Photo on Pexels by Andre Estevez

You may already know this story.

Almost six weeks ago, a humpback whale calf became stranded on a sandbank in Wismar Bay off the coast of Germany. It developed a skin condition. Its mouth was damaged by a fishing net. The whale listed in the waters, slowly getting sicker. It was there in plain view, enormous, trapped, slowly perishing.

Somewhere along the way, the whale got the name Timmy. Others referred to the whale as Hope.

The people became distressed. Some people cut the netting off Timmy’s body. Others treated his skin condition. Every day, people gathered at the shore to visit the whale. Someone set up a cam, and people posted updates any time the whale moved. Soon, Timmy was a national story in Germany. A 67 year old woman got a boat and tried to leap off and visit Timmy. At the last moment, her plan was foiled.

The collective demanded this whale be rescued. The media called researchers and scientists, asking them how to save the whale. The likelihood of a rescue working, the International Whaling Commission replied, was low. They should leave the whale to die in peace.

Nonetheless, the people were so upset that they demanded action. Perhaps inflatable cushions could push the whale away from the sandbank? That rescue didn’t work. The researchers counseled the people to prepare for the whale’s death.

Instead, the collective refused. The media refused. Two millionaires offered to fund as many attempts as were needed.. The’d pay whatever it cost.

The rescue that succeeded—the fifth—was more elaborate. Some people dug a trench, creating a channel deep enough that Timmy could swim in it. At the end of the channel, they parked a long barge, full of water. Timmy swam into the barge and the barge was towed out into the open sea. People said Timmy seemed to get it; he didn’t resist efforts to guide him to the barge.

When Timmy was released into the North Sea off of Denmark and swam away, he sent up an enormous plume of spray. He started swimming in the right direction.

This story has everything. A whale! Nice millionaires! People who wouldn’t give up; a media that advocated and wouldn’t stop until change was made; scientists and researchers who knew what to do and overcame their own skepticism to help; an outpouring of collective goodwill, and a happy ending.

I truly do love this story. I hear so many stories about breached and dying whales. I read about whale babies who die because the rivers have been dammed and there are now too few salmon for the whales to eat. The moms, starving, don’t get pregnant as often, and when they do give birth, often they can’t produce the amount of milk necessary to keep their calves alive.

When I read about Timmy, I felt happy. But then I got to the last paragraph of the article, the one where the writer goes back to the researchers to celebrate. Burkard Baschek, director of the Ocean Museum Germany and the scientific coordinator of the rescues, said he wished people would take away from the Timmy story the fact that the reason Timmy breached in the first place was because he was entangled in a fishing line. More than 300,000 whales die each year because of fishing nets, he said.

There’s nothing at the end of the article that tells readers what they can do about the 300,000 whales, or how to make the sea safer for whales. There’s no mention of the effect of river dams on whale survival, likely because most people don’t know that salmon get into the ocean in the first place from the rivers where they were born.

We humans are wired for stories. When we name animals, whether we then anthropomorphize them or not, we feel greater kinship to them. They stand out in our minds and become distinct. We get curious about their fates.

We can empathize with them, and we can tolerate bearing witness to their suffering. We can even handle our grief if they don’t make it. But once we are asked to expand our consciousness to hold the suffering and pain of 300,000 soon-to-be-dying whales, whales we can’t visit or watch on cameras, whales that are spread out in seas across the globe . . . this is much more difficult to conceptualize and, by extension, to feel.

The people who came and watched Timmy were compelled to act, because the problem was tangible and immediate. It is stirring and inspiring to see people overcome these kinds of obstacles, and it is a balm, in this moment of global ecocide on such a vast scale, to hear something that pushes back against the idea that people don’t care.

I think people do care. I think they care so much they’re terrified they wouldn’t be able to function if they let in how they really feel about what is happening to the more than human world.

It fells me, sometimes, to think about how much effort the collective is making on a daily basis to compartmentalize the terror and grief and empathy it has not just for other creatures, but the plants and insects and forests and waters that support us all.

That’s a hum that’s being silenced, or muffled, every day. I wonder about what happens when we practice walling off our grief and terror and then get hit with a fact like: the number of whales that are going to die in 2026. I wonder if it just bounces off. Too abstract. Too big. Too detached from a clear thing we can do as individuals to stave it off.

A few months ago I watched this incredible TED talk by Peggy Oki, an artist, surfer, and environmental activist.

She’s devoted years to making visible the killing of whales by creating origami screens and exhibiting them all over the world. She’s working to overcome the ways people shut down when they hear how enormous a problem is, instinctively retreating into despair or apathy or self protection if they can’t immediately see a way to make the problem go away.

One thing I wonder about is how we can work together, sometimes individually and other times collectively, to build our capacity to take in suffering, so we can find a new way to relate to these vast numbers.

You may have heard of loving kindness meditation, or metta practice. One piece of it is to hold in your consciousness an image of a person, or any being, and send them loving kindness. You can do the practice at the end of the day, holding in your awareness all those you encountered, fully appreciating how interconnected we all are.

You can also use loving kindness meditation to widen your capacity to hold the pain of beings you can’t envision, or haven’t yet seen.

When I do loving kindness meditation and send waves of love out, I feel good. Sometimes I even feel benevolent. Then I notice how my story is about how great I am, and not really about other beings, and I feel like an asshole.

Maybe I’m practicing loving kindness meditation in a way that makes me avoid my pain, rather than experience it, because I’m under the illusion that my actions are having an impact. Perhaps I’m telling myself that even if I’m not solving the problem now, I’m helping it diminish. In that way, I’m no different from people who shut down when they hear how big our problems are. The desire to turn away from pain is so instinctive. It’s so difficult to override.

When I read the end of the article on Timmy and heard the researcher patiently explaining that Timmy likely still isn’t going to make it, even though he’s doing great right now, I got really upset. I don’t want to know this was my first thought. You took away my hope and now I have to sit with the problem not being solved. Instead of picturing Timmy’s plume of thanks to the nice rescuers, I have to imagine him drifting, sick and weak, sometime in the future, when there won’t be any cameras there to tell me it’s happening.

How can I hold this truth? How can I hold at once the truth of so many beings dying, and the truth that people, collectively, can pull off tremendous things, things far bigger than this small rescue of a whale? How can I hold my hope for it to happen and my puny fury that it hasn’t happened yet?

What does it mean that our feelings can drive so much powerful action, and at the same time, that they can snuff it out? I’m tempted to say that you have to make a decision to act, and then figure out how to watch those feelings crest and fall, and those feelings are part of you, and so is the action, but at the end of the day, you keep your commitment to the action, no matter what.

One thing that helps me is the idea that the breath, coming in and out, whether we’re conscious of it or not, can be a reminder that we always have an opportunity to return to action, no matter how long we have been away. Just as the breath comes and goes, so we may find ourselves engaged and then disengaged. It doesn’t mean we’re amazing and it doesn’t mean we’re a jerk. It’s just what it is to be a small human, on a small planet, trying to find gratitude and sense.

Here’s a few places to start with making the oceans safer for marine life:

Save the Whales

Whale One Foundation

Marine Observer

My brilliant friend Eleanor Robins, of How to Go Home, asked me to give a talk to her subscribers about trauma and memory. My talk was part of her six-month project devoted to memory and imagination, which included a series of lectures, a book group, and the challenge to her members to memorize and then perform an important piece of writing.

I learned so much from Eleanor and the other participants, and I’ll never think about memory the same way again. Here’s some context for my talk and the group discussion that followed:

When Eleanor first asked me to speak, she raised two questions: What if trauma is a memory disorder? Is there a role for imagination—specifically, collective imagination—in trauma recovery?

A few weeks later, the book club began reading Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. Hyde asks: what do we want to remember, individually and collectively? What do we have to forget, in order to make our story of “what happened” cohere?

Hyde answers these questions in fragments, gathering them into four themes: myth, self, nation, and creation.

Hyde’s book helped me see that memory and forgetting are not two separate acts. Instead, they’re better understood as two ends of a spectrum. To tell a story, we must remember and forget at the same time.

The act of forgetting has an enormous, often unnoticed, impact on what we tell ourselves about who are now, and who we were in the past. As we repeat the story over time, will we even remember the details we left out? How might our self conception change if we put those details back in?

What happens when remembering and forgetting aren’t just about who we are as a person, but instead, who we are as a nation? What is the story of our past? What deserves to be memorialized?

With the larger project and the Hyde book in the background, Eleanor asked me four questions. I’m listing them here, along with a brief overview of my answers. The numbers in parentheses are the corresponding time stamps in the attached video.

1. In this memory project, we’re using two definitions of memory. The first is aletheia, the stepping out of oblivion and into the awareness and fullness of the world’s presence. The second is the stories and experiences that collectively shape who we are and how we story our experience. How would you describe traumatic memory, which seems to be a different kind of memory altogether? (2:18)

What if PTSD is a kind of “memory disorder”? Two persistent symptoms of PTSD, intrusion and avoidance, are about memory—specifically, the eruption of unwanted memories into our consciousness, and our efforts to forget them or push them away. This oscillation between memory and forgetting can create a fixation on how to make the pain go away, pulling awareness out of the present moment and by extension, blocking the opportunity of examining what the trauma is asking us to confront.

2. In the myth section of Hyde’s book, he talks about underworld stories—the stories of literal and psychic death and rebirth. In many cultures, underworld stories talk about two streams: one of memory and one of forgetting. You have described trauma as a call for the survivor to enter an underworld journey. In the journey of trauma recovery, what needs to be forgotten and what needs to be remembered? (17:23)

The springboard into the underworld is often initiated by the shattering of the idea that one can keep oneself safe in the world, or that the world is a benevolent place. If our ideas about safety and meaning are destroyed by a traumatic event, or by the chronic impact of structural violence, we can become nihilistic, or even become violent ourselves. We can feel monstrous, believing that we do not belong in the social order, or that the benevolent world has rejected us. All of these states are invitations to go deeper into the pain that shattered self and world.

What will it take to turn toward the memories we most want to forget? The journey to the underworld; the dark night of the soul —these myths and archetypes tell us how to confront our individual and collective propensity for violence. The self that is reborn has the capacity to accept the reviled aspects of the personality, and thus to extend understanding to those who have exiled themselves from the human community.

3. If memory is the storehouse of our experiences, at the national level, memories make a nation what it is. Is trauma an opportunity to re-member into the nation the stories of those who have been forgotten? (31:00)

How should a nation respond to its violent origins? What happens if that past contradicts the story of what the nation stands for? Whose stories, and whose traumas, are allowed to be part of the nation’s history and whose are to be erased, in the name of uniting the whole? I look at political polarization in the United States as in part a battle about what deserves to be remembered, and by extension, what reckoning might be demanded of us in doing so.

I also talk about how the social body acts like an individual body, oscillating between its capacity to remember violence and its repudiation of that violence, burying its history. I discuss the work of trauma theorist Judith Herman, who sees social movements as essential to helping the social body tolerate what it is to remember and organize against violence.

4. One premise of this group is that we can revitalize ourselves by memorizing poems and stories, allowing into our bodies an experience of otherness that can enlarge our sense of self. That might be healing, individually, globally, and environmentally. Do you think this idea could help trauma recovery? (47:14)

One of the most fundamental experiences of trauma is non-consensual violation and powerlessness. Our boundaries are violated, physically and emotionally. Our self-conception is forever changed. We are overcome and, perhaps, behave in ways we never could have predicted. The instinctual response to this violation is to close down and refuse to let anyone, even any feeling, enter.

To engage the collective imagination, to allow the stories, words, and experiences of others to enter our being and to move us into action—this is an act of “consensual permeability” and, thus, a first step towards re-opening. It can be an initial practice of what it might be like to return to community. It’s an act of agency that creates a bridge between ourselves and the collective. It could lead to taking on the power of the collective by engaging in the work to prevent violence from happening to others.

We had a great discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions in the comments.

Have a great week!

Rebecca

Photo by Eliza Vaska on Unsplash

This post is part II of a three part series on anxiety. The first, on anxiety in our individual lives, is here. This is the second.

Let’s begin:

Grab a scrap of paper. Describe professionalism. Write fast, so you don’t second-guess yourself.

Here’s what I wrote when I did this exercise:

Calm rational objective without bias clean orderly productive able to manage and schedule one’s own time responds to criticism or feedback without defensiveness works collaboratively but does not rely on others to complete tasks able to work at a sustained pace for weeks or months without respite or vacation dresses and grooms self in a manner that conforms to the culture of the workplace complies with the demands of one’s superior without resistance delegates responsibility to subordinates completes exams licensing and board requirements to remain in good standing fluent in language of specialty does not leave work to attend to familial or other responsibilities

Here is what you must do:

Buy and wear nicer clothes than you’d wear at home. Or, don a uniform, making your rank and status visible to others.

Prepare for your supervisor to abruptly add to your duties, interrupting your current work. At the same time, meet the pre-existing deadlines. Maintain a pleasant or even demeanor, regardless of what you’re doing. Avoid personal disclosures. Collaborate with others, even if you think your way is best. Look out for the team.

If you have been promoted to a position of authority, replace your patient demeanor with one of brusque focus. Keep conversations short. Interrupt verbose people when necessary. Maintain a brisk pace in the hallways. Arrive earlier than your staff, to model discipline. Or, arrive later than your staff, to display your confidence in their judgement.

The Pitt (Spoiler alert)

In the first episode of The Pitt, which is set in a Pittsburgh emergency room, the viewer is thrown in with the interns—we’re new on the scene, expected to catch up, already confused and behind.

The staff are whispering. The head of the ER, Robby, has come to work on the anniversary of his mentor’s death. Dana, the day-shift charge nurse, warns them not to ask how he’s doing. He’s snappish and preoccupied, then dialed in to the next patient with severe trauma.

He’s gentle with his instructions to the residents, then impatient when they don’t follow them precisely. He watches from the doorway of one room, nodding, then rushes to the next when someone yells his name. He keeps trying to go to the bathroom, only to be called away before he can make it down the hall. It’s several hours before he can pee.

The day goes on, and the pace picks up. Robby starts to pant and squint. He ducks his head away from an invisible threat, as if by tilting his head he can avoid what’s inside it. Suddenly, we’re in his flashback: we see his mentor, suffocating on a vent, minutes from death. Robby is helpless, panting inside his protective gear. He’s yanked from the memory—a little girl has arrived, unconscious. She’s been found in her grandmother’s pool. They try everything—bodies mashed up against each other, hovering over her small frame.

After she dies, Robby gathers the staff in an empty patient room. He says he’s going to teach them how to deal with a child’s death. Picture a graveyard, he says, and each one has a headstone—a nurse rushes in to say there’s a bunch of ambulances pulling up. The staff bolts out of the room. Congratulations, you just told everyone to bury their grief, Dana quips to Robby as they run out.

*

When I watch The Pitt, I get anxious. I pant. I stay in there. I will be as strong as the staff.

Professionalism is a performance. It’s not only what you do, it’s how you do it.

When we watch a play, we want the actor’s performance to be so good we believe she is the character. If there’s a gap—if we notice she’s “acting”—she’s no good.

At work, it’s the opposite. When we watch a person successfully suppress their emotions and their body’s needs, they’re showing us how devoted they are to their work. They deserve the authority they’ve been given.

After a full day’s shift, followed by a mass casualty event, a resident asks one of the new interns if she’s tired; if her brain is mush; if she needs to eat. She looks up in relief, stunned this woman has taken the time to actually see her. Yes, she finally admits: I need all that. “Your patient doesn’t give a shit,” the resident tells her. “Get back in there and treat her.”

Whether it’s an ER, soaked with blood and piss, or a hedge-fund daily briefing during a market crisis, the workplace demands its employees perform the denial of their feelings, their embodiment, their human needs and, in having that denial witnessed by others, receive praise, promotion, and power.

The question becomes: where did this idea come from, and why is the performance of emotional and physiological denial—one that increases anxiety, the more one feels these needs and feelings threatening to leak out—thought so intrinsic to the successful completion of work?

