I completed a year-long essay writing project this past December. I told readers of that project that I needed to take a break after achieving my goal of sharing 52 essays in 52 weeks.
I’m pleased to report - I’m back.
I did the math, and there are 1,461 days scheduled in Donald J. Trump’s lame-duck second presidential term.
1,461 days can feel like an eternity.
Being in pain for that long, being afraid for that long, being in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn for the next 1,461 days sounds exhausting.
AND, I’ve lived 44 years thus far, so I’ve lived 1,461 days many times over already.
“Not more than we can bear…more than we should have to…”
American treasure, poet and professor Nikki Giovanni, wrote this as the opening to her poem, “::This Is Not for John Lennon (and this is not a poem)” which was published in her 1983 body of work entitled Those Who Ride the Night Winds.
Giovanni passed away on December 9, 2024, just a few weeks ago - and coincidentally, the day before my most recent birthday.
Lucky for me, I discovered Nikki Giovanni’s work while rifling through the stacks of a bookstore when I was just a teenager. That means I have had her words, her insight, her wisdom, and her perspective with me my entire adult life.
As an homage to her prolific life, and because I simply feel like I need it, for the past couple of weeks I have been re-reading Nikki Giovanni’s work as an almost daily devotional each morning. Her words resonate. Her words crack me open. Her words give me hope.
Nikki was writing and teaching and making offerings across her 81 years on this planet. Referring to her lineage of Black Americans, revolutionaries, resistors, lovers, mothers, Nikki spoke about what she saw and felt and believed and hoped. She also called “bullshit” when things felt like lies, and she reminded us over and over again of the dark and light that is the fullness of the human experience.
“Not more than we can bear…more than we should have to…”
I keep coming back to that stanza as DJT and his money and fame obsessed cronies unleash a barrage of mean-spirited Executive Orders and talking points on their first day back in office.
What a time to be alive. What a strange, yet familiar, fantastical, yet very real context we find ourselves in.
For folks who know me, I’m not one to take breaks for all that long. I stop as needed, gather myself, find nourishment, and dive back in when I can. As I shared in the last essay of that year-long project, I’m switching to Substack because I’m ready for a format that can be more interactive, and I’d like to move off of a set schedule and towards a “share when I have something to say” cadence.
What you can expect from my Substack is that I will pop in to share, build, and connect dots. My professional passion continues to be the intersection of identities with U.S.-based workplaces. Think pay equity, race and gender justice, LGBTQ+ liberation.
I will be “talking politics” because our bodies have been politicized. Bodies of color, bodies that have a uterus, disabled bodies, and bodies that happened to be born outside of U.S. borders. You get it.
I do NOT plan to respond to every inane proposal made by the current federal government. We cannot live in a hyper-vigilant posture - that would run us into the ground and we know that. We are also not going to bury our heads in the sand, deny, or pretend we can or should opt out of the fights and opportunities ahead of us.
Listening to the podcast “Pod Save America” this afternoon, Dan Pfeiffer, a political communications professional, said something that deeply resonated with me:
“After today, there are going to be 1,460 more days of the Trump presidency. And we’ve got to get through all of them. We’ve got to try to get through them with our faculties intact…
We don’t have to follow him [Trump] down every rabbit hole. He wants our attention 24/7…
Our attention is our greatest resource.
This came in the portion of the conversation the co-hosts were having about how to survive a Trump presidency. They went on to say that separating the signals from the noise is going to continue to be important. There will be life-altering policy changes, and there will be knuckle-head distractions. Practicing how we are each going to vet the sources of our information and what we are going to move into action around will be a series of muscles we will continue to need to build and use wisely.
1,461 days. As I learned in my time in the Al-Anon 12-Step program - one day at a time.
“Not more than we can bear…more than we should have to…” We all come from a lineage that includes strong-as-hell people. This is going to be brutal in more ways that one, but for folks who care about mutual aid, humanity, and kindness we will find ways to bear this - together.
“Our attention is our greatest resource.” I believe that that is true - intellectually, energetically, spiritually, in all the ways. To the extent possible, I am going to share where I am consciously choosing to focus my attention, and thus my resources as we continue to move through whatever this is going to be.
I would love for you to subscribe! To share this Substack with a friend. And I hope to build and be in constructive, strategic, and powerful community with you in the coming days, weeks, and years.