How to live

This is community

What are you doing in this uncertain moment to keep yourself putting one foot in front of the other? What are you NOT doing?

So many of my conversations — group chats and talks with randos out walking their doggies in the after-dinner hour mostly — have gravitated toward this subject matter lately.

“What are you up to?” has been replaced with “How are you surviving?” and, even, “How are you finding joy right now?”

Today’s “how are you doing it?” has changed in timbre. It’s not at all about chasing the hustle.

I am done wondering how the golden ones do it all. I just want to know how to live right now, pure and simple.

How to get through the day, how to stay brave, how to hold onto hope and each other.

All of the lectures and talks I’ve attended in 2025 have included a question like this in their Q&As, followed by an audible shifting as everyone scoots to the front of their seats to drink in the answer.

In this moment, we are hungry to know how others are getting through, and this is a very good thing. This is community.

We needed this.

We are struggling and we are connecting and we are growing something new, even when it feels impossible, even when we can’t see it.

I saw the poet and memoirist Maggie Smith speak at Town Hall earlier this month and when she answered a question like this, pens were racing across papers, and fingers were racing in the Notes app.

In case you’re wondering, I happen to have her answer right here in my own Notes app: she’s listening to very loud music and live music, taking pictures of clouds, singing morning karaoke with her kids, and, when she’s really angry, running on her new treadmill.

Pictures of clouds and morning karaoke with her kids. Doesn’t that just sound so good? I love her for sharing that!

(She’s also been working on an anthology with Saaed Jones called The People’s Project with the sub-head “Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward.” Um, yes, please. It comes out Sept. 9. Join me in pre-ordering it!)

I too am surviving on loud music and live music, on drinking in as much of the art and conversation and action happening in my community as I possibly can.

It’s sustaining me and reminding me of how much we have to live for.

I read in the news about humans doing unspeakable things to each other, and I despair that there is no end to some people’s greed, it’s just this great morass, sucking us all in — but art helps me remember the rest of what it is to be human, the parts of us worth saving.

I am grieving and I’m struggling and I’m getting out there.

Photo by Madeleine Maguire on Unsplash

Getting out there last month allowed me to watch a non-binary ballet dancer get a full-theater standing ovation. It allowed me to connect with a grieving high schooler I’d never met before. It allowed me to hear the life-changing symphony commissioned by late Upper Skagit elder Vi taqʷšəblu (Tock-sha-blue) Hilbert along with her relatives and strangers in a packed Benaroya Hall.

It allowed me to clutch hands with my family at Hamilton, a show we’ve all had memorized since the pandemic. We couldn’t afford the tickets, but I don’t care. It was important not to miss that opportunity for joy and connection.

It’s interesting, contrasting my 2025 self with my 2017 one, how much more I feel called to the world outside my head — outside my phone — this time around.

I’m struggling, make no mistake. But I’m braver and more sure of myself. Even amid so much despair, I’ve actually been finding it easier to hold onto hope this time around.

Really, living off the algorithm is its own act of protest, and I’m doing that a lot more now, too. It’s so very different from the performative shit I cloaked myself in during Trump I.

I wasn’t helping anyone with that. I was just feeding monsters. That’s another thing I’m not doing anymore.

Really, “How are you getting by?” is a question I’ve wanted to ask others my entire life. In many ways, I have been, especially with this newsletter — and trying to share my own answers as honestly as possible.

Aren’t we all desperate to know how everyone else is holding it together? Maybe we think everyone else is doing it better.

But we are all just figuring it out. (I mean, not all, but you know.)

In 2017, I was having plenty of conversations with real people, but I was also significantly more Online than I am now. My desperate, hungry sponge of a brain was soaking up everything it came across. Absorbing hundreds of opinions an hour alongside fewer human-scale conversations made it hard for to categorize what came from whom and especially to prioritize the fire hose of horrors.

I was like OMG I need to protest this pipeline! Another innocent person is dead and I need to do something about it! I need to protest that executive order! Why are those people in cages? Another absolutely lovely and lifesaving book was banned! Why were those people arrested? Shit, another unconstitutional executive order?

Spinning and spinning and spinning, reacting and reacting and reacting to a never-ending stream of crises resulted in a lot of self-hatred — and more inactivity than I’d like to admit. It was easy to spin guilt and shame into all that chaos. All the things I did wrong in 7th grade! All the things I did wrong at 22!

Even when I did protest and write angry letters to my reps, it was complete scattershot.

It’s like I was alone in a boat with 10,000 holes and a handful of Q-tips and bubble gum.

I don’t feel like that anymore.

In 2020, when I lost most contact with anyone outside my own household, the online conversations got even louder and I lost touch with my own inner voice completely.

Lucky for me, I spent 2021-2023 getting lots of therapy and starting this newsletter.

I reclaimed authority over my life. I did a lot of inner work to stop proving myself and justifying my existence at every turn.

I learned that my immediate response is usually my trauma response, and while it takes a little while for my actual self to react, I do know how to respond if given enough time.

Even after all this work, I need to remind myself I will do the right thing.

But first I can breathe.

First I can walk.

Sometimes, I need to rest a while. Even when the world is on fire. Especially when it is. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to do anything about it.

Photo by jennifer uppendahl on Unsplash

Always, I need joy and community filling me up, reminding me I’m not alone. Reminding me of all we have to live for.

Not only is peace and joy allowed, it is part of the work. I know that now. But I still have to remind myself.

Chronic illness has taken a lot of things away from me (and we’ve only just begun, lol), but maybe the greatest gift it’s given to me is the awareness of just how finite my energy is.

I can’t do everything. I can’t take in everything. I can’t respond to everything.

I have to be selective, and while it can be infuriating to not be able to do as much as I want anymore, it is truly a lesson in prioritizing and being deliberate with my time and energy.

I give a lot of thought to my sourcing these days. Not only what is a trusted news source, but also, whose voices do I want in my head? (Like Masha Gessen, David Remnick, and so many others at the New Yorker, and the three sages at Vibe Check, the podcast getting me through 2025.)

I’ve given a lot of thought to the things that really feed me, and I’ve been funding them whenever I can.

And honestly? With even with all the time I’ve put into taking care of myself, into prioritizing rest and joy, I’ve already messaged my reps more in 2025 than in any of the years I spent shame-spiralling, doom-scrolling and speed-reacting to every fresh horror.

In 2025, I’m thinking more about what I can do, not what I should do. I’m being honest with people, and more importantly, with myself.

I don’t know what will come next, and that terrifies me. But there is so much joy here, too. There is so much living.

I know so many of you like to text and email me me privately after my newsletters and truly I love that and don’t want it to ever ever stop, but may I also encourage you to comment here if you feel comfortable? I’d love to create more community among the 170 dear souls who read this newsletter, and your messages are always such gems that it seems greedy to keep them all to myself.

But please see that only as the invitation it is. I feel your presence and I want you to take care of yourselves! Also, I am plenty greedy, so please keep spoiling me alone if you so choose!