Neurasthenia, 1869

On Thursday, April 29th, 1869, the neurologist George M. Beard, Lecturer in Nervous Diseases at The University of New York, announced to the readers of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal that he had discovered a new disease: neurasthenia. “Like anemia, or want of blood,” he explained, neurasthenia was the result of the patient’s “want of nerve force.”

Anemia and neurasthenia were “most frequently met with in civilized, intellectual communities, . . . compensation for our progress and refinement.” Neurasthenics lived a paradox: their bodies were at once the engines of American civilization and the most endangered by its success.

Nineteenth-century neurologists maintained that individuals were born with a fixed quantity of nervous energy that circulated through the body’s three reflex centers—the brain, digestive system, and reproductive organs. If nervous energy became fixed in one center, it would rob the rest. The patient’s symptoms would alert the physician to which center was overtaxed.

In his book American Nervousness, its Causes and Consequences, published in 1881, Beard explained that neurasthenia was a response to rapid technological advancement, which was accelerating the pace of social change. The superiority of American civilization was distinguished by five characteristics, “the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women.”

The majority of Beard’s patients were “brain-workers” who worked long hours at the office. Their nervous energy was concentrated in the “cerebral reflex center,” making them physically weak and robbing their reproductive organs of the energy they needed to remain virile. When women sought education or work outside the home, they’d endanger their reproductive capacity, possibly becoming infertile.

Neurasthenia marked its sufferers as distinguished, sensitive, intellectual, disciplined, hard-working, and responsible. Unsurprisingly, diagnoses of the disease became a kind of social currency, and soon members of the elite, artists, intellectuals, and Gilded Age capitalists were seeking treatment. Theodore Roosevelt went to the Muldoon Hygienic Institute, taking the long hikes that brought him into contact with John Muir. The writer Theodore Dreiser volunteered to build the railroad to restore his constitution, being sure to write a book about it called An Amateur Laborer, making it clear he was an amateur rather than a member of the working class. The brothers Henry and William James often decamped to Europe to treat their disease. (Beard, too, diagnosed himself with the disease.)

Beard’s fixation on the link between “civilization” and nervous disease might seem odd, until one remembers he announced his discovery of neurasthenia just four years after the end of the American Civil War. American Nervousness was published as the nation was trying to reconstitute itself and restore its international standing. The American social body was under duress from Catholic and Jewish immigrants, freed slaves, and American Indians, all of whom threatened America’s racial stock.

. . . in America, as in all lands, the majority of people are muscle-workers rather than brain workers; have little education and are not striving for honor, or expecting eminence or wealth. All our civilization hangs by a thread; the activity and force of the very few make us what we are as a nation; and if, through degeneracy, the descendants of these few revert to the condition of their not very remote ancestors, all our haughty civilization would be wiped away.

American brain workers could not afford to be nervous. Their ability to remain calm, rational, productive, and virile was of extraordinary importance. Neurasthenia was an objective, scientific acknowledgement that the frantic pace of technological advancement, rapid communication, and capitalist competition was taking its toll on America’s finest. Like seismologists, neurasthenic bodies were registering the threat of impending social collapse.

We can hear the residue of these ideas today in the debased prose of corporate performance reviews and job descriptions, which continue to evoke Beard’s brain worker as the template for its exemplary employee.

Is it any wonder that so many experience unrelenting anxiety at work, as they make heroic attempts to conform to an amorphous set of standards, knowing full well the ways they don’t look like, or act like, this professional ideal? What happens to our capacity to perform our duties, if we are distracted by our self-monitoring? Will we be asked if we’re suffering from imposter syndrome and need outside help? Will our anxious demeanor get picked up by the people around us, signaling that perhaps we aren’t as up for the work as everyone else? Will our lack of “cultural fit” be the legal cover to replace us with someone who seems a more natural hire?

Beard assuaged his anxiety about change by taking refuge in the notion that he was not just a drone. Instead, he was a desperately-needed contributor to the nation’s progress. His fears of annihilation and meaninglessness were overridden by his championing of the brain worker as the only one racially capable of defending American civilization from internal and global threats.

How eerie it is now to hear re-evoked not only his concerns about technological acceleration, but also his toxic racial self-soothing in the evocation of Great Replacement Theory as an explanatory narrative of our cultural decline; in the firing of Black women across the professions; in the rolling back of DEI initiatives; in the immiseration of the poor and the sick and the vulnerable because they don’t have the standing to matter.

The language of globalization may have replaced nineteenth-century imperialism, and the responsibility to defend Western progress may now be carried by Big Tech. But Beard’s fears that our bodies and minds cannot manage the current rate of technological and social change remain strong.

As the German sociologist Helmut Rosa writes in Resonance,

Institutionally, the major looming crisis of “globalized” modernity turns out to be both consequences and expressions of a crisis of dynamic stabilization. The logic of escalation has run up against its psychological, political, and planetary limits. Culturally, however, the same crisis turns out to also be a widespread crisis of relations of resonance, a structurally induced muting of the world.

What’s particularly unmooring about the present moment is that the dampening of resonance that Rosa describes—our embodied knowing that we are losing the experience of relation that reminds us that we are alive, that we love, that we are connected not only to other humans, but to the more than human world—is occurring at the edges of our awareness, even as we participate in what counts as daily life.

How strange to long for a return to resonance even as we scroll, or commute, or take out the trash. What aspect of our being lifts up when we allow ourselves to resonate with the ecological devastation that is accelerating in harmony with the acceleration of our economic systems?

What is the consequence of spending so much of our time in workplaces that demand we exclude our emotional and embodied knowing, or at least tamp it down, so we can get things done?

There’s the anxiety that work produces because it demands we leave so much of ourselves outside its doors. There’s the anxiety that comes when we witness a small group of people get rewarded, while more work piles up on the rest.

But there’s a secondary-level work anxiety, one particular to this moment in time. Professionalism asks us to be and do in certain ways, but most of its power is about the kinds of being and doing it forbids. It keeps us focused on the next quarter, excluding long time and with it, the problems that can only be solved from within its frame. It labels growth the primary good and dismisses alternative measures as unrealistic and absurd. The more hours we spend inside professionalism, the more habituated to its logic we become.

Step outside it for a moment, however, and what appears to be a vast framework, a net encompassing the whole world, suddenly looks like a tiny engine, hissing and sputtering, pushed by an impatient child around a rickety track on the floor.

I should have known better. Every time I tell myself the post I’m writing is simple and I should be able to knock it out, I discover how complex the subject truly is. I’m working on the second part of my series on anxiety, looking at professionalism and anxiety in the workplace. I’ve discovered more than I expected and now I need to sift and cut it back.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few things:

—After several years of not having time to start seeds, I’m back at it. My first little sprouts came up this week (pic above). I forget what it’s like to come down every morning and see something growing . My favorite part is watching a green speck heave a tile of dirt out of its path. It’s a kitchen version of Alyssa Liu’s decision to do things her own way.

We’ve had a weird winter/non-winter here in Portland, with not enough snow on Mt. Hood and the ski season canceled across the West. Though having a bit of sunshine in February has been nice, it also feels unnerving, because we need lots of water here in the winter to stave off the threat of fire in the summer. I keep delaying pruning my roses because I’m waiting for a hard frost, and now it’s almost March so I’m going to be cutting back rose canes that have new leaves on them and feeling like I’m inflicting harm.

—I pulled together some books on solidarity and I’m reading them as I have time:

I’ve wanted to dig into this idea for several years, but the situation in Minneapolis—and now the surrounding towns—made me even more eager to understand the history of solidarity and how it’s being used in different contexts today.

I’ve heard from a number of people that folks in Minneapolis pulled together and didn’t get waylaid by theoretical or political differences from each other because it was so obvious what had to be done. That made me wonder about the difference between solidarity forged in response to a direct, violent threat and solidarity forged in anticipation of a threat. If there’s no clear sense of when that threat might arrive, and how much time you have to prepare, does this ambiguity make solidarity harder to achieve?

I’ve also been thinking about the block-by-block organizing strategy that kept Minneapolis decentralized and flexible. It’s a humbling reminder to me that even though I know some people on my block pretty well, others are strangers to me. I’d love to learn what they need, what they’re good at, what they have to give and what they’d be open to receive from others. It’s such a simple set of questions, and yet I feel shy at the thought of just knocking on someone’s door and saying hello and taking the first steps that would get me to a place where I could ask those questions without seeming invasive.

I know what I’m describing here is more mutual aid than solidarity, but that’s in part why I’m learning about solidarity—to understand if mutual aid can build solidarity, or if solidarity leads to mutual aid happening organically, or if the two tactics orbit each other but don’t necessarily connect.

—Lastly, I’ve been trying for weeks now to discover what it is specifically that ICE recruits are being told about the “other,” however that other is being construed. I’ve found information about the training as a whole, and how many hours are being cut, and what sections of training have been eliminated. But I still can’t find anything about what new ICE employees are being told is the larger “why” they’re in our cities and why it’s so crucial to eliminate this threat, either through deportation, locking people up, or murdering them. (So if you know anything about this, please let me know.)

As I’ve been trying to answer this question, I’ve been rummaging around in German sociologist Helmut Rosa’s doorstop of a book Resonance. He has this to say about adolescents who are abused in their families and who then become violent in response:

By committing violence themselves, these youths overcome and conquer their vulnerability and experience of powerlessness. . . . The perpetrator of violence who strikes is not harmed but does harm. He himself tortures, destroys, annihilates, and thus compensates for his experience of repulsion. What he is not able to do, however, is establish a resonant relationship. His relationship to the world remains repulsive. The polarity of the repulsion is merely reversed: it proceeds no longer from the world, but from the subject. The perpetrator now pre-empts the hostile world.

The victim is now perceived as being utterly at the mercy of the perpetrator, and in the act of violence, the subject may also become completely insensitive both to his own physical pain and to other, psychological impulses. The exercise of violence can thus take on intoxicating, orgiastic features — the experience of impotence is transformed into an experience of omnipotence. But this form of relating to the world lacks everything that characterizes a resonant relationship. The subject who commits violence closes himself off from the Other. He does not want to perceive the Other’s “own voice” as a voice that concerns him in some way, but at most wants to hear the pained screams of submission to his own will. He does not reach out to the Other in a dialogic sense, but aims only at annihilation and control, at instrumental self-efficacy. (448-449)

I’d already been wondering about the backstory of so many of these ICE recruits, and I was struck by the way the description provided by Rosa matched what I’ve felt as I read about or watched ICE agents congratulate each other in public as they’re inflicting violence. I don’t want to simplify what’s happening or speculate about the family histories of what is certainly a varied and complex group of people.

I’m offering this passage, rather, because it offers a way of interpreting what ICE agents are doing that supplements the arguments that ICE recruits are acting purely out of training, or pre-existing white nationalism, or successful propaganda about threats to the viability of the nation state.

Alright—that’s it for me. I’m putting these seeds of ideas and questions out here in part to see if you have thoughts about them, too, or suggestions for learning more about any of these topics, or things you’re doing out there in the world, so please chime in if you have stuff to share.

Hope you are all having a good week. Bye for now!

Photo by mahdi rezaei on Unsplash

This is the first part of an exploration of anxiety at the personal and collective levels.

The librarian

Anxiety shows up like an exacting librarian. She’s wearing a black pin-stripe suit and spiky heels. Her glasses are half-way down her nose, and she’s peering at you over the top. She pulls out a steno pad and starts making notes. Her pen nib scratches across the page. She’s writing as fast as she can, flipping the pages, one after the other.

She’s got handy tips to improve your morning routine; notes to prepare for that meeting in a few hours; ways to fool people into thinking you’re competent. She’s just warming up.

The toilet is failing, and you only have one bathroom. When you get fired, here’s when your savings will run out. That strange sound the car is making could mean your tires will fly off when you’re next on the highway. How long has it been since you went to the doctor—that weird thing you don’t tell anyone about doesn’t seem to be going away.

She’s reaching into the lumpy bag at her feet, handing you an umbrella and sunscreen at the same time. She’s pressing you to do something, now even as she’s warning you to stop, you’re not doing it right.

Your heart pounds. You’re holding your breath, trying to catch what she’s saying because she’s speaking so fast. Your vision narrows and fogs, as all your energy is consumed by listening to her voice. Sweat gathers in your armpits, clammy and cold.

The body

Anxiety’s pounding heartbeat and held breath draw our attention to the top of the chest, which often lifts in response to the tension. Our back might arch, to hold our chest high, and our head might push forward, as if looking into a future we can’t see.

Our attention is “up” and “out”—above the diaphragm and towards the external world, which is reviewing us, judging us, coming for us. We might pant a bit, once we realize we’ve been holding our breath.

The promise and the ruse of anxiety

Anxiety’s promise is that it can keep us safe, if only we will do exactly what it demands. But this promise is a ruse. A “ruse” is a “trick intended to deceive.” In the case of anxiety, the ruse is that if you eliminate its content—that endless list of tasks—you will subdue its affect, and its physiological effects. Peace, then, comes as a consequence of completion. At first glance, the ruse sounds like a logical proposition.

The problem? The to-do list keeps getting longer. We can’t keep up. This failure gives anxiety more juice, because now it can comment on our performance. Why can’t we move faster? Why aren’t we more efficient? Why, when we know what will protect us, aren’t we doing it? The unforgiving voice; the ever-escalating level of its demands; this is the energy that both responds to the body’s heightened arousal and feeds it.

Remember, though, that this entire production is a deception. Anxiety keeps saying it’s protecting us, but what it’s really doing is providing a kind of abusive companionship. Its constant yammering fills the silence. Not the quiet, which is restful. The silence, deep as a thousand caverns, stacked one on top of the other, that holds at the bottom all your deepest, wordless, most amorphous fears.

At its heart, anxiety expresses the fear that we can’t handle our deepest fears. It tells us that if we were to discover them, we would collapse, or lose our capacity to function. Anxiety keeps us rushing from one thing to the next, luring us into thinking we’ll finally be safe, in order to keep us from actually encountering the things we fear most.

Back to the body

If we recall that anxiety takes us “up” and “out,” we can see that in pulling our energy above the diaphragm, anxiety keeps us away from our midsection, our center. It prevents us from reaching the belly and its deep wisdom. The midsection is a zone of information that is distinct from the analytical mind and, some argue, is more holistic and synthesizing in its approach to information. (If you want to know more about the enteric nervous system, the network of nerves in the gut, our “second brain,” Philip Shepherd’s New Self, New World is a great place to start.)

One way to break the ruse of anxiety, then, is to leave the analytical mind and find new information in that second brain. We can drop the breath back into the belly, searching for a sensation outside the “response” energy that is generated in reaction to anxious thinking. This action will feel quite uncomfortable if you are already in a spiral. I’m going to give you a practice that you can use to turn away from the anxiety feedback loop and drop down into a lower register, where anxiety will have a more difficult time finding you.

I should say that I encourage you to do this practice, initially, when you aren’t in the depths of the spiral. The first goal is to discover how many minutes you can tolerate the lower register. As you become more familiar with this second zone, you might be able to get there even when you are in the spiral. It is extremely powerful to see the mind doing all it can to distract us from this lower register, generating even more catastrophic fears about our daily lives and threatening us with social exclusion, all to keep us in its thrall. To watch this, even as we encourage ourselves to “leave,” is to truly appreciate—in the sense of be grateful for, and at the same time, really see—just how much we are often engaging two completely different kinds of fear at once, one consciously, the other pushed just outside of our awareness.

How to break anxiety’s grip

One way to work with anxiety at the individual level is to inch closer to the fear anxiety is blocking you from reaching. To find it, you can start by exhaling, slowly, until you have no more air in your lungs and the sensation makes you want to lean forward. This action will interrupt the pounding heart and slow it down.

As you inhale, you want to control your breath, which will strive to bounce right back to the top of the chest. Instead, imagine yourself drawing in air through a straw (you can even purse your lips), dropping the breath from just below the collar bone to underneath the tight knot in the center of the chest.

Take a few of these breaths. If you want to signal to the wordless parts of you that they are welcome to attend, you might light a candle or make a small gesture that indicates that you are starting this practice. Then, set your timer. You want to make this practice as easy as possible. Decide how many minutes you might tolerate the silence, the not-knowing-what-might-show-up. We’re talking 3, 5, 7 minutes tops. As you begin, you might ask what is there; what your anxiety is trying to keep you from contacting. Often, there won’t be an answer. There won’t be a dialog, or a request, or an image. The mind may be wrapped in darkness.

