something I cannot feel AT ALL, which is one reason I am in pelvic-floor therapy), and the physical therapist said pointedly (this was the day after the election, and both of us were pale and quiet) that this was also very good for stress and anxiety.
• Spending time with other people who feel similarly about All This, and how serious and dangerous it is.
• Avoiding people who want to explain how actually this is the Democrats’ fault, and/or who seem to have no understanding of what has just happened here, and/or who want to have bad-faith discussions about it. Re-setting some boundaries.