Titrating Exposure to Poison
How I'm Learning to Relate to the News of the Day
Obviously, time is a construct, and 2025 is particularly disorienting.
I have been working with each of my practitioners in my usual cadence and fashion (chiropractor on Mondays, Enneagram teacher every other week, and entrepreneurial psychologist who specializes in working with high performers once per month).
I’m also newly engaging in hormone treatment, as perimenopause is wreaking havoc on both my joints and my sleep.
I share this because it feels important to pass along what I am learning, re-learning, and grounding in as a person who intentionally revisits the question, how will I know that I am doing “enough” in the context of our current shitshow?
There is violence everywhere I look. There is cruelty and destruction and pain waiting for me on that machine in my pocket.
Deep breath.
I’m still a haphazard meditator, but I’m trying.
In those deep breaths, listening to guides on an app or on YouTube, I am reminded that I can regulate my nervous system, quiet my mind, and momentarily lock into the reality that I am a tiny person on a spinning rock in a great big solar system.
For as long as I can remember, I have been able to “handle” a lot.
Medical crises of family members. A significant shift to move house, move cities, move money. Whatever it takes, I have been able to receive life’s surprises and hurts and think, “Yeah, this sucks, and it makes sense. It’s life. Very strange and shitty things can happen. Based on my proximity to this particular upheaval, what’s next?”
To be clear, I am wired to react in a fairly pragmatic way: "What are viable next steps available to us given what is and isn’t realistically possible?”
I am also (which you may not know unless you know me well) a deep, deep feeler.
I constantly think about the lives, hearts, feelings, and well-being of people close to me, as well as people I have never met. My worry, my wonder, and my desire to do something to help are my constant companions.
I recognize that I was raised as a girl, conditioned as a woman, coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s in the Midwest in the U.S. All of these things have contributed to my relationship to taking good care of the people around me, and doing what I can to make sure everyone at least has “enough.”
As you might imagine, with the scale of human, animal, and earth suffering, this has often meant feeling like I am fighting a losing battle.
I wrestle with a distorted sense of my ability to “fix.”
That is most certainly, at least in part, a result of the accumulation of white-savior nonsense poured into my subconscious from every possible angle. As a “good girl,” and now a “good woman,” I can be trusted to be “charitable,” “generous,” “giving,” and full of wisdom to help soothe, civilize, and make clean and good and right.
Whoa.
I went over the top there at the end because I believe it’s essential to paint the picture of how perverted and wrapped in purity culture and the falsely elevated position of moral, financial, and social superiority white Americans have been taught to perch ourselves from. It’s gross. It’s still in there. It will continue to be the work of a lifetime to extricate and disentangle the strands of myself that long to be truly interdependent in community, a good and reliable leader, contributor, and follower, while also having been taught that I am people like me are “better than,” “especially capable,” “special,” literally - superior.
I’ve been raised inside of late-stage racial Capitalism, amongst the last gasps of an Empire built on exploitation but committed to American Exceptionalism - a holdover of “Manifest Destiny” - “surely God sent us here to be the boss of everybody” megalomaniacal thinking.
It is hard to shake the “I am the best helper” identity.
Three things have stuck with me from my life over the past week that I’d like to share with you.
My friend Dana was on an airplane and was sending me messages over Signal about just how majestic and breathtaking the mountains were on her travels to and through America’s Pacific Northwest. I went to college in Tacoma and began my organizing career in Seattle, so I was immediately transported back to the visuals and memories I had of being enraptured by those same mountains and dwarfed by those enormous and ancient Redwood trees. It occurred to me in a flash, so I told Dana over text: Mountains are such a powerful reminder that the Earth is ancient and enormous, and we are tiny and brand new.
While in my most recent conversation with my Enneagram teacher, we got to talking about all of the destruction energy happening right now. It’s a dark, pull you under, insideous kind of energy. We are witnessing and experiencing destruction of institutions, destruction of trust and confidence, destruction of relationships, destruction of families, destruction of land, destruction of homes, destruction of people, communities, and dreams. It is overwhelming. And then Linda and I got to talking about how powerful and wise it is in moments, decades, and centuries like this to consciously focus on the opposite of destruction - creation.
In recent days, I have felt alarmed by the stories of how fellow Americans say they are relating to “the news.” I have witnessed some people proudly proclaiming that they are tapping all the way out - not listening to, reading, or interacting with current events in any meaningful way, opting out - actively. I have been equally thrown off by the malaise and overwhelm being expressed by the people who are tapped into the news 24/7, injecting it into their eyes, ears, and hearts as if through an IV - a never-ending news drip. They share that they are feeling consumed, hyper-reactive, and at times crushed by the ticker tape of each new cataclysmic event. Tapping all the way out or swallowing it all whole cannot be our only two options. I will not make it through the next 3.75 years if that’s true.
When in session with my psychologist, I described to her that the energy, news, disappointment, horror, and embarrassing actions of leaders who are supposed to represent me on a world stage feel like they’re getting into my bloodstream.
We kept with that metaphor for a bit. We talked about our cells, our energetic fields, and our unique wisdom, expertise, abilities, and potentially valuable contributions.
We, of course, spoke of the value of balance and how this is most certainly not “business as usual” type types, but neither are our short precious lives put into a period of suspended animation either. All around us, people are experiencing their bodies, their relationships, their homes, their families, their hobbies, their art, their passions, and their jobs. People are experiencing nature and wonder and awe and connection. It’s BOTH/AND not EITHER/OR.
I shared the solace I was taking in remembering my true size - small and mighty.
I shared that I believe “creation” is going to be my 2025 guiding word. Anything I create - a craft, a meal, a story, a worksheet - it all counts - it all goes in the column of actively fighting against destruction.
I shared that this amount of cruelty, callousness, and cavalierness feels to me like a poison. Thinking about my leadership, my goals, my stated values, and my commitment to movement building, community, and my vocation, Dr. Sherry suggested, “I think we should make sure you are titrating exposure to poison.”
It hit hard when she said that.
Take sips, not gulps.
Poison is all around us at this moment.
Protect ourselves how and when we can, recognizing it is unlikely we will be able to come through unscathed.
There is also an element of trusting just how strong our bodies and spirits are. As little kids we eat dirt and expose ourselves to germs and micro dangers as a way of evolutionarily getting used to the world as it is - building up our immune systems (for those of us with that privilege) and realizing we are not so fragile that we will crumble at the first sign of pain, discomfort, or distress.
This human experiment is no fucking joke. It’s a tough one. I, for one, have both internal and external scabs, scars, and open wounds. I needed two band-aids - just yesterday! ;)
I have survived heartbreak. I have survived loss. I have lived in fear and made it through to the other side. I have and continue to build relationships and communities of people around me who share values of wholeness, liberation, joy, confidence and humility.
I am certain that I am going to continue to wonder, over and over again, am I doing enough? And I think that’s a perfectly fine prompt to revisit. I will not use that question to beat myself up or to over-inflate my sense of importance. I will also not use the question to allow myself the sometimes tempting slippery slope into nihilism and a distorted belief that nothing I do matters - because that’s simply not true.
Aiming for some semblance of balance in a deeply out-of-balance world. A recognition of what is happening. And a conscious awareness that we are living with poison all around us, so it behooves us to have a plan, to experiment, to iterate, and to take turns in our interdependent quest to get to the other side of whatever this is.
I’m in it with you.
Thanks for listening.