You might feel nauseous. You might break into a cold sweat, not knowing why. You might have a buzzing in your head so loud it’s all you can hear. Or maybe a headache. Your shoulders might be so tight they’re painful to the touch.

Go to this place. Go there at the same time, every day, if you can. The ritual tells the fear that you are serious. That you’ll show up, for however long it takes, because you want to listen. Set the timer for the minutes you can bear it, but no longer. You may find that in time you want to lengthen the amount of time you stay, but this isn’t about endurance. It’s about consistency.

It takes time to become familiar with silence. This practice requires patience, often when we’re at our wits’ end. Anxiety might yank us out, demanding of us how long we will feel this upset; when it might shift; what it’s for, and if it will make anything better.

The demand for answers runs counter to this practice, which cultivates curiosity in the midst of uncertainty and, often, deep pain. Over time, however, discovering what is there becomes more absorbing than the yammering about surface-level failures and disappointments. Seeing that you haven’t gone mad or stopped paying your utility bills, the librarian will likely pick up her lumpy bag and her steno pad and walk away. She will see that you don’t need her protection, because you’re in the place she was there to keep you from reaching. It’s not that there’s no “thinking,” it’s that the particular form of thinking that is characteristic of anxiety can pause, or even halt.

When you meet the thing that anxiety is protecting you from encountering, anxiety gets out of the way. Then, you can do the deeper work. It’s a kind of sobriety, with all the void-like silence that comes when we stop doing the thing we thought would soothe us, or get us through. It’s not that the fear goes away. It’s that which fears are worth noticing starts to change.

If you learn to stay, if you keep returning, the part of you that has been silenced, or compartmentalized, might begin to trust that you really want to know what it has to say. It might hand you a picture. A letter. A vibration. A song. Over time, you may discover that the way to that feeling of peace you were promised is to do the thing you’re most afraid of doing, or mourn the event you thought defined you, or take on the work your ancestors initiated, or avoided, or suffered from. You might make your own mantra, or map, or adventure kit. One way or another, you might see who you become once you take flight.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

This past weekend there were two mass shootings, one at Brown, as students gathered for an exam prep session, and one in Sydney, Australia, as Jewish people gathered at a local beach with their kids to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah. On Sunday night I went online to learn more about Brown and Sydney, only to discover that Rob Reiner, a famous Hollywood director, and his wife, Michele, had been murdered and their knife wounds likely inflicted by their son. Next up was a post about a hospital having to call poison control to figure out how to treat a one-year-old who’d been tear-gassed in an ICE raid; the doctors and nurses had never treated a person so young.

Because I read these stories on a social media feed, they came in both singly but in that blur of togetherness that the form creates. People writing online said the “weekend of violence” was more than they could take in. We all went to bed, demoralized, grief-stricken, scared, wondering what we’d wake up to learn next.

On Monday I read responses. Some were beautiful and sad and full of longing. Several people wrote to say they weren’t ready to say anything. Many people struggled to stay on topic: they couldn’t focus on one massacre and enter it. Their emotional terrain was cluttered with all the violence, in a heap. They’d try to say something about what happened, only to focus on their certainty that more was coming. If everything has been said and it’s still going to happen, maybe silence is the only meaningful response.

There were beautiful acts of heroism in Sydney. A woman lay on a stranger’s child to protect her. People opened their apartments to people fleeing, sheltering them. A man wrestled the gun away from one of the gunman and was injured, risking his life in an instant’s decision. At Brown, a student shot in the leg cradled another who was more wounded until the first responders came. A professor protected his students through the long lockdown. Friends called survivors of other school shootings who were at Brown, helping them get through the night.

The beauty and love happened at the same instant as the violence; erupted in response to the violence; defying the threats.

Is it morally reprehensible to ask what happened to people who enact horror, when the people who are suffering from its effects are so often glossed over and forgotten, or spoken about in aggregate, while the killers lap up the notoriety and attention and fascination?

Should we—and by “we” I mean those of us who are not directly impacted by a violent event— try to understand the people who did it, in the hopes that we can glean information necessary to prevent violence from happening again?

When I searched for clues in the reporting about what caused these very different people to commit acts of violence, all I found were labels. Antisemitic. Addict. Anti immigrant. Soldier. Each label was designed to tell me something about the person’s mind. The media’s questions came from the law and the language of mental health diagnoses.

Were they rational? Were they in an altered state? Was there a plan and a clear intent? Were their beliefs clear and logical, even if they were repellent? When did they become sick, or antisocial, or deranged, or criminal? Will they stay that way? Can they be redeemed? The questions asked where the person who did the thing would end up. A mental hospital, a court, a prison?

The ultimate question: when will this person be removed from the social order, and when they are, will the rest of us be safe?

What happens when we keep putting our faith in the mental hospital and the court; keep diagnosing and locking people up, and still the violence keeps coming? I think part of the reason people are falling silent isn’t just because of their horror and grief. They’re falling silent because there’s no point in saying, or asking for, the same thing. It reminds me of the silence that shows up in therapy when a person realizes that all the things they’ve done to cope, to get through, if only for a moment, no longer work.

When I’m working with a person in therapy, I talk about what happens when we stop. Stopping is the hardest thing. You have to sit there and be really uncomfortable and anxious and feel itchy. You have to eat and sleep and listen to the buzzing of the refrigerator and listen even more to the “what’s not happening” that you used to rely on to distract yourself. You wait. You wait some more. You consider fucking things up, just to have something interesting to do. You don’t do it.

The stopping feels like defeat. But it’s only defeat if it’s judged by what came before. In the present, it’s a blank space.

It’s easy for me to talk about individual change, because I’ve helped so many people as they do it. I can stay in that itchy place with them, for as long as it takes, while we wait. I tell them I don’t know how long we have to wait. I tell them I don’t know what’s coming. I just know it will be categorically different, if they can just tolerate stopping long enough.

It’s harder to describe what this process looks like across a culture, because a culture can’t stop in the way a person stops. How do we talk about change when what needs to change isn’t only a person, or even a group of people, but instead the infrastructures and ideologies that hold the culture together and keep its engines running?

Ideologies and systems and structures don’t have psychologies. They don’t get tired, they don’t feel sorry for us, they don’t have complex motivations or repressed desires. They aren’t kind or unkind, though we can talk about their effects as creating suffering and pain.

Because people in the U.S. are not often taught how to describe and talk about systems change, but are given the language to talk about individual change, when something goes wrong, people look for the individual to blame, or follow, or condemn. We know how to talk to and about people. So mass violence must be about bad people, and those who swoop in to rescue are the good ones, the ones we should trust. We say this, knowing the demographics of those most likely to commit gun violence and those who won’t.

If it’s individual pathology, then why are so many of the shooters from similar demographics, similar professions or trainings or specialities? If it’s just criminality, or mental illness, shootings would be committed by people wildly different from one another, their choice of targets erratic or opaque. Instead, we know who is likely to be targeted. We know which demographics the shooters are likely to belong to. We know the general contours of the meaning systems that drive most mass violence.

Why, then, are we not asking questions about how it is that a large group of people, who are very different from one another at the individual level, come from different families, live in different parts of the country, make the same choice, do the same thing, in the same way, over and over again?

Routing our explanations for mass violence back to the individual mind or brain leaves us with so few options, such a thin understanding of how we might make it stop. But to say that mass violence occurs at the intersection of self and culture widens the aperture of what intervention and prevention might look like. It includes looking at the self not purely as a product of the brain, but about the way the culture defines and reproduces a certain kind of “selfhood,” and then stories and evaluates people in relation to it.

How do we talk about the personal and the structural at the same time? How much richer and more complex a prevention plan can we create collectively if we develop fluency not only in individual psychology, but in the ways our very self cannot be extricated from the images, stories, narratives, events, and histories that tell us what a “self” looks like and how it behaves?

I want to know not just what happened in a person’s life but how they began to store up the meanings they were receiving from the dominant culture about how to be and what to anticipate and what success and failure look like. I want to know how they came to understand power, and who has it, who deserves it, and what they could expect to achieve. I want to know if they had access to resources, and who they saw having more or less than they did. If they witnessed suffering, how did they make sense of it? What’s the root cause? I want to know how they learned what their body meant and what it was for, what it means to be a man and what patriarchy promises and what it delivers and what you’re allowed to do if the promise isn’t fulfilled.

I want to know all the intersecting logics and systems and ideologies that cut through and across their lives and that gave them power and creativity and cunning and at the same time curtailed it. I want to know what they learned about violence and if they were subject to it—physically, emotionally, structurally, and if that had anything at all to do with the moment they picked up a gun or a knife.

It’s harder to talk about systems and structures and ideologies and cultures and how to make change at such a massive scale. But I think mass violence, in part, comes from and is about the mass, and is addressed to the mass, as much as it targets and violates the people and communities it destroys.

Bread line during the Great Depression—public domain

Tomorrow, November 1, 2025, 750,000 Oregonians are slated to lose their food stamp benefits. Nationally, 41.7 million people, or 1 in 8 low income households, will lose their benefits. Unlike WIC, which as its name reflects, targets women, infants and children, SNAP largely benefits children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. The November 1st date is tied to the government shutdown: the federal government is refusing to release funds to the states. But this cut is compounding the funding cuts passed in the Big Beautiful Bill this summer, making an already horrifying situation worse.

Though one might expect that states with the highest poverty rates are the ones with the highest usage of SNAP benefits, that’s not actually the case. Because each state can set its own eligibility requirements, even states that have high poverty rates can have a lower percentage of users than states that aren’t as poor. (If you want to know what percentage of people rely on SNAP in your state, you can go here for the non-partisan CBO’s state by state fact sheets, as of January 21, 2025.)

(As an aside, if you’re wondering if districts that voted for Trump are likely to be more affected by the cuts, or if it’s the ones that voted for Harris, the answer is that it’s pretty much a draw. This misery will be evenly spread across people everywhere.)

It’s important to recognize that SNAP doesn’t only prevent hunger. It also prevents economic instability. The SNAP program is absolutely enormous: it pays out 99.8 billion dollars a month. When the economy hits a crisis point and people lose work, SNAP funding goes up. When the economy is stable, SNAP funding goes down.

SNAP is a shock-absorber for the economy. When SNAP benefits kick in, people can keep spending. Lost in the coverage of the SNAP cuts is the fact that as of November 1st, this massive funding shortfall will add to and accelerate the combined economic impacts of the government shutdown, the efforts to fire even more federal workers during the government shutdown, Amazon’s cutting 30,000 jobs this week, the tariffs, the loss of labor and thus crop availability due to ICE’s raids and terrorizing of communities, and an overvalued stock market. That’s before the increase in healthcare costs kicks in next year, further straining the budgets of not just the poor, but middle income Americans.

For those more than 5 million SNAP recipients now facing new work requirements to keep their benefits, this economic shortfall could create a feedback loop, in which people who need to work to be able to eat find that because the very program they depend on to eat is cut, further stressing the economy, the jobs they need to obtain are not available or, if this continues, likely to be cut.

So how did we get here?

Let’s talk about the prior SNAP funding cuts passed in the Big Beautiful Bill. The bill mandated 186 billion dollars be cut from the program over the next ten years. But it enacted further program cuts on the implementation back end, making the amount of money it actually cut closer to 300 billion:

–It increased the age at which you need to work to qualify to from 55 to 65 (the expanded work requirement alone cuts 69 billion over 10 years from SNAP)

–If mandates those caring for children over the age of 14 also meet the work requirement (the House wanted it to be 6)

–It removes the protections for foster children, who when they age out of care are left with no resources or housing

–It removes exceptions for houseless people and veterans

–It removes SNAP benefits for immigrants living lawfully in the United States under humanitarian protection

–Under the “Indian health care act” it removes protections for “an indian,” an “Urban indian,” and a “California Indian”

–It removes waivers for people who can’t find work because they live in areas that do not have sufficient jobs for the number of people who could work, until that area reaches a 10% unemployment rate

And there’s more:

–Households without an elderly or disabled member no longer qualify for utility assistance for heating and cooling

–It strips the internet from shelter costs

–It cuts the amount the USDA pays states to administer the SNAP program

–It ends SNAP obesity prevention and nutrition education programs

What was already an enormously cruel budget cut has turned into a disaster, now that already reduced funding is being completely cut off. This playing chicken with the poor–and just this morning, floating the idea of killing the filibuster to end the shutdown–has, in an uncanny reenactment of Dobbs, offloaded the problem to the states.

Cutting off SNAP funds doesn’t just force people to go hungry. It also strains their mental health. Connecticut’s Community Mental Health Affiliates, for example, classifies hunger as a traumatic experience, noting that food insecurity can cause “chronic stress, behavioral issues, depression and increased risk of drug misuse and poor health outcomes.” A survey of women in high income countries reports that food insecurity is associated with depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Food insecurity is also tied to feeling less socially acceptable, as people can’t participate in social activities due to lack of funds, and can retreat into shame and isolation.

For children, specifically, according to Oklahoma’s 25 Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CREOKS), food insecurity not only results in poor nutrition, which can influence brain development, but also create irritability and difficulty with focus and concentration in school, creating a physiological/psychological feedback loop.

What’s going to happen next?

As of today, 25 states have sued the federal government, demanding the USDA use contingency funds to pay for SNAP. The judge who has been assigned to the case states she will rule as soon as she can on the suit.

In the wake of the federal refusal to free up money, it’s up to each state to decide if they want to release funds, and how much. Some governors, like Gavin Newsom, are deploying the National Guard to support food banks in making boxes and are releasing a lot of money (80 million). Some, like Oregon, are releasing some money (5 million). Others are digging in and refusing to pay for anything.

In the interim, if you live in Portland, here’s a roundup of resources. If you don’t live in Oregon, you can use this framework as a template for your own research and, I hope, add newly emerging resources in the comments section of this post.

If you live in Portland and you need support:

Food Sources/Food Banks

Oregon Food Bank

Feed the Mass

Lift Urban Portland

Urban Gleaners: Food for All

Blanchet House Food Rescue

Feed’em Freedom Black Community Foundation

Sunshine Division is taking names early for “Thanksgiving” food boxes

pdxfreefridge on IG has a list of fridges all over the city

Partner for a Hunger Free Oregon can help you find food assistance and see if you qualify for SNAP

Organizations accepting food donations

Child Foundation

Unite Oregon

Restaurants that have stepped up to give free or sliding scale meals

Heretic Coffee

GeekEasy Anime Cafe

Laughing Planet (all locations)

Red Sauce Pizza

Legacy Coffee

Mirisata

Mama Chow’s Kitchen

El Sombrero

Maxines

AG Burrito Shops

DB Desserts company and cafe

If you live in Portland and you want to support others:

In addition to volunteering with organizations, please donate funds to the above organizations and businesses. The good news is that donations are pouring into the Oregon Food Bank–so much so that they are crashing the site. This is great, because the food bank sends money and food across the state. Please consider donating to some of the organizations listed above, all of whom are also doing a heroic job and aren’t automatically getting large lump sums from the state.

Please add resources as you learn about them in the comments section

One beautiful thing that’s happening is that in this moment of crisis, people are stepping up everywhere to help. Google searches won’t help people find emerging resources, because things are moving so fast.

There are lots of great accounts out there on social media that are updating information in real time, but I thought we could also use the comments section of this post as a place to crowd source information about resources and free food that’s becoming available in your state or community.

If you follow Emily L. Hauser (@emilylhauser.bsky.social) she’s doing threads of restaurants and other orgs all over the country that are offering meals and food.

In Portland, Unlawful Whatever, also on Bluesky, is also posting information about restaurants that are offering free food that’s Portland specific and will be posting information about mutual aid groups in the near future.

A question I have for you all: let me know if you’d like me to create a post with recipes for easy and inexpensive meals that don’t require very many ingredients—I have a few really good ones that are cheap and feed a crowd—and we could use the comments to do a recipe share as well.

Thanks, everybody, for your love and care for all of us.

Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels

The vast and enormous No Kings marches sent a message. Protests are showy. They’re symbolic. They’re one-off events.

Organizers look at the number of people who march and ask: how much stronger could our movements be, if even a percentage of those who showed up made a long-term commitment to social change? That’s their hope.

Then there’s their fear: what if people pat themselves on the back for marching and after they get home, decide to take a break and check out? The march might inadvertently create a net loss of engagement, if the people’s enthusiasm isn’t immediately channeled into direct action.

So the calls for engagement go out; the sweeping rhetoric about what the march means starts flowing; the opposition shits on the marchers; the video gets by turns ridiculed and taken seriously, and by Monday night it’s hard to remember that less than 48 hours ago you stood on the street, surrounded by people, or watched from somewhere else, or supported others who marched in your name. The crush of what’s next threatens to obliterate your memories, your meaning, and with it, your power.

My exhortation to you is to pause. Take yourself out of the current. Find a little bit of time—30 minutes or less—to determine for yourself what, if anything, changed for you because of that march, and what meaning you made of it. If you found hope, store it. If you found passion, let it vibrate.

I’m giving you a small worksheet here, a pathway back to yourself. But you could just as easily go on a walk and make an audio note of your memories and your take-aways. You could do a body-scan and drop into a slower brain frequency, and when you come out of it, look for the moments of congruence and difference between what you took away and what you’re being told the march means, and what you should do next.

The “so what” of this worksheet

My intention here isn’t just to encourage you to solidify your memories of Saturday. It’s to help you bottle your experience and, in doing so, return to your own power and agency.

Only you can decide how much time you have, and what you have to give. When the requests to take action come in, you can use the information you gathered here to help you figure out what you can drop, now, so you can take on more or different responsibilities.

It’s better to give an hour, week after week, than get caught up in a surge of desire to make a difference, overcommit, and then find yourself overcome with guilt because you have to drop out. It’s powerful to protect overstretched organizations from having to train a big group of new volunteers, taking time away from current projects, in the hope that a few people will hang in.

When you hear conversations about what “we” should be doing, you can remind yourself that the rhetoric of we can be empowering and uplifting, and it can also be alienating or shaming, depending on your identities, your resources, your communities, your abilities, and your socialization by patriarchy or white supremacy or nationalism.

Another reason to do this exercise? When you bottle your memory of collective power, you participate, literally or vicariously, not only in one march, but in the unbreakable legacy of movement history.

When you push yourself to do something tough, like work with a community that’s very different from yours, or join with people whose language you don’t speak, or stay on the ground in chaos that’s not going to stop, you can visualize the people who are also stretching themselves. The people you don’t know, but whose bodies you witnessed in other places—they’re joining you and refusing to stay silent. You can use it to remember that people in power want us to believe we are powerless. The violence that is landing on people’s bodies is also designed to land vicariously on all of us, to demoralize and terrify us. You need your center, your full heart, to stay present. You can stay remain fierce and original and independent, even as you open that new door, and join in.

If you choose to complete the worksheet, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments, if sharing them feels right to you.

Photo taken by the author

I have a favorite blueberry. Its name is Elliot. Every August, when I go to the blueberry farm I found years ago, I use ET’s raspy voice, calling out “El-y-ot” under my breath, as I pick. The Elliot blueberry ripens late, in mid August to early September, long after most of the others are finished. When I found this farm, shortly after I moved to Oregon, I was struck by the number of varieties they grew. Torros, Brigitas, Auroras, Nelsons, Darrows and still more, each with its particular flavor. The Elliot is tart, on the smaller side, and makes your mouth pucker a bit when you eat one, especially if it’s slightly under ripe. It makes a mean pie, especially the no-bake kind. 

The Elliot blueberry is named after Dr. Arthur Elliott of Michigan, a renowned blueberry breeder, who received and evaluated the cultivar created by George M. Darrow of Maryland. Why the Elliot is not the Darrow, and why it lost the second “t” of its namesake when it was named, are mysteries I cannot solve.

When I tell people I have a favorite blueberry, they often snort at me in derision. What an absurdity, the snort says, to have a taste not just for blueberries, but for one kind. They respond as if I’d said “I will only eat Elliots,” as if I am a sommelier of blueberries, a fuss pot, a rejector of perfectly good fruit. They’re wrong.

I have a favorite strawberry, too, but when I get the snort I don’t disclose that fact. (It’s Mary’s Peak, a sturdy, large berry, perfect for freezing because it is large and sweet and holds its flavor). I love Mary’s Peak, though, not just for the flavor, but for the fact that the name alone takes me back to the first week I was ever in Oregon, many years before I lived in Portland. I had moved into an old Victorian house that had been turned into apartments, and my downstairs neighbor, seeing that I was at loose ends, invited me on a hike. We left late that afternoon and drove to a mountain called St. Mary’s Peak, on the outskirts of town. By the time we reached the summit, it was almost dark. We found our way down using her headlamp. She was breezy and unflappable. I had never hiked down a mountain in pitch darkness, (small mountain, to be sure) which meant I had never had to use my senses, and feel into the soles of my feet, to find my way over roots and gullies and keep my balance. I think one reason that memory is still so strong is because I was on a sensory alert, even though I wasn’t afraid. 

The names of the people who farmed and cultivated varieties of fruits, and the locations in which those varieties best grow, are maps. The names of seeds enshrine place and taste and nourishment and history. To know not just fruit, but the vast array of taste each variety can hold, isn’t just about enjoying pie. It’s about locating the self in a region, or appreciating a region from which a fruit or vegetable hails, when it has traveled to you from far away and ends up on your plate. 

When Monsanto determined it wanted to patent seeds that had been used for generations by indigenous peoples of North America; when Israel destroyed the seed banks of Gaza this week, they knew what they were doing. It’s not solely about profit and starvation and genocide—it’s about stripping people from their connection to place, and with it, everything that place envelops: community, history, beauty, ritual, sacred story and song, ancestral wisdom and healing traditions, and the particular food that certain bodies have been ingesting for generations. In the nineteenth century, when the American Indian and First Nations children were taken to boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada to have their culture eradicated, their parents were told that if they did anything to stop it, their food rations—corn—and those of everyone in their community would be taken from them. 

To know the specific names of the foods you eat; to know the path of the watershed that keeps you from perishing; to know the species of trees that inhabit the neighborhoods you wander after work, and which other trees they need nearby to help them thrive; these names and this knowledge connects you to your animal self and the land that keeps you alive, even if what you see out of your window is asphalt and billboards and power lines. There are still trees. The water in your pipes comes from somewhere. The vegetables in the shrink-wrapped packages have names and origin stories. But when we are disconnected from that knowledge, we can start to believe that food just appears, weekly, when we want it, from wherever it was shipped. Food, disconnected from place, is just a thing we buy, like an alarm clock. If it’s more or less expensive, we might look for what’s on sale, but not ask what’s happening to the soil.

It wasn’t until I taught myself how to build a vegetable garden that I learned when certain vegetables are in season and why. I figured out why the broccoli and cauliflower were cheaper in the spring and fall than the summer, and I started to plan and anticipate what food I would make, based on what I knew about crops. I felt humbled and kind of stupid, discovering this information when I was an adult, when it was so simple and ordinary. But I grew up in a suburb, and I made food based on recipes I wanted to try, or what was cheapest. The food I wanted was at the store when I wanted it, so I didn’t ask where it came from. I didn’t feel any responsibility to the farmers or the plants I relied on to stay alive. I believed the food would always be there, unless I heard about something disastrous, like a freeze in Florida, killing all the citrus one year—a freak accident, a singular event. 

I’m talking about alienation, here, not just from place, but more significantly, from mortality. To believe one will always have access to food because food comes from the grocery store—to know that sure it comes from a field somewhere but you’ve never worked in one—is to believe on at least some level that we have transcended our dependence on the earth. Capitalism and markets give us food, and as long as there’s money, there’s food. That’s enough of a remove from the field, from the soil, from the interdependence of the ecosystem that feeds the field, to make food seem like an object rather than a living being.* The more packaged the food, the more alienated from its living source. 

From this perspective, climate change would be an idea, a concept, at a distant remove from the Cheetos on sale. When we toss them in the grocery cart, their unnatural orange hue is a kind of guarantee of their permanence, and by extension, our permanence, our lack of vulnerability to the catastrophic effects of global warming and ecological extinction. If we can live on Cheetos and forget the corn from which they’re sourced, we can continue to believe, at least for one more week, that we’re ok, and that we don’t have to change.**

When I learned this week that Trump had paved over the Rose Garden at the White House, I thought about how roses are a symbol of love and relationship, but also a symbol of human frailty and fragility of our life—how quickly we fade and die. It made sense to me, from this perspective, that Trump, an aging and increasingly frail body trying so desperately to inhabit the immortal power of a king; a man whose difficulty sustaining relationship of any kind is part of his power and his brand, would feel an instinctive need to destroy such a visceral reminder of beauty and mortality. A field of roses, each with their particular names and histories, the garden itself full of symbolic meaning, safely buried under concrete and covered with patio tables and umbrellas. 

Trump is selling off the forests, drilling the oil, denying climate change, deriding the feminine, in what looks like a frantic and hopeless lashing out against mortality itself. To control Nature and all that is symbolically accrued to it—is that not the closest one can come to the Christian representation of the immortal God? Perhaps he is the apotheosis of this idea, but the fact that there are not mass marches and strikes and interdisciplinary emergency innovation gatherings happening globally, ceaselessly, until we are all forced to acknowledge and respond to the fact of ecological devastation means that too many of us, especially in the Global North—and I very much include myself in this us—still aren’t at a place where we can really feel how vulnerable we are. 

A path forward can start simply, with techniques to restore the connection between the self and the ecosystems in which we are implicated and upon which we depend. It can build power and force when we come together and contribute our singular gifts to the local organizations, the national gatherings, and political global movements that are already doing the work. Here’s a few things to try:

• Learn the name of the trees on your block and what they need to thrive

• Try to identify three bird calls you hear every day (you can cheat and use Merlin, the app)

• Find a place to lie down outside and look up and listen. It doesn’t have to be a “pretty” place.

• Research where the water you drink comes from

• Choose one fruit or vegetable you eat frequently and find out how far it had to travel to get to you.

• Read this article from Outside Magazine to learn more about public lands

• Spend one day participating in a habitat restoration project and notice what changes about your connection to the place you worked

• Take a 101 level class on what climate change is and how it works

• Attend a climate café to sit with others and share you grief

• Pick one bill that’s influencing a place you treasure and advocate to protect it

• Research your local organizations and learn more about how they understand what’s happening in your region

*The producer price index from July reported a 38.9% increase in the wholesale price grocery stores are paying for fruits and vegetables, which is being passed along to consumers. Though the official line is that prices “are volatile” and impossible to predict, when pressed, the political economist interviewed conceded that price increases are due to climate change, the ICE raids, because migrant workers are afraid to come to work in the fields, and tariffs.

**The CDC conducted a survey between 2021 and 2023 and found that Americans over the age of 1 get an average of 55% of their calories from over-processed food.

Photo by Robert Acevedo on Pexels

Whenever I hear “Loose Yourself” from the movie 8 Mile on the car radio, I turn it up and sing. I ask myself what my battle is; what risk is worth the sacrifice. I wonder if I’ll ever nail something so completely I can sink into it and relish the moment.

It’s exciting to think about risk this way—a person does a bunch of hard work in the shadows. They encounter obstacles that drop them to the ground and they get up and do it again. Close friends and lovers, frustrated with the person’s single-minded commitment, walk out. The person experiences moments of despair, preferably against an inky black sky, lit by a single streetlamp. Finally, the moment arrives—it’s do or die. The people who have left return: they’re all here, watching. It looks like it’s not going to happen. Wait—it’s happening! The person does the thing! They win! Everyone cheers.

The above isn’t just the plot of almost every musical biopic. It’s documentaries about Olympic athletes, or political activists and the movements they catalyzed, or seekers after spiritual truth. The opening shot is the scene where everything is on the line, but we don’t know what it’s about yet. The scene returns at the story’s close, sealing the triumph.

In this storyline, risk is something you’re born for. It’s in you, this ability to leap, often in public, regardless of how afraid you are. You put yourself on the line. You risk humiliation and defeat. The risk is in equal measure to the power and brilliance of the result.

But what happens when we keep taking in this storyline, in movies, on podcasts, in profiles, in newspaper articles? When we keep hearing that heroes and athletes and artists are these extraordinary beings, with stamina, courage, and willfulness, bordering on obsession and assholery, and that’s what makes them great? What does that do to our image of who can take a risk, and what “risk” looks like?

One thing that stands out to me about this storyline is that it makes risk singular. Not only singular meaning exceptional, but also singular meaning “once.” If risk is viewed as a singular event, its result easily becomes a verdict stamped upon the self. If you fail at the thing, you are a failure. And everybody watched it happen. 

There’s a key difference, however, between risk as a driver of plot—the traditional narrative arc, with an initial conflict, a buildup of tension, a crisis, and its resolution—and risk as a verb, a throwing ourselves toward something, over and over again.

If risk taking is about the regular movement toward something, rather than a fixed moment in time, there’s more room:

–Room to repeat an action, over and over, until we become familiar with it

–Room to break the action into small pieces, each with its particular skills and tasks

–Room to ask other people for help, and not have others’ help mean that we “don’t have what it takes” to tough it out

–Room to position risk taking as a form of learning, often through mentorship and example

–Room to see risk taking as requiring emotional support, as we push past our current limits

–Room to feel confidence that comes from practice rather than our inherent bravery

Ask yourself how you feel, when you read the above list. I confess, I feel a bit deflated. I drained all the excitement out of the story. I pulled the curtain back, revealing that risk taking isn’t necessarily as special as we imagine.

It’s as if there’s two options: the idea of a big, exciting risk, with blood pumping and heroic pride in self at the successful outcome, or a boring, enormous amount of work, often made possible by the help of others, made up of slow, incremental gains that may or may not result in victory. Boy, does that sounds like an exciting movie. Story one is inspiring. Story two is . . . life. 

I’m using “story” intentionally, here, because I think what we say to ourselves about our abilities, in our most private and silent place, often predicts whether we will take risks, or avoid them, telling ourselves we “aren’t the kind of people who” can do the thing.

What’s even more problematic about the notion of heroic risk is that it strips risk of its context. It says one either is or isn’t a person “comfortable with risk taking.” As if access to power, money, and other resources has nothing to do with it. As if incarceration and violence will or will not follow from it, depending on your structural location in culture. Our ancestors may have taught us that a risk we take has a collective effect; that our identity mandates that we be prudent, quiet, unobtrusive, to preserve our safety and the longevity of our lineage. When we restore the structural context within which risk taking occurs, what risk taking looks like starts to shift. We can ask what it means to situate risk along a gradient that is not only personal but also cultural and systemic.

What happens if instead of seeing risk taking as an aspect of our personality, we see risk taking as our walking around and up a spiral? Who is with us, as we travel? Who has walked the path before us? We move along this spiral path, building our skills and increasing the difficulty. Each time, we move up to and past our “edge” and stay there for a time, and then we return to our prior safety, to breathe. The more we repeat this process, the less resistance we’ll have to the new and scary. After years of this, we might be mistaken for a “naturally” courageous person; even a person who moves boldly onto some kind of literal or metaphorical stage and finds joy in it. 

The dominant culture, with its repeated representations of white bodies as natural leaders, and some people of color as “heroic exceptions” to white supremacy—those whose individual merit demonstrates that there are no structural barriers to success in the United States—relies on the story of risk as a personal characteristic. As something rare. It doesn’t tell the story of daily, ordinary risks, the risks so many people take every day, in order to survive.

Representations of risk taking as exceptional and character driven function not only psychologically, but also ideologically. They are particularly powerful in this moment, when we are daily barraged by information about violence that is at once landing on certain bodies and not others, but also violence that is structural, systemic, political. Some of this violence is familiar, but some of it is new and requires risk taking that is emergent, fertile, and provisional. The thinking and resistance that this moment requires isn’t the same as the resistance to rights-based violence that comprised so much of the rhetoric and strategy of the anti-violence movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s.

