“Rise and spiral” a queer friend texted this morning from Iowa. “How are you?”
“Spirally,” I replied.
Heightened times, almost goes without saying. The grocer saw me last week and hugged me. A deluge of random texts, sympathy like somebody died. I admit never have national politics felt so intensely personal.
A farmer friend brought some ribs, a gift along with my order. We stood sighing a moment in my mud room.
Nobody knows what we’re actually contending with, I know. I imagine various scenarios. My head offers myriad hellish fantasies. My sense of time feels warped, these last days. The calendar reminds me we’re but a week in. And I know we’ve also not yet begun.
*
I’m someone who has to take the daily work of staying alive on earth very seriously, all the time. And I do, every day, have for some years now. Those who’ve read the entirety of my Believer piece will have a slightly fuller sense of my actual deal now, when it comes to my own so-called ‘mental health.’ By which I mean, what I contend with internally, and why, and how I get by. In brief it’s a lot, my story, one I’ve still mostly yet to tell.
Suffice to say, these days I am very prepared for hard times in the psycho-spiritual-emotional sense. For periods of heightened feeling, for times of extreme activation and distress. I am fortified inside to withstand severe storms, you could say.
And yes, this weather feels especially scary, even unprecedented.
How am I? I am hanging in there, it’s true. I am good at bad times, it’s true. Sometimes I’m overcome, seized by fury or by crying. My sleep is crap as is, often, my mood.
But my mind weighs whether it’s a good thing, for example, that lots of cis people seem to suddenly have sympathy for the likes of me. Being trans in America is no cakewalk, as was certainly true before last week. If anything, in terms of the result itself, count me among the not-surprised-but-nonetheless-profoundly-disappointed. But I’m not surprised, probably because I’m trans and aware how much animosity remains in so many American hearts.
I mentally outline my relative advantages, if some nightmare or another should transpire. But I know, like everybody, I’m just guessing right now, when it comes to what will now come, let alone how to prepare.
The day after the election, wrung out, I stumbled into my garden. I turned a pile of compost and hauled over a big wheelbarrow-full to spread over the beds for next spring. I ripped out corpses of tomato plants and artichokes, shriveled bean vines and papery corn stalks. I pulled weeds for hours, until my palms were sore and my back said enough.
Over and over I thought versions of, well, I don’t know what’s coming except I guess next spring, I’m planning on being alive, and here, and planting a garden.
Couldn’t fall apart last week, besides, because we had a friend staying with us. I did dishes; I made coffee. I baked scones. I made a big pot of turkey sweet potato chili and another of black beans, mostly for the freezer. Food for our future selves, I thought, for when and if I am even sadder, even more depleted, even further out of fucks.
*
Last weekend I hiked another mountain, a 3500-er as we in the Catskills call them, I’m told. I have become one of those people who’s hiking all such peaks now, I suppose. I have hiked my whole life, especially growing up in West Marin, and then studying abroad in New Zealand long ago. Though I’ve always hiked some since moving to the Catskills seven years back, this fall my hiking habit has escalated, which pleases me. Hiking more has given me yet another new appreciation of this especially beautiful place where I live.
Summiting some peaks, I’ve remembered that mountaintops are unusual places — wind-beaten and gnarled, pretty and strange. Vast rock outcroppings and ambitious mosses. Last weekend’s mountaintop had many yellow birches, which I learned grow atop boulders and other hard surfaces. Their old broad roots stretched downwards like white piano keys.
Last weekend I also went to a bunch of local bookstores — several in Hobart, a village in the Catskills that has a surprisingly dense outcropping of mostly used stores, and another I enjoy in Delhi called The Last Bookshop. I bought a few books, including a physical copy of Braiding Sweetgrass just to have around. The bookseller informed me Robin Wall Kimmerer will be speaking nearby next spring. In my mind, I updated my future plans to include, go see Robin Wall Kimmerer speak next spring.
I realized this activity, mentally calendaring positive activities in the future, this was helping me not merely slip into wells of despair, as is quite tempting these days.
What else am I looking forward to? This winter I am hopefully getting a long-awaited surgery; I finally have a first appointment next week. During my recovery, I’m aspiring to do an unreasonably enormous and challenging puzzle I already purchased, one so big it’s going to take over an entire room.
More friends will visit, we’ll gather when it’s cold. We’ll eat meals and be with each other. Snows will fall. Eventually it will be spring. Otherwise, what comes next, who can say.
*
For now, the focus is surviving today, which again I am practiced at. This newsletter is, if nothing else, my sharing some of my strategies for precisely that.
So, I’m still doing much of what I mentioned in last week’s edition, which wound up feeling like advice for myself in the aftermath. I’m leaning harder than ever on my own daily self-care practices. Keeping myself present or trying to. Keeping connected with people or trying to. Listening to my own limits. Trying to stay grounded. Trying to soothe myself, especially when I do just feel overwhelmed, bereft.
What else is helping this week:
A fire in the woodstove and my dogs splayed asleep beside it.
Trying to detox from news consumption, especially of the future-prognostication sort.
Take care,
Sandy
p.s. Here’s an excellent cornbread recipe I’ve made twice recently.
p.p.s. Here’s a playlist that is chill and piano-y.
p.p.s. Cannot stop thinking about this line from the Martha doc…
