Just about everyone I know is carrying a backpack full of anxiety, dread, despair, or anger, sometimes weighing into terror or rage. We are not sleeping well, at least those of us who found the election results and the ensuing news cycles to be devastating. For many of us, this isn't just a simple tip from one party to another, but something far more existential.
Another way of saying all this: a lot of us have landed in the unbearable vulnerability of now. Underneath whatever is waking us up at 4 a.m. or shortening our fuse when someone cuts off us off in traffic is a deep sense of just how fragile we humans are, individually on a day-to-day basis and collectively over the long haul. This time waiting to see how something negative plays out can be the hardest, at least when I consider the excruciating times between cancer diagnoses (for myself and people I love over the years) and a treatment plan.
We're always somewhat vulnerable because we're only human and we live in a giant vat of uncertainty where things can go wrong in a flash with our health, fortune, families, or communities. Multiply that by threats to some of what and who we care most about in this world, plus the propensity of any strong emotion (especially fear) to act as if it's the only diva on the stage, and it's hard to believe that whatever this is, it will pass into something better. Right now we're in this time. This challenge. This call to pay attention, consider how to resist injustice, find a way to get through the dishes, the work on our laptops, or the late night meanderings of a mind hungry for reassurance.
We don't know exactly (despite the playbook of Project 2025 and lots of pundits out there), what and how things will change, if those changes will land and stick, and what we will discover about ourselves and each other and what's possible. We can sure speculate, but as my therapist used to repeatedly tell me when I posited what people's motives were or what was about to upturn my world, "you don't know that." What we do know, however, is that change is coming.
None of this means we don't prepare or inform ourselves of course, especially when the likely shit starts flying at high speed toward the likely fan. Indeed, living with the already-present or future-likely unbearable calls on us to learn and consider how best to work for what we believe in while taking good care of each other and ourselves. There's also lots of help already in formation arriving at our inbox (here's a good thing called Finding Steady Ground), front door, or in-person. Just outside the door where the wind, sun, and 40-degree temperatures broadcast other kinds of news, which brings me continual assurance of a much more multi-layered and vibrant world in motion than any mind or collection of minds can hold.
Acknowledging the unbearable vulnerability -- at least for me, and you too? -- is the road to accessing our resilience and creativity. As Kelley Hunt sings this great Jesse Winchester song, "That's What Makes You Strong," what makes us strong comes out of our capacity to love and trust others, and in doing so, open ourselves up to the real deal of the human experience. The more open our heart, the more we can access all our intelligence to better discern reality from gaslighting, and with it, the true and best next step. The more in touch we are with our bodies and current state of being, the more we can sustain ourselves and others.
I know I've been writing of "we" a lot here, and I apologize if I'm presuming too much, but this feels like such a "we" time -- including how we can access whatever helps us bridge the divides between "us" and "them." I'm finding solace in talking and being with others in shared vulnerability, whether weeping at a Kelley Hunt concert with strangers and friends, or sharing soup and bread with dear ones, or talking on the phone with someone far away but close to me in shared trepidation.
There's a lot right now that calls on our deepest capacity for kindness and tenderness. There's a lot that will call on our strength for resistance and acting for a present and future that protects the most vulnerable around us and the very vulnerability of our good hearts.
No matter who you are, we are in this time and place together. It's unbearable. it's vulnerable. It's now. May you find whatever helps you see clearly, breathe easy, and love fully.
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P.S. If you're still reading this as a Trumps supporter, you are welcome here (and thank you for reading this), but please, let's all act with civility. It's one of the only clear things that gives so many of us just enough of a micro-dose of hope (to paraphrase another thing Brené Brown said ) to get out of bed in the morning and talk to each other.