What this means is that the speed and force of today’s violence is not only terrifying, but that it demands new thinking, new strategy, new participation from people who haven’t yet joined in, to creatively and collectively overcome its intentions and power. It demands a new story of risk. It is an exhortation, a song, a beckoning. It asks us to risk, not only to counteract what is, but to walk up that spiral together, into an unknown that we create in our difference, and in our collectivity, each wave pushing us up against our edge, and then pulling back, as inevitable and powerful as the tides.

I’ve been trying to remember the first time I heard her name. Someone referred to her in the offhand way you do when you’re talking about someone so well known, so essential to transformation work, they’re certain you’ve known about them for years. “Joanna? The Great Turning? Yes?”

I’d gotten my start in organizing work that focused on people: on racism, sexism, economic injustice, whereas Joanna’s focus was deep ecology. Maybe that explained why the people who taught me didn’t know about her work. I was clearly behind the eight ball on this one.

I tracked down some books to try to catch up. I picked up Coming Back to Life. I thought I had a pretty complex analysis. I thought I knew what movement work looked like, sounded like, what a meeting structure might involve, and a successful project require. I say this as background: I was already calcified in my thinking, even though I was aware of how little I actually knew or had experienced. I thought I had a foundation and I needed to build a house.

So when I picked up Coming Back to Life I wasn’t ready to receive it. In the introduction, she talked about the Great Turning—the possibility that, with time, there could be a wholesale refutation of late capitalism and alienation from the natural world, allowing the collective emergence of an entirely new way of being. The remainder of the book outlined a list of practices that were so simple, so decontextualized, that I couldn’t see how they could possibly lead people to surrender their reliance on the dominant culture. They seemed almost childlike in their simplicity. They were too clear, in the Buddhist sense, for me to receive them.

I had expected an elaborate political argument. I knew she was a scholar; a Buddhist teacher; that she had trained in a Christian seminary before she rejected it because she found it too patriarchal. She’d written a book on systems thinking. She was a world traveler. She’d trained others and taught countless workshops, and now she had an entire cohort of trainers who were bringing her practices to an even wider community. The Work that Reconnects—the umbrella term under which her practices are organized—was being used all over the world to take on incredibly complex social and ecological problems.

I couldn’t make sense of the difference between her history, her institutional training, and the practices she had created. I didn’t know how to enter. I knew that often, these kinds of techniques don’t translate well on the page. I knew there was something important to Joanna about grief, and the practices were designed to pull the grief up and out, into the space between and among people. Grief needed to be witnessed, shared, and acknowledged in its intensity. It had often been transmitted across generations; it saturated the past and shaped our expectations about the future.

Ok, so people are sad, I thought. These exercises? Something to do on the side, maybe? But I was impatient: there was so much violence; so much terror happening right now. Who had time to grieve? Let alone sit with a group of strangers and cry? How was that going to make anything better? I put the book back on the shelf.

Some time after that, I read Malidoma Patrice Somé’s The Healing Wisdom of Africa. At his birth, the ancestors revealed Somé’s purpose—to bring the healing traditions of the Dagara culture of Burkina Faso to the West. Some of the most powerful and necessary healing practices, he explained, were communal grief rituals. These rituals often went on for days, were held regularly, and were almost universally recognized by the community as essential to the functioning of the whole. Without the regular expression and recognition of grief, nothing else was going to happen properly.

Griefwork wasn’t private. It didn’t happen “outside” the work that in the West is often designated part of the “public sphere.” It was intense, it was individual, and it was also collective. But it was expected. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t even “special.” The problem wasn’t the intensity of grief. The problem was the suppression, the refusal to be with grief, and the unwillingness to join together with others, as the grief poured out.

I had never participated in a grief ritual like this. I tried to stretch my imagination; to envision myself participating monthly, for days at a time, in the excavation and communion with my own sadness, longing, loss, and pain. Doing so publicly, with others. Being in a space designed for this process; that made it ordinary and significant at the same time. And afterwards, there would be a feast.

I lay on my bed, trying to imagine who I would be if that was my life. Then I saw how utterly insane the United States must appear to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. Which meant I was likely suffering from a form of insanity, myself.

One of the things Joanna Macy says is that until you access your grief, your ability to act is likely to be blocked. The fear of grief—really of the pain and sadness and powerlessness that fuel it—makes it almost impossible to harness the energy necessary to resist the power structures that rationalize and enforce violence. If even coming into brief contact with others’ suffering is too much to bear, the person will do everything in their power to avoid their fear and grief. Their energy will stay locked up in the effort to compartmentalize and deny what they know. Any call to action will be received from this place: of terror, uncertainty, and often, cynicism.

What is needed are practices that help people feel how devastated they are that others are suffering. To help them encounter the ways they are often complicit in others’ suffering, not from malice or ill will, but rather from acceptance of the status quo. And once those feelings emerge in their vastness, to help people become capacious enough to hold the grief and the hope and possibility for something entirely different to emerge. Once they have that, action will follow, because it will be obvious to that person what they must do. And the kicker: they must act from a place of radical uncertainty. No guarantees. Just the knife edge of what she calls “active hope.”

I’m lucky that, as a slow learner, it took a number of years before I heard that Joanna was coming to Portland to offer a day-long workshop. She was 88 years old. She’d been doing the work since the ‘70s, starting with the anti-nuclear movement. Finally, I thought, I’ll be able to see what these practices feel like in person. I gathered with the people and sat on the floor of the room. Joanna walked out on the small stage and opened the day. Her presence was so powerful and relaxed that she created the emotional container for our work within minutes. She broke us into pairs and we started with a simple exercise, speaking back and forth to a stranger, making eye contact, answering the question she’d posed, one of the exercises I’d read years ago in that book.

It was the summer of 2016. What I didn’t know, because I couldn’t feel it, was that my body had been in a months’ long, silent, state of emergency. I’d been blindsided by the election. That night, after I heard the result, I knew I was seeing clients in the morning and I would need to do something to be present and hold space for their reactions. So I pulled all my energy in, and up, and I walked into my office and just kept going.

I’d been intensely focused on my clients; I’d been tracking and watching and responding to what was happening; I’d been strategizing and analyzing . . . what I hadn’t done, not once, was cry. I was still so naive—so sure that I could hold it all, and that “holding it all” was somehow the best way to make sure others could rely on me—that it hadn’t even occurred to me that in attending the workshop I might be confronted with my own grief. But somehow the second I felt Joanna’s presence and sureness, I just started crying. My tears had nothing to do with the exercise, which wasn’t designed to induce grief. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular before I started crying. It was like they’d just been waiting for Joanna to show up.

You won’t be surprised to hear that once I started crying, I couldn’t stop. The relief to be in a space held by Joanna Macy, to feel that I could relax into my own sadness, that I could cry my way through every exercise, regardless of what it was about, and no one would ask me to explain myself, or be frightened by my sadness, was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had.

Because Joanna Macy started her work in systems thinking and deep ecology—and because the interconnectedness of all beings is a fundamental tenet of Buddhism—her work is best known in the communities of engaged Buddhism and ecology/climate justice. She is internationally renowned, and yet there are still many justice-based organizations and communities that do not know her work. Now, when it is me who says “Joanna? The Great Turning? Yes?” to other people, I am both surprised and not surprised when they say “Who?”

When I look back and marvel at the fact that Joanna Macy already knew in the 1970s that this moment was coming, and knew what it would take to be able to stay with it, and that she wrote and practiced and did it again, and again, over and over for the entire remainder of her life—with skill, and courage, and humor, and singing and poetry—I think: what must it be like to be a prophet and have to get up every day and occupy a beginner’s mindset? How did she patiently and rigorously and fiercely explain all of this, over and over, never knowing if it would be heard in time?

And though I can come up with speculative answers to these questions, I still can’t know what it feels like to be her, and what she had to wrestle to the ground to keep going. All I can say is Thank You. May your legacy continue to spiral up and out, and may the Great Turning you saw coming arrive, in good time.

If you want to learn more about Joanna Macy. If you want to learn more about the Work that Reconnects. If you want to leave an appreciation for Joanna, who is hearing them and being buoyed up, on her Caring Bridge, it’s here.

Image by Cottonbro on Pexels

In 2018 I moved into the place I live now. I wanted a garden, and the backyard was flat and square, except for the dogwood tree at its edge. At some point a previous inhabitant had built a stone flower bed at the back, near the fence. The bed was empty, except for two pink rose bushes. Someone had also planted a red rose in front of the bed, blocking the view. All the roses were diseased, and the leaves, yellowed and covered in black spot, fell off in clumps before they could bring any nutrients to the plants. 

I discovered a shard of another rose, also diseased, under a gangly bush. It had one flower, and the scent was so deep and potent that it startled me, taking me back to a day in England when I was a teenager and I smelled a rose perfume so strong and accurate that I never forgot it. Here was the rose that seemed like the source of that perfume, its head drooping over a barely alive stem.

At the edge of the yard was a long bed, empty, full of yellow dirt. The only animals who lived there were a few squirrels and a family of blue jays that yelled at me every time I opened the back door. No butterflies; no ladybugs; no worms; no other birds or visiting cats—it was as if the entire ecosystem had been vacated.

I went to the fancy nursery in town, where the plants are so expensive they can afford to hire horticulturalists to work the information booth. The expert told me the best way to fight the diseases and save the roses was to fertilize the plants every week. I could also spray with copper fungicide, for good measure, he said, but the real issue was that the plants were weak, and the disease could take hold because they didn’t have the strength to fight back. The plants looked awful, he admitted, but what he saw was not so much devastation as vulnerability. “It’s like when you have a skin fungus,” he said cheerfully, “it’s not going to kill you. It just means you have to address it.”

I went to the hippie farm store, its asphalt parking lot covered by ragtag plants and herbs, its interior full of books, tools, seeds, and straw-filled pens holding goats and rabbits. The hippies told me to buy as much compost as I could and add it to the yellow dirt. I could start tinkering with the pH levels at some point, they noted, but for now, “Just keep adding compost and turning the soil.”

In both situations, the advice was the same: fortify. Strengthen the existing plant. Build the foundation of the soil. Keep at it, over and over. Don’t worry too much about what you see and how bad things look right now. Do what’s necessary. Trust. Keep at it. 

I bought the fertilizer. I ordered the compost. A couple of weeks later a giant truck drove in from rural Washington and tipped 3 cubic feet of compost into my driveway. It filled the entire thing. I had compost sand dunes. It was way too big to cover with tarps. My neighbors, who I hadn’t met yet, slowed when they walked by and looked at it with curiosity. I bought a wheelbarrow and started shoveling.

I’ve been asking myself: what are the ways we can fortify a movement, the way the horticulturalist and the hippies approach a plant? What’s the soil that strengthens it? What’s the regular practice that acts like fertilizer and keeps the movement going, so it can ward off threats? And what are the visual distractions, like black spot, that appear to be the problem but are instead indicators of a deeper and more fundamental weakness of the whole?

Because I’m a trauma therapist, the part of movement building I understand the best is the fight against violence. And yes, I don’t like the word “fight” in this context, but it’s true, we are fighting and the violence is not only interpersonal, but also structural, enacted by institutions that are networked and mutually reinforcing. 

The violence now is all consuming, multifaceted, so vast it threatens to push our consciousness into disbelief, even as we are amidst it. The imperative is to fight back and try to stop as much as we can. In the fray of the moment, what can get lost is the question of how we can transform our relationship to violence itself. To build a movement that dignifies and protects those who are being harmed, but that also fortifies the vision and belief that we can overcome violence itself.

I remember the first time I heard about Generation 5. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh! the person said, “it’s an organization created by Staci Haines and others in 2000. Its mission is to end child sexual abuse in five generations.” I felt like all the gears in my brain locked up at once, like the time I discovered the oil change person hadn’t replaced the oil and now my truck had seized up on the side of the highway.

My first thought: “End child sexual abuse? They’re crazy. How is a tiny organization going to do that?” And then I took a beat. “Wait a minute,” I asked myself, “Why don’t I believe we can end child abuse? What beliefs are supporting my certainty that we can’t overcome this? And how is that fatalism influencing my actions, when child sexual abuse absolutely needs to end?”

So then I asked myself: “What’s it going to take to believe we can end it?” That’s when I started asking what ending it in five generations would require. How hard we’d all have to work to get there, but what an amazing result that would be. I’d already been shaken up, just by learning of the mission and the organization’s name.

Generation 5 is a movement building organization. It’s got a long time horizon, one like the gardeners who know they are restoring not just patches of dirt, but entire ecosystems. 

I started thinking about the difference between protest and movement building, and how we need both, but they perform completely different tasks. Yes there’s black spot, but you can’t take your eyes off the soil.

It’s absolutely essential to respond to violence with protest. Reacting with speed, force, and numbers builds momentum and reminds those in power that the mass is way bigger. But the protest isn’t the movement. The protest responds to what is happening right now in order to stop it.

Because it is often a “No!” to explicit acts of domination and oppression, the language and goal of the protest often occurs inside the frame that justified or rationalized the violence. Philosophically, the protest is a negation of a pre-existing concept. It cannot liberate itself from the concept, because the protest is only legible because of what it opposes. The energy of the protest appears to come from the crowd. But often, that energy is actually generated by the other side. It’s reactive rather than generative.

A protest carries within it the expectation of its dispersal. Here’s what I mean. Last week when I was marching at the No Kings protest in Portland, I got caught in this strange lull within the march. The people behind me were chanting. Up ahead I could see people on a bridge, calling to the people below. But I was in this odd dead space. No one was talking; no one was chanting; people were ambling along, many of them almost expressionless. I was part of a big crowd, but I felt like I could have been moving through a crowd at the end of a concert, trying to get to the parking lot. 

I could feel the imminent dispersal, even as the march was happening. I could sense the people in the crowd starting to think about lunch, that their feet were hurting, that they hadn’t yet done their grocery shopping for the week . . .  I felt deflated by the lack of energy, even as it also made sense. Some people, I presumed, were here because they believed it was very important to be counted. They wanted the protest to mean something. They wanted the highest numbers possible, to register the size of the dissent. And on that level, the march “worked.” 

From a grossly pragmatic perspective, as soon as that march was made up of 50,000 people, it was a success, and therefore “finished.” I’m being a little cheeky here, but there was a way in which the goal could have been dispatched and checked off, like part of a grand to-do list, as soon as it achieved critical mass. 

The instrumental function of the protest seemed like it overtook the embodied experience of some of the participants. Its “job”—to be filmed and put on social media and written about in the newspaper—became more important than the actual political and spiritual and emotional Being of the participants, people gathering together to reckon with authoritarianism and ICE. When I felt like I was no longer at a protest and instead part of a crowd, I was confronting the disparity between the instrumental and the consciousness-raising aspects of a protest. 

If a protest is against something (ICE detentions) or for something (abortion rights), it’s clear what the end goal of the action is. And if the goal isn’t met, the protests will continue. But a movement isn’t a discrete action. A movement has a kind of timelessness to it, because it is understood to require generations for its unfurling and revealing of itself. 

One function of movement building, for example, is to fundamentally transform our relationship to violence. The movement contains within it thousands of questions about what violence is; how we recognize it; if interpersonal violence is an expression of systems of domination, or something separate and distinct; how we train ourselves to ignore the suffering of others; what forms of violence are acceptable to the public and what kinds break our consent; if the methods of stopping violence are themselves forms of violence.  These questions are designed not only to stop the violence that *is,* but also to show us the limits of our current thinking, pushing us to conceive of violence in an entirely new way and fortify our belief that we can stop the engines that produce it.  

From this perspective, movement building is about throwing ourselves forward into uncertainty. It’s an opening up, a moving toward, a listening for something that isn’t perceptible yet, the way you think you hear approaching footsteps, but it could just be the wind. 

Movement building requires different tools, and different coping mechanisms, than protests. The “time” of movement building is like the time it takes an ecosystem to restore itself. It’s completely outside the timeline of a news cycle, or even a political season. This is why I started this meditation with my roses and my sterile garden beds. A protest is spraying copper fungicide on the blackspot covering the leaves of my roses. A movement is putting three cubic feet of compost in my yellow garden bed and having no idea if any creatures will choose to live there, or if any plants will thrive, or if what happens in the garden bed will transform the rest of the backyard. My puny action can help, or it can make things worse, but whether the ecosystem restores itself is beyond my personal agency. 

I’m not going to open this next point up, but I think part of what makes this time of movement building so challenging is that it’s occurring in the context of “collapse” and “polycrises.” That is, there’s the grieving of the collapse, and there’s emergent strategy for what will follow, but it’s easy to see these energies as opposed to each other. Can we be in the grief and recognition of collapse—that is, not in denial, or some kind of spiritual bypassing of the polycrises—and at the same time be gathering and building energy toward what comes next?

If so, what does fortifying movement building in this context look like? If part of the goal is to include ever more people along the way, how do people who perhaps have joined a march for the first time and are feeling pretty pumped about it start to shift their thinking from event-based participation to catalyzing a wholesale regenerative process, one that includes not just human beings, but the more than human world? 

What will foster our stamina and resilience? How will we shift our mindset from completing a task to engaging in transformation? Though this is a daunting alteration of consciousness, by changing the timeline and broadening the scope of what is addressed, movements can go beyond questions that are less about transformation and more about power within the current political structure, such as: “What’s the unifying goal people can organize around?” “Who is the credible leader and what do they look like?” “What outcomes will people see as a result of their participation in the work?” “How will we give people hope, if they don’t know specifically what they’re fighting for?”

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the above questions. They help people hone their actions and fight back. They are essential to the resistance to what is, in all its cruel and sadistic manifestations.

But when the leaves keep falling off my roses, and I keep spraying, I might get frustrated and think I failed. If I’m fortifying the soil and, I hope, fortifying the rose bush, I can’t actually know how long it’s going to take til the leaves stop falling off in clumps. Some plants, in fact, look like garbage for a long time when they are actually regenerating, because they’re pulling all their energy “in” to strengthen the center. When all the leaves drop off, people think the plant is dying, or already dead. What they can’t see—what we can’t see, in this tiny moment in time—are the roots.

To develop a movement—and to use protests as an entry point into movement spaces—people who are new must be supported in understanding the difference between the two. They need—we all need—practices to build our stamina; methods to help us stay in contact with violence without turning away in terror and hopelessness; mentorship to enter a long time horizon and still move with urgency in the present; ways to know resilience not only in the self but in relation to others, most of whom we don’t know and don’t yet trust; and humility before the wisdom traditions built on aeons of knowing that are completely outside those the dominant culture uses to reproduce itself, and that can push us off the cliff of our self reliance and into the unknown.

Photo by Arthur Brognoli on Pexels

The tactic of “flooding the zone” isn’t only about engendering fear and exhausting movement building. It’s also an effort to both normalize and render spellbinding the presence or threat of violence.

There’s actual violence, and then there’s threatened violence that doesn’t materialize. Sometimes it seems like the retraction is a response to protests, or lawsuits, or counter-threats. Sometimes it’s whimsical; the capriciousness designed to demonstrate the vast distance between the people who have the power to order violence and those who are here to absorb it.

The scale of the violence, and the way it's constantly coming at us, albeit in changing garb, carries with it the threat of adaptation: that we’ll find a way to get used to it, shrug our shoulders if it doesn’t directly impact us or those we care about. To become inured to violence is to join in with the sadism. To refuse to adapt—to see each threat, each cruelty, and to stay with it—this can become so absorbing that it blots out our capacity to function, to be there for ordinary life.

And even “ordinary” life is becoming blurry.

There’s events that happen in ordinary life, like a job loss, or an imprisonment, or an illness. But these events can also be attached to the unfolding mayhem of the present: a job lost because  USAID was destroyed; an imprisonment because a student is protesting; a child’s liver damaged because her parents heeded advice from HHS and gave her Vitamin A to prevent measles. The “same” event, vibrating with portent, because of its context.

Do these events have the same moral valence, if their contexts are different? How are we supposed to deal with the ordinary but significant events we’ve always had—deaths, funerals, weddings, caregiving, illnesses, graduations, celebrations—and the enormity of events that feel like they’re newly raining down upon us, or worse, intensifying sufferings that have histories and legacies that stretch back to the founding of the United States? Is it all just the soup of existence? Or is there something worthwhile about seeing these things as separable, understood through different theoretical lenses, requiring different responses?

I take this snapshot of the U.S. right now because I think it’s worthwhile to describe the complexity and depth of what any of us might be carrying, even if what we’re experiencing in the present is an “ordinary” day. In fact, the schism between the ordinaryness—or even the joy and beauty—of any particular day and the fact of what is also happening alongside it can lend a surreal aspect to mundane tasks like grocery shopping, or blowing out birthday candles, or just looking up at a blue sky through pink dogwood blossoms.

In all of this, how do we find a ground of self awareness? 

I use “self” here, rather than just “awareness,” the usage common to many contemplative practices, because part of the design of the above forms of psychological warfare is to obliterate self knowing, and with it, our connection to our core ethics, and to our purpose and value, the motivations that help us stay alive and take action.

“Self” here refers to the ground of existence, and not to the ego, the overlay, the noise of consciousness and momentary emotional states that pass through us and are often reactions to whatever has momentarily taken hold of our attention. I am also bringing the word self in here because though in many philosophical and spiritual traditions, aspects of self like identity or sexuality are said to be constructs that obscure our access to a deeper true nature, in the present moment these constructs are also being used to target people for violence and oppression, and to deny them rights that are predicated on the idea that they have a self that deserves protection. 

To achieve and celebrate a self is work, if that self is targeted for obliteration.

This is a moment when so many people are being told and are experiencing the stripping away of our rights, the decimation of our histories, the denigration of our value, the scorn of our beauty, and the refusal to allow us to contribute to this nation. Though these efforts are in some ways a continuation of longstanding efforts to strip particular groups of their civil rights, they are also new. The ways that cruelty and violence are currently represented as transgressive, as daring, as sexually potent rebellions against a repressive and dogmatic regime of domination—the upending and co-opting of liberation discourse—means that the very language that gave marginalized people a sense of longstanding spiritual and philosophical belonging is now wavy and distorted, put through a fun house mirror.

To return to the self, in its deepest knowing, to take the time to find that place and return to it, daily, sometimes hourly, is a profoundly political act. There are many ways to engage in the practice of self awareness. For some, it is sitting meditation, or listening to music in the dark, or making something—a garden, a bookshelf, a painting, a cake—or walking and trying to see something new. To drop down, below our thinking mind, gives us access to wisdom that is categorically different from the kind of knowing that is necessary to navigate our ordinary lives. 

When we are in wordless connection with self, we can access a multiplicity of information channels: our energy bodies; our surface and deeper feelings; our physical sensations of pain or hurt or tension or release; the ways our body is at once separate from existence and also interconnected with it. We can experiment with these boundaries between ourselves and others, recognizing the ways we need and rely on people who we haven’t even met, whose daily actions help us survive and how all of us depend upon the more than human world. These practices take us into deep time, into a capaciousness in the present that is rooted not only in our own core ethics and purpose, but in the legacy of our ancestors and those who will follow us.

When we are using our skills to navigate and discern the best ways to survive and to protect those we care for, it is easy to lose touch with this other capacity of self. It is easier to become vulnerable to stories that want us to believe we have no value; that we are unwanted; that we are hated or misunderstood or that people take joy in our suffering. These stories are designed to immobilize us, psychically, politically, collectively. But there is a part of you that is outside all of this, or below it, or wherever you can find it. All you have to do is show up.

Photo by Heber Vazquez on Pexels

Here’s the thing: I’m not talking to the part of you that already knows that.

I’m talking to the thrum in your gut, whirring like a jammed gas pedal. The 3 a.m. waking, no matter how late you turned in.

The part that keeps going back. Just one more post and then we’ll stop. Gathering stories like eggs in a basket.

Why do we call it doom scrolling?

Doom: death, destruction, or any very bad situation that cannot be avoided (Cambridge Dictionary)

If the destructive situation cannot be avoided, why do we keep checking? Why share information, if the outcome is already determined?

Maybe it’s the scrolling, rather than the content, that’s the source of the doom? We’re just passing by, out for a stroll. But the path is strewn with corpses.

4 reasons we come back to (the) feed.

One.

We believe knowing will make us safe.

Two.

We’re in a distal relationship to the tyrant. If he was in the house with us, we’d be tracking the tension in his jaw. Listening for the tone shift in his voice. But we can’t see. The stories are like paper airplanes, thrown over the wall.

Run. We want to know when to run.

Three.

We want to make sure you’re ok. But the you who’s being targeted keeps shifting. Our heads swivel like an owl’s. How can we find you? What do you need? Do I have it?

Four.

We’re looking for instructions: this is how to make it stop. Better: the post that says it has already stopped.

I like the term doom scrolling because it’s a welding together of a feeling and an action. Embedded in the phrase is a cautionary tale: the longer you stay in, the worse it gets.

In the Underworld myths, the hero goes through the gates of hell to visit the land of the dead. He is stripped naked. She has to give up her amulet. One by one, the protective talismans are removed. It’s the self that’s confronted, in its most tawdry, vulnerable, pitiable state. Everything that is feared and reviled, everything that is “not me” and has been thrust into the shadow—now it’s all here.

Only when the self is no longer split; the loathed and violent aspects of its being no longer displaced onto an “Other” who can be scapegoated, pursued, and killed off; only then, in facing and integrating its shadow, does the self come into maturity. Once whole, the self is capable of doing the hardest things.

Perhaps the doom isn’t out there, in the body of the tyrant. Perhaps it's a reflection of our collective shadow, and we keep sidling up to it, then running away. In that sense, the term doom scrolling is a diminutive; a cute-ifying of horror.

How much longer will we avoid the reckoning? How many reels do we have to watch, before we look in the mirror?

Once I’ve been scrolling for a bit, I start to feel like I’m in a trance state. I’ve noticed there’s a war going on. My drive to keep reading, to “know,” pushes me forward. But as the emotional impact of what I’m learning registers, I feel a distancing, a pulling up and out, into dissociation.

The trance state, accompanied by a kind of queasiness, puts me in a soul-slump. I think that’s when I start scrolling faster, skimming, no longer sending myself important articles to read later. At that point I’m staying in because I’m afraid of how I’ll feel when I stop. I’ll have to ask myself if I’m ok with knowing how bad it’s gotten. Then I’ll check my schedule to see what’s next. I’ll continue using my brain to override my gut.

Is turning away from the doom and returning to the day’s tasks itself a practice? Is Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil something that’s now collectively practiced, perhaps more hours a day than we exercise, or engage in spiritual reflection, or spend in person with people we love? Or (perhaps and?) are we becoming more compassionate, because we can see so much more, learn so much about what people need, and how we can help? If we are being given tools, and reading about others successfully making a difference, will we be emboldened to join in? I can see evidence of each of these effects.

Western culture generally lauds rationality and is suspicious of emotion. We often think that impulsive action is driven by emotion, like a crime of passion. But I think there’s a second kind of impulsivity—the action said to be a consequence of reasoned decision making, divorced altogether from feeling. The decider is disconnected, numb. He has convinced himself he is rational, because he feels nothing.

The frenetic pace of destruction that is happening right now is terrifying not only in itself, but also because it’s being represented as if it’s dispassionate, objective, rational, divorced from feeling. As if “feeling” the impacts of the decisions would undermine the correctness of the logic that drove them. (Perhaps it would.)

To witness destruction become bureaucratic, machine-like, unstoppable; this can make a person question their perceptions. Am I the only one who sees how bad this is? Am I crazy? Is there a wolf pack that can gather around me, lick my fur, let me rest while they keep watch?

How beautiful that there’s a chorus of voices who can tell us we’re not alone. How wrenching that we aren’t with them, holding them, bringing them nourishment, laughing and making a fire. We put the phone down and the refrigerator is buzzing loudly in the silence. We look out the window at the street, empty of people. The chasm within feels bottomless. Our fingers graze the glass, then curl around the phone’s edges. Will we pick it up again?

The virtual world asks us to think, and to feel, but not to touch. One way to pull out of its trace, its lure, its perpetual catastrophe, is to bring back touch. To stand up and move towards something tangible. It may be putting your hands in the dirt. It may be picking up your guitar and writing a song. It may be going into the garage and gathering things other people could use. It might be sitting with someone in a facility who doesn’t get many visitors. Or picking up a card and writing by hand to that person you think about all the time but haven’t spoken to recently because they’re far away. It may be walking, or wheeling, or running, hard, to feel your breath and find a focal point that’s far off in the distance, bringing your perspective to a wider frame. It may be as simple as running your hands across your thighs and feeling your own solidity, right here, right now. It’s ok to feel your loneliness. It won’t break you. It may be your pathway out.

Photo by Wendy Wei on Pexels

What’s the image that comes to your mind when you read that slogan? 

I’ll tell you what I see.

I see a group of people in a field, looking at a ridge in the distance. They’re waiting quietly, or milling around. The sun is just coming up. They hear sounds in the distance—a crowd is coming. The people in the field perk up. The people who have been approaching cascade over the top of the ridge, peacefully, methodically, a pretty rag-tag bunch. They walk joyfully towards the people waiting below. Except it’s the same group of people, in two places at once.

It used to be that when I heard that phrase I took it as a “no heroes” approach to organizing. You don’t need a leader to tell you what to do. You don’t need a proven framework to follow. Your small self, in itself, is as heroic a being as anyone needs. I used to think it celebrated the people’s own capacity to know what is needed. I also saw it as a fierce refutation of our dominant culture’s desire to have an influencer, a preacher, a star, or a politician be this truth carrier, allowing everyone else be a worthy follower or worse, a minor copy of the idol they revered. I agreed with the slogan in theory, and I enjoyed the mental picture it conjured.

I also thought that by the time I was really needed, I’d know what to do and say; I’d be the right combination of badass and communitarian; I wouldn’t be afraid. For now, I could participate, but it wasn’t me who was really needed; I was just a low-stakes tag along.

More recently—meaning over the last five or ten years—I’ve been letting that slogan sink in. Now I hear it differently. This moment is all there is. There is no answer. There is only acting or not acting. If you want a leader, you are following. You are not in your own awareness; you are passive.

Ouch.

The question becomes, what is the right action, for you and you alone? Where is the need? What do you have to offer? When you sit with yourself and ask what you have to give, do you have a sense of how to give it, or how to find people with complementary skills, to make your offering more powerful?

It’s with these questions in mind that I started noticing some of the advice about action that’s been in the air these last few weeks. Here’s some common statements I’m encountering:

—If you aren’t doing everything you can, you’re content to let Nazi troops roll through your city, like they did to Paris on June 14, 1940, and you’re going to regret it later, when it’s too late.

—If even the people who are entrusted with the power to defend democracy are rolling over in advance, bowing to a bunch of arrogant billionaires who think their riches prove they’re smart, how can you, with no money, do much of anything to make a difference?

—Currently you’re helpless, because there’s no plan, no strategy, no “so what” to plug in to, at the national level. The problem is one of leadership and organization. When the pushback goes beyond lawsuits, then you’ll be able to do something.

—Call your Senators, and go to their offices.

—You need to take care of yourself, because this is going to be a long struggle, and dark, and you are going to watch as people you love, or people you care about but aren’t connected to, are subject to violence and may die. 

—Self care happens in a space that is separate from action, so you have to choose, or toggle between the two.

—You have the power to act. Figure out something to do, and start, now.

—If you are afraid, and want to just curl up and check out and retreat, that means you are callous, or weak, unless you are a member of an explicitly targeted group.

—You should take as much time as you can to be joyful, because now is all we have, and if you spend all your time focused on politics or violence you’ll miss the beauty of life and you’ll get bitter and nasty and no one will invite you over for tea.

One thing I started noticing, as I gathered this advice in my mind, is that what unifies almost all of it is this sense of the “bigness” of this moment, and how that should shape our response to it. Reading each of these statements in isolation, what I see are attempts to provide encouragement, or some kind of ground to stand on, or some orientation towards the future, to stop the vertigo of the “shock and awe” of the last few weeks. Some are softer and others are tougher, but what sounds kind to one person can sound tone deaf to another.

It is only when I put them side by side that the polarities, the contradictions and paradoxes become apparent. And if I’m hearing all of these statements at once, or scrolling past them all before bed, I bet I’m not the only one. I’m not saying people can’t hold paradoxical information in consciousness. I’m wondering about the emotional impact of receiving so many competing messages at once.

One project of this newsletter is to explore the emotional impact of engaging in social change work, and to ask what skills and tools we might use to increase our ability to stay strong and healthy while we do it. I’ve been thinking about the bigness, that is, not to ask whether or not it’s an accurate representation of what is happening.

Instead, I’m asking what emotional effect this kind of elevated language has on a person’s likelihood to see themselves as capable of engaging, let alone determining for themselves what they have to offer. If what you choose to do is high stakes, is of world historical import, well then, you’d better know what the hell you’re doing. When I get fundraising emails that say things like “What are you going to tell your grandchildren when they ask you what you were doing when X catastrophic thing was happening” for example, I think: this question is supposed to be an exhortation to action, but what I hear is a shaming tactic. The fastest way to get someone to shut down—or fight you—is to shame them. 

I’m actually sympathetic to the “bigness” conversation. There’s a lot happening that has never happened before, and so some people are like, well, maybe we throw out everything we’ve tried before and try to meet the originality of this moment with something equally original in response. Be humble. Be open. Be curious. In many ways, I think that’s what the slogan is recommending. We are here, now. We don’t have to look to the rights-based movements of the ‘60s, or even the BLM protests of 2020, to tell us how to organize. We are called to do something that’s for this time, not others.

This is where I think there’s a two-ness about this moment. There’s the conversation about the response to policies and laws and funding and rule breaking on the material level, right now. And there’s also a conversation about what might emerge, if we are in a moment of ecological and economic and political collapse. They are both “big” but big in different ways.

The violence that is happening, the loss that is happening, however, is not original. The method may be, but the effect is not. In that sense, what there is to do is ordinary. It’s lots of mundane tasks, repeated consistently, within the context of an unknown and uncertain outcome. (And then, later, when someone makes a movie about it, they’ll leave all that footage on the cutting room floor.)

Life isn’t a movie. That makes it seem less exciting. But I think the ordinary is the entrance point. If the actual fighting of fascism is boring, then anyone can do it. If it’s tiny tasks, completed over and over, then it’s not hard to figure out the next right thing to do, because it’s right in front of you. You don’t get to have a grand narrative of your purpose and why you’re going to win. But you also get to make soup, and plant a garden, and watch a kid play, and go back and do the next thing.

It can be exciting to think one is involved in the grand moment of history. But we can only know its grandness in retrospect. It’s grand when we tell it as a story, with an arc, and a beginning and middle and end. It’s grand when we try to compensate for our mortality by saying this moment, when we’re here, is the most important one. But if that bigness means we aren’t enough to meet it; we don’t have anything of value to contribute to something so vast, so we’ll leave it to someone who is bigger, or stronger, or who needs to be seen more than we do, then we don’t get to ask what we have that is only ours, and that can be of small use, somewhere, whether we are seen and praised for it, or not.

The struggle isn’t only “out there” on the streets. The struggle is “in here,” too, in the daily mundane things we don’t want to do, or the emotionally hard things we don’t want to face. When you make that phone call you’re dreading; when you finish the project that’s lost its allure; when you vacuum up the cat hair and do the laundry and answer the emails, even though you don’t want to, you’re building the muscle—the same muscle—that is needed to ask what you can do in this moment that is a stretch, that makes your nervous, that might be a nothing burger, that might not lead to anything other than what it is. 

You already are enough; you already have what you need; there is nothing else, but the next, unfurling thing.

But if you don’t feel like answering the questions and want a few strategies to try right now, here’s a few:

–Before you open an app or website, take a second to ask yourself what it is you’re hoping to learn or achieve from your engagement.Bonus: ask yourself what you’re feeling, and if those feelings drove you to engage in the first place. After scanning for five minutes or less, check in to see if there’s a match between what you want and what you’re being given. If there’s no match, get out.

–If you’re reading legacy media like a newspaper, scan the headlines and subheads first. Before opening any articles, ask yourself if what the header and subhead promise is a) someone’s opinion about what might happen; b) an interview with an expert about what might happen; c) a projection using data about what might happen; c) an aggregation of historical information about the past that might help us guess what our future holds. Do you see? All speculation. You don’t need to read any of it.

–Ask yourself if you’re feeling nervous about the crazy ideas that are in your head, or that woke you up in the middle of the night, and you’re looking for confirmation in your media feed that other people are thinking and worrying about these same things. This impulse to scan stems from a human need for comfort. It’s totally understandable! But you might not want to soothe yourself this way, because your animal self isn’t getting any in person resonance from having another person across from you, meeting you there. Even if what you’re reading confirms your thoughts, it may not make you feel any better.

–When you’re engaging your media, ask if there is any information that is sourced from the “margins” or “outside” the mainstream, dominant cultural consensus of “what counts” that might provide an alternative way of looking at the situation being reported or, even better, describe strategies that worked in a particular context to empower people. If it’s not there, ask yourself how the argument you’re consuming would be different, if it included that perspective or history.

This is just a short list, to get you started. Feel free to drop others in the comments, to help us all be more savvy in this fraught time.

Remember: when you harvest that time by taking it back, you can take action, instead.

Photo by koolshooters on Pexels

I went to the ocean during Solstice. The sky was dark and the grasses on the dunes looked greener because of it. The old trees, orange when they washed up during the summer months, were now black.

It rained, and then gusts of rain with bigger drops pelted down, and then the sun came out for a brief moment, and then the rain started again. I walked the open beach, watching the top level of sand drift toward me in the wind. I heard the sound of my hiking boots crunching the sand. 

The sun set each day at 4:30 on the dot. Once it was a true sunset; another time a quick yellow smear behind the clouds. On the second night, there was a tiny Christmas parade: the town brought out its fire truck and a police car. They were joined by a few vans and trucks from local businesses, each decorated in lights. The drivers honked out the beats of some carols with their horns and waved, and people waved and cheered back, and the whole thing was finished in about ten minutes.

I often walk the beach to excavate feelings I can’t access in my daily life. I come hoping for an epiphany, or at least an insight. But this time I had already spent the month of December doing a four part reflection practice. There wasn’t a lot left to discover. My mind was quiet. I had a chance to listen, instead.

When I heard my boots crunching the sand and felt the wind and the spray of the water on my face, and that was all there was, I felt —

nothing.

Or more precisely, nothing-ness. Not the existential kind, but the actual lived moment of no thing other than what is. 

When I am at the ocean in winter I’m likely to view the landscape as a metaphor for my internal state. In its grayscale emptiness I see a making-visible of my own loneliness or lack. Other times, it’s a counterweight: its simplicity a contrast to my swirling preoccupations. 

This time I wasn’t using the ocean as a resource for my self understanding. I didn’t even know I was having the experience I just described, because I wasn’t narrating it to myself as it happened. I was just another aspect of that place. Nothing special, but included.

It takes me hours of sleep and silence and emptying out to get to the place where thinking becomes strange and being is my default. Each year I forget that it’s not the holidays that make me feel celebratory; it’s the after party. It’s this interregnum, where the collective agrees not to ask anything of anyone, not to slice time into fat, even chunks, and to instead give way, allowing formlessness to become emergence. 

After days of being this way I start to bump closer to the ground, like a balloon tacking across a varnished floor. I remember what it’s like to want something because my spirit needs it to survive. I can pick out the actions that connect me to my elemental desires. There aren’t that many: it’s not that my needs are legion, but rather that I regularly don’t meet them.

I don’t have to tell you what it’s like to have your breath compressed by the shoulds that march forward from the moment your eyes open to the time you turn again towards the dark. I don’t have to remind you that your animal self wants air and water and fire more than achievements. All it takes is for everything to stop, and it’s right there.

We have to be urged, day after day, to want something else. We have to be assured that others want the something else too, to persuade us to surrender this wisdom.  

What is it you can not do, to get back the silence through which your true self can reach you? How much do you have to clear away?

All this stillness, all this not doing—it’s not a pillow. It’s not a refuge. It’s preparation for something you don’t know yet, that’s coming to you, or for you, or for someone you love. I don’t know if it has shiny pointed teeth, bared and dripping, or if it’s holding a wrapped box in its hand, sheltering the gift you’ve waited for your whole life.

I’m just wondering what it will take to be ready.

After the election, a lot of people told me they were going to use the time before January to rest, and to turn toward those they love. The news orgs freaked out because their viewership dropped off a cliff. They panicked at the loss of our collective fixation.

Over the last two months I’ve heard all these stories from people about how they’ve been connecting with others, building bookshelves, repairing broken things, cooking challenging recipes, or engaging in other physical projects, all of which show their impact—evidence they are alive, right now, and can alter their environment.

Some people told me they are having multiple embodied experiences at the same time: their physical body tense and watchful; their spiritual energy flowing, clear and determined. Part of what I’ve been hearing is that people are listening for a what’s coming that isn’t about portending violence, but instead something altogether different, something more sensed than defined.

But now it’s January, and I wonder how people are feeling. I picture all of us, lined up like Olympic sprinters with our feet in the blocks. Are we going to jump the first time the gun goes off?

We know part of the strategy is to drown us in a thousand catastrophes, keeping us off balance, flooded, easier to defeat in a fight.

We know that anxiety creates black and white thinking, with nothing in between: we respond or we retreat; we hope or we collapse; we take care of our own or we give til we drop. The trauma logic: there’s only victim and perpetrator.

I’m wondering if there’s something from this time that can be carried forward. A practice of keeping your fierce and particular intention, unwavering in its focus. So in that moment that’s coming, when you have to decide in an instant whether to commit, you know how to choose.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

We don’t come into the world ready to discipline ourselves. We have to learn it.

I was a skinny kid. Too tall, and blind without my glasses. A weakling, a target. I learned early on the power of eye contact: I could out-stare anyone. People would come up and hurl some kind of insult or question at me and I'd just look through them, my expression blank. I enjoyed unnerving my tormentors. 

The question launched at me most frequently was "Are you anorexic?" I knew by the disgust, the screwed up face, that it was a bad thing to be an anorexic, but I didn't really know what the word meant. I figured they didn't either, but after this insult followed me around, year after year, I decided I might as well figure out if I was, indeed, this thing. 

I found The Golden Cage and read it in three days. I determined I wasn't, in fact, anorexic. But that book was the gateway to self help, a genre that kept me company throughout my adolescence and beyond. I loved the bullet points, the charts and pyramids on the page. I loved the stories of miserable people becoming happy people after following a series of steps. 

It wasn't too much of a jump, as I entered adulthood, from self help to productivity: bullet journals, highly effective people, themed and unthemed planners. Troubles anticipated and managed before they arose. Tasks moved from undone to done by the day's close.

I write this as if I'm no longer in thrall. But here's something I read last week, from a best-selling productivity book. It’s a list of habits I can use as a model, Ben Franklin-style, to improve myself:

Meditation. After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.

Exercise. After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes.

Gratitude. After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I'm grateful for that happened today.

Marriage. After I get in bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.

Safety. After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or family member where I am running and how long it will take.

I confess that when I read the above, I put the book down. Who has to make a plan to kiss their partner at the end of the day? What would happen if they stopped reminding themselves? What is the author discovering in his one minute of meditation, standing in the kitchen with the last of his coffee perfuming his upper palate? What is it like to approach connecting with Spirit, or one's beloved, in the same vein as putting on a pair of shoes? 

I sound like I’m enlightened, yeah? But when I check my email or go through my to-do list I have more in common with this author than I’m comfortable admitting. So much uncertainty is walled off when the focus is on pushing forward; so much reassurance is thrumming away in the background when I know there are millions of people out there, ordering their lives in the same way I am, checking off their lists, kissing their partners at the end of the day, gathering around the table, Norman Rockwell style, to tell each other the thing for which they’re thankful. 

I was busy disciplining myself for years before I learned about Cartesian dualism; the superiority of the intellect over the body’s wants; Augustine's Confessions, his story of wrestling his lust to the ground and substituting prayer and virtuous action; Freud's id, rising up with its dark tsunami of desire to threaten the functioning social order, and the punishing, moralistic super ego's answering of that threat, battering the id into a temporary, resentful submission. These, the primary logics of Western individualism, rendered benign in the watered down cheerful prose of countless paperbacks, stacked beside my bed.

In a time of such comprehensive physical, psychological, and ecological brutality, it can seem a bit precious to be talking about self discipline as a form of violence. Shouldn’t our focus and attention be out there, where the real violence lives? So I looked up the difference between discipline and domination.

Here’s American Heritage on discipline:

• Training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement. "was raised in the strictest discipline."

• Control obtained by enforcing compliance or order. "military discipline."

• Controlled behavior resulting from disciplinary training; self-control. "Dieting takes a lot of discipline."

• A state of order based on submission to rules and authority. "a teacher who demanded discipline in the classroom."

• Punishment intended to correct or train. "subjected to harsh discipline."

• A set of rules or methods, as those regulating the practice of a church or monastic order. 

• A branch of knowledge or teaching. "the discipline of mathematics."

By definition two we’ve moved from moral improvement to talking about the military; by definition five we’re in the terrain of explicit violence. 

Here’s domination:

• Control or power over another or others. 

• The exercise of such control or power. 

• The act of dominating; exercise of power in ruling; dominion; supremacy; authority; often, arbitrary or insolent sway. 

• A ruling party; a party in power. 

• The act of dominating; exercise of power in ruling; dominion; supremacy; authority, often when arbitrary or insolent.

In the eyes of American Heritage, it would seem that we discipline ourselves, and are dominated by others, either to “help” us learn better discipline, or to be forced to obey. Discipline is the training ground for domination, if we have the power; it’s the method of self protection, of becoming invisible, if we don’t.

What’s thrumming away under my to do list isn’t reassurance that I’m doing it right. It’s violence.  What I practice in my mind all day long is a rehearsal of what I expect from others. How can I enter into community with vulnerability and trust, if my daily practice is about locating and uprooting my deficiencies? How can I be present with my embodied experience if I daily split myself in half, being both the dominating authority and the obedient subject? How can I collaborate with others, if I see relationship dynamics through the lens of power over?

If this is the map of change that we are exhorted to practice, how the hell are we supposed to get to liberation?

--You can't keep asking yourself to add in just one more thing and think you can keep it up, year after year, and not end up numb and resentful and checked out.

--You can't dominate yourself all day long, and believe domination is how change happens, and access what you need to be free.

--You can't wedge a new volunteer opportunity into a daily planner and think it's going to combat the structures that support Western individualism.

--You can't write: after I finish my work day I will spend 5 minutes overturning white supremacy with a straight face.

--You can't task yourself with knowing what's coming, let alone to dream a new way of being, in the same way you can train yourself to take your supplements after you wash your dinner dishes, but we live in a culture that thinks we can.

Or, if you’re in a dark mood: we live in a culture that knows we can’t, and keeps us busy trying.

Look away from this screen. Look out the window, or up at the sky. What do you see? What have you been telling yourself all morning about what you can expect from the day? About what kind of world you’re living in and whether it’s coming for you, judging you, uncaring, contemptuous, indifferent. Whether that story about what the world is like is related to the story you are telling yourself about time, and what you are supposed to do with it?

You know I can’t end this post with a list of next steps, and exhortation to “do.” So I’ll just say —

Stay safe out there this week.

xo

Rebecca

For many of us, “fear” shows up indirectly. The mind can go into overdrive, assaulting us with the litany of our failures, or the undone tasks that somehow signify our incompetence. We may find ourselves impatient: nothing is moving fast enough; the people we depend on seem unresponsive to what we say; we feel we’re yelling into the wind. We can’t recognize that the engine of our frustration is fear.

One strategy we can use is to jam the accelerant energy. When we stop the freight train of doing and food stomping at ourselves and others, we can drop out of anxiety—which often presents as busyness—and into the more powerful emotion, which is fear.

The fear of the fear—the fear that we can’t tolerate it, that we’ll fall apart, or sink into deep powerlessness and inaction—is what drives the mind to compensate. It persuades us that if we can control our external environment, if we can eliminate our faults, and those of the people we depend on, we can become perfect. If we are perfect, we can inoculate ourselves from fear.

What to do:

Spend some time noticing what you’re doing. Call in the observing self—the part of you that can witness you without judgment. What’s happening in your body? What is the tone and tenor of your thinking? Where is your focus? Are you unable to focus? If you sense a rushed intensity in the way you’re moving through the world, see if you can tolerate sitting down, even for ten minutes. Close you eyes. Drop into your center. Ask yourself what else is present, besides the thoughts that are filling your consciousness. Practice encountering the fear, even for a short time, to build your capacity to move in and out of its energy.

Fear about the future

I think this is the big one right now. Here’s some things you can try:

When your mind paints a picture of a new disaster that’s coming your way, get curious about it. Don’t turn away from the images and try to put a different, soothing image in your mind. Don’t move into distraction. Don’t reassure yourself that what you fear won’t happen. All of these techniques, though they appear kind, are minimizing a message that is very important.

The energy that is driving the fear will likely respond to the above minimizing techniques by trying even more forcefully to get your attention. You might even start feeling sick, hot, sweaty, breathless, nauseous. These are ways our spirit, our essential self, will get our attention, if we don’t listen the first time. We might actually get sick, in fact, if that’s what it takes for us to stop long enough to hear the information that wants to reach us.

The message is likely more complex than the terrifying scenario that’s conjured in your mind. In this moment, I’m testing a hypothesis: I think there’s a strong connection between fear and love. That is, much of what people fear might happen in the future is linked to their deep love for something that appears threatened. (I notice how much of my thoughts right now are about protection.)

You can ask your fear to show you as vividly and specifically as possible what it is you want to protect. You can ask what it is you love so deeply that your long to reach into the future and control time, avert catastrophe, out think a scenario you have invented, out argue a person who isn’t here.

You can marvel at the depth of your love, the deep current of connection between you and what you love and care for. You can ask if you are protecting that entity now, or if, now that you can feel your love, you need to act. You can ask yourself what you might do in this present moment to make that love even more powerful and alive.

To be in the doubleness of love and fear, braided together, changes the fear. When we are solely envisioning a disaster in the future, it’s like hearing a siren and watching a building burn, with no water, no power, no fire truck, no people to help. It’s pure powerlessness. It’s a warning we can’t heed, because we aren’t there yet.

But when we have an opportunity to feel that our fear is at the same time invoking our deep connection to the world—all of it—we move from the lonely isolation of pure powerlessness to the depth of our interconnectedness with Being itself.

The simplest way to deal with fear of the future is to drop into our love, and bring that love forth into the present. To hold with gentleness our desire to know what it going to happen, and to remember how much power we have in the now. Our love is the flashlight that carries us, inch by inch, into the unknown.

It is virtually impossible to engage deeply thought collective action in the present and at the same time stay paralyzed with fear about the future. Our anticipation of future threat blocks our capacity to actually address harm in the present.

We can remember that it is not our job to be the lone hero who pulls the crowd to its feet; to be the one mind that solves the problem; the only person who can see what is endangered. We can instead invoke the ingenuity and participation of the more the human world; the ineffable power of Spirit, however we define it; the river of history and the wisdom of the ancestors who felt as we do now and came together to engage in singing as they struggled.

That we are here and cannot know if what we are doing will have the outcome we hope for—this can feel like a crippling burden. But that we are here at all, that we exist and still now can take the next breath, make the next pot of soup, create the next thing—that can be a manifestation of love; a way of transmuting the energy that drives the fear into conviction and promise.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

Imagine this.

You’re a therapist. It’s Monday, 10 am. Your new client comes in and sits down in the large royal blue chair, running her fingers through the nap, making patterns as she talks. She’s got shoulder length blond-red hair, blue eyes, a rounded face, a few freckles. She’s wearing a cream colored cotton sweater and jeans, with a rope necklace at her throat. After asking you if she can take off her shoes, she sits cross legged in the chair, holding her cup of tea in her lap.

She tells you she’s not sure if being here is right. She has a three year old and a twelve month old and time is tight. She had to pick: the gym, therapy, a creativity class, or free time to herself. This is it: her only time in the week when she’s not taking care of her kids. You nod sympathetically. You say you won’t be offended if she picks something else. She breathes out when she hears this. It’s so hard to know, she says.

She has a partner: he’s been really supportive. He used to come home and turn on the TV or play a video game and wait for her to make dinner. Now he plays with the kids, giggling and rocking them so she can work in the kitchen, out of view. 

When you ask why she came today, she pauses. She says she’s been having a hard time focusing. She’s so used to being interrupted by the kids that she’s edgy when she has a few minutes to herself. She doesn’t know what to do. Today she prepared too early for the session, then wandered around the house and left too late.

She looks out the window at the leaves turning. She says sometimes she just feels blank. At the end of the day she often can’t remember what happened at all. When she talks, looking away into the distance, her face changes. When she’s looking at you, answering your questions, she’s eager, smiling, eyes locked in. When she tells you about her time alone, her mouth settles into a completely different expression. She’s looking into a place you can’t know yet.

You ask if she’s able to sleep, if she’s eating regularly. She’s waking up in the night, she says. Busy thoughts about nothing. It’s hard to keep track of your own eating schedule when you’re taking care of little ones, constantly cooking and cleaning up after them. She knows she eats dinner, because she makes it for the two of them. When you ask if she knows what she’s hoping to change, she looks at you like she’s failing a test.

When she gets up to leave she asks the name of one of the plants on the bookshelf, touches the clay pot on the table by the door, looks at the throw rug on the floor, and then up at you. Her body holds a question she’s not asking. You say It’s nice to meet you. I’ll see you in two weeks.

That Friday your billing person calls and says you forgot to give a diagnosis for your new client and she can’t bill unless you do. You think back to the conversation. She says she has difficulty focusing. Poor sleep and appetite. Low motivation outside of caring for two kids. Questions of meaning and purpose. These could signify the onset of depression. 

But she was also second guessing herself, thinking your questions demanded a right answer. Her sleep is interrupted by rumination. She’s waking up too early, a sign of anxiety. She couldn’t remember being hungry, or if she ate during the day. Her body seems to be revved up, but her relationship to time feels like everything is slowing down, grinding to a halt. Perhaps she’s suffering from anxiety more than depression? There are anxious depressions and lethargic depressions—perhaps the question is which kind of depression is this?

But what about the missed time? Is that about days full of repetitive tasks, or is she too scared to let you know that she’s dissociating, that the missed time isn’t about boredom but instead a losing touch with reality altogether? What if she has a significant trauma history and she’s trying to figure out if now is the time to open the door to her past? If she’s home alone and losing chunks of time, are the kids safe?

You give the biller the code for depressive disorder and write rule out anxiety in your notes to yourself.

Three months later she tells you her partner lost his job and now that he’s home she’s feeling watched while she takes care of the babies. When she stopped in at the coffee shop on a walk with the stroller she saw a flier for an accountability group for people trying to find a new job. She told him about it. Now that he feels bad about himself because he’s not working he’s been critical, she says, asking her to explain why she’s doing things in a particular way.  She’s been doing it that way the whole time, he just didn’t know. He said he’d think about the group. They have savings, but not a ton. 

At the end of the session she tells you they have insurance coverage for the next month, but then her coverage is going to end. You tell her you’re on the Medicaid panel, but she’s going to have to apply, or your therapy is going to be interrupted. You ask if she’d be willing to apply for SNAP, to get money for groceries. She says other people need it more than her; she’ll figure it out.

It’s two months later and she comes in with red eyes. She’s looking at her lap. She says she can’t believe she did this, but a few weeks ago she was up in the night and she took a kitchen knife into the bathroom and made a few light cuts on her thighs. She used to do that when she was a teenager, after bad fights with her mom. She thought she was past it. She thought she could get away with not telling you, but the urges to cut again are getting worse.

She’s been panicking about the money in the bank account going down and feeling like she can’t have anything of her own. Even though they can’t afford it, last week when she was out with the kids she rushed into Anthropologie and bought herself a shirt, full price, that she couldn’t afford even when her partner was working. 

She doesn’t want to return it. She can’t wear it, because he’ll see. It’s in her closet and she takes it out sometimes and runs her fingers across the fabric. It’s white ground, covered with red poppies. The material is so light that when she waves it in the air it reminds her of summer; the way the petals look in the wind.

The biller calls again, asks if you want to change anything in the diagnosis of your new client. You look at your list of new behaviors: impulsivity. self harm. relationship stress. possible controlling behavior or domestic violence. economic insecurity. loss of sleep. Some of these behaviors might indicate your diagnosis is off. 

The self harm, the loss of time could indicate a kind of dissociation that’s closer to borderline personality disorder, or PTSD from a trauma she hasn’t disclosed, than depression. But what if the increase in impulsivity is the first sign of a manic episode?

The possible domestic violence and economic insecurity don’t qualify as diagnoses, because they aren’t mental health disorders. There are V codes and Z codes that you can use to record the stressors she’s facing. But the insurance company won’t pay for V codes, because they reimburse for the treatment of mental illness. 

Is she getting sicker? Is she starting to trust you enough that she can show you she’s been ill for a long time, but wanted to appear more functional than she is? Are her circumstances so different, now, that she’s less functional, not because she’s ill, but because her stressors are overcoming her capacity to cope?

You’ve only been working together for five months, and she’s had to cancel a few sessions when the kids were sick, which means you’ve had sessions where she’s just filling you in on the details of her life; there’s not much time to process. She’s had to leave a lot out, just to tell you the major stuff. There’s so much you don’t know about her life, her relationship history, the larger context for her current situation.

You’re supposed to know what’s really going on, so you can provide the best support. You’re supposed to have a sense of what’s coming, so you can figure out the most accurate diagnosis and treatment. You’re supposed to trust her, take at face value what she’s telling you, what she says she wants.

You’re supposed to see what she can’t, so she can get a wider perspective. You’re supposed to be listening to what’s said and unsaid. You’re supposed to rely on your training; you’re supposed to be open to what’s unfolding right here, right now, that may contradict what you know. You’re supposed to be collaborating—you practice from a relational approach. You’re supposed to be the expert: that’s the reason she’s here, because you have the training to help her figure out what’s going on.

You teach people to sit with uncertainty, to manage the anxiety that comes because we can’t tell the future. The biller’s calls remind you you’re supposed to know what’s coming and what to do next.

In 2020, the psychologists Lucy Johnstone and Mary Boyle published A Straight Talking Introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework. 

The book distills the arguments of a longer paper, published in 2018, that critiques psychiatric diagnosis, arguing that our current diagnostic categories cannot be said to follow the same logic as medical diagnoses like diabetes and polio, even as the fields of psychology and psychiatry, especially, want mental health to be conceptualized and treated within the medical model.

Designed in collaboration with forty people, some of whom are therapists, others of whom are participants in the U.K.’s mental health system, the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) offers people the opportunity to create a narrative about what has happened to them and the responses they were taught and created in response to threats.

Whereas diagnoses are something you have, and can be static or enduring, perhaps for entire lifetime—a label that tells you who you are, or a prediction of how you will behave, or how functional you can expect to be—narratives are by design flexible and changeable. The narrative, because it is created by the person who is trying to better understand their suffering, centers their expertise, their story, and in doing so, reminds them of their own power.

The Framework can be used individually, but when it is used in a group, or with the help of a provider, it can more fully alter the person’s story. The framework begins by asking six questions, overlapping in their content, that are designed to place the person’s distress not in the context of mental illness, but rather of power.

1. What has happened to you? (How is power operating in your life?)

2. How did it affect you? (What kind of threats does this pose?)

3. What sense did you make of it? (What is the meaning of these situations and experiences to you?)

4. What did you have to do to survive? (What kinds of threat response are you using?)

5. What are your strengths? (What kind of access to power resources do you have?)

6. And to integrate the above: (What is your story?)

What these questions highlight is that distress occurs in a context. Rather than solely the product of a disordered brain or body, distress is a response to the operation of power: the relative power and agency (ability to act) that a person has at a particular moment in time, and their relationship to larger power structures, such as their economic position; their identities; their access to resources.

In the above fictional case study, the client’s circumstances are shifting rapidly. Already facing a number of life stressors, she finds herself suddenly in unexpected economic circumstances. Her white partner’s sense of masculine competence, thwarted by his job loss, puts him in increasing dissonance with dominant cultural representations of masculinity and success. Her competence in the household, in contrast to his “uselessness” in the home—if their relationship has been organized around binary gendered spheres of labor—could be a reason he’s become critical of her competence. Though he appears controlling and she’s starting to avoid him, he may be awkwardly trying to rebalance the power between them, afraid he’s going to loose her next. Or, he may be compensating for a sense of powerlessness by engaging in potentially abusive behavior that he may or may not have engaged in prior relationships: it’s too soon for the therapist or the client to know.

When the client, already trying to keep her head above water, is frightened by her desires to cut, and ashamed of her recklessness in spending money, and chooses the brave path of telling the therapist what’s happening, how can she be met in a way that enhances her sense of agency and power? If she is told that her behavior indicates the presence of a diagnosis, she could feel hopeless and ashamed. She could alternatively feel vindicated by its explanatory power, relieved there’s a “something” that can now be identified and addressed with a set of practices that are vetted by experts and have helped others.

One thing that occurred to me as I read the PTMF is that “diagnosis” is also a narrative, one that has a particularly compelling relationship to time. When I read the six questions of the PTMF, I can see how the answers would help a person’s story become three dimensional. In Western individualism, which is the foundation of many therapeutic approaches to distress, the person’s story usually begins in the past and travels along a linear track. Let’s make one up now:

“I grew up in a home that was chaotic and unstable; my parent’s marriage ended when I was nine; I have struggled to maintain close relationships because I don’t trust they will last; I act out and make up reasons to leave, even when a relationship is good, so I can stay safe; I am now lonely and frustrated and drinking too much; I don’t know how to interrupt this pattern and believe things can change.”

The PTMF would take this narrative and look “up” at the structures that framed this story of individual and familial dysfunction. It would look “out” at culture, and how the person learned to tell their story in this particular way, and how they learned that they weren’t measuring up, in terms of what their relationships “should” look like, and what a healthy and successful person “does.”

Diagnosis, in contrast, looks forward. It has a predictive quality to it; its utility is in part based on the idea that it can tell the “patient” what they can expect, either if they continue in the way they are now, or if they engage in “treatment.” The therapist or practitioner is expected to know: not only what’s wrong, now, but also what we can expect. It’s the therapist who, in giving the diagnosis, is put in the position of evaluating the present against an anticipated future.

Our therapist in our fictional case study wants to stay with the client’s experience; the therapist is very unsure of what’s actually happening and “how bad” things are. But the biller’s request for a diagnosis code keeps the therapist focusing on how what’s happening now will evolve. The more the diagnostic logic runs the show, the “sicker” the client appears to be getting, in medicalized terms, as the therapy progresses.

But if the therapist resists diagnosis and says the client is just adjusting to job loss and having a second child, and it’s revealed that instead the client’s impulsive shopping expedition was the first step on a ladder to mania and the therapist missed it and one day the therapist gets a voicemail saying the client was found raving in the parking lot with her kids in tow, not having anticipated the signs of her impending bipolar disorder . . . what then? The pressure on both the therapist and the client, inside this paradigm, is immense.

When we ask: what is the purpose of diagnosis? there is not one simple answer. One significant component of the debates that characterized the planning for the DSM 5 was the question of whether diagnoses are static and separable from one another, or whether they occur on a continuum. Even within the medical model, that is, there is debate about what a diagnosis is, and how it operates.

It is not that the PTMF is focused on diagnosis as the enemy to be defeated and replaced. Rather, it is asking: what is left out when we stay inside the logic of the medical model? What happens when story, which is how we know ourselves, the world, and our relationship to history, becomes as important as science, in helping us think through the best way forward? (As if science is not itself a story, but I digress . . .)

If you get a chance, write your answers to those six questions, and see what emerges. I’d love to know how it went.

Stay safe out there this week —

xo

Rebecca