Rooting myself in what's real
What I was up to while the hot takes got cold
The day after last week’s election I sat down at my computer, fingers poised at the keys. “I need to say something,” I thought. I typed, deleted, typed, deleted; after a while, I wandered away to make a cup of tea.
The next day, I sat down again. “I really should say something,” I thought, as I typed, deleted, deleted, typed. The thoughts couldn’t seem to form themselves, so I went out to feed the chickens.
And another day went by, and another, and another. The longer I didn’t write about the election, it turned out, the less I wanted to. And the longer I stayed off Facebook and Instagram (after an ill-advised peek a couple of days after the results were called) the less I felt like I needed to.
As someone who has never fit neatly into either dominant political party, I am typically disappointed by all the candidates who actually stand a chance of winning, and skeptical that the bright future painted by either party is actually the direction that will best support human flourishing. I typically feel lonely, even despairing, during election season and glad when it’s over, regardless of the outcome.
But the past few election cycles have been particularly rough, and the dust hasn’t seemed to settle as quickly afterward as it used to. I’ve found myself (far too) caught up in other people’s opinions, analyses, and especially their feelings - absorbing the sadness and elation, fear and confidence, until I could no longer hear my own moral compass guiding me or even identify which feelings are actually mine.
This year was a little different. I started getting a gut-level inkling of how things could likely go months ago, so I decided to step mostly away from social media while it all played out.
And while I wasn’t happy about the results, I found that much of the loneliness and despair I typically feel around an election disappeared, right along with the scrolling.
What is real? I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about that over the last several days. We’re surrounded by artificial things, from food and faces to art and “intelligence”. More and more it seems to me that the emotional spectacle of the election cycle is manufactured as well; that we are reacting to messaging that’s been created explicitly to foment fear, anger, and division by industries that have gotten very, very good at producing their chosen product: us, absolutely freaking out.
That’s not to say that our elected leaders don’t have power to enact policies that could have actual impacts on our day-to-day lives: of course they do. But online I see people reacting to things, in both negative and positive ways, that have not yet happened, and that may not happen, as though they have already happened. A normal human trait, to be sure. But social media turns this freakout into a contagious mass event, almost a moral obligation. We’re all freaking out, and freaked out by each other’s freakout.
Are feelings real? Obviously, they seem very real to us when we’re feeling them. But I also know how unreliable my emotions can be. How easily influenced they often are by the feelings of those around me. How quickly I can get stuck in the narratives I’m fed about myself, about other people, and what I’m experiencing or may experience in the world, and how easily anxiety about what might be can start to seem like I’m reacting to what already is.
(And by the way, while I’ve found Substack to be a much less anxiety-inducing reading experience than the major social media platforms, I’ve still had to be careful to stick to the limits I recently created. Someone else’s thoughtfully-expressed feelings are still someone else’s feelings, and it’s way too easy to marinate in them so much we forget what our own feelings are.)
Anyway, here’s what I learned by not responding quickly to a major national (and international!) event: the more time that went by, the less I felt I needed to share my opinions in this space. All those early reactions stayed in my head, essay drafts that will never be published - and that’s okay. Those thoughts can be just for me.
Nobody, after all, asked for another pundit.
Instead, I’ve spent much of the past ten days immersing myself in what feels immediately, undeniably real. Making a crisp from the last of the fruit we got from our pear trees this year. Scooping still-warm, smooth-shelled eggs from the coop and slipping them into my pocket. Brewing cup after cup of fragrant tea: black, oolong, pu’er, rooibos, chamomile-mint-lemon balm. Carefully packing mail-order tea and craft boxes and hand-writing notes for the recipients. Taking in the particular beauty of a late-autumn sunset…they always stop me in my tracks.
Creating, making, doing things with our hands, experiencing the world with all five senses - it’s real. And it’s good. It reminds us that we have agency over our surroundings, that we are capable of action and the satisfying results of our own work.
I’ve also done a lot of in-real-life “peopling” over the past ten days, an amount that I had grown somewhat unaccustomed to recently as my life has become quieter and more home-oriented. I had a lot of conversations with people who voted all kinds of ways, I’m sure, though most of our discussions weren’t directly about politics. Yet all of these points of connection - whether they lasted a moment or two hours - were with people who are shaped by their own experiences, opinions, and stories, as we all are.
It helps me to see what’s real to other people, even if it seems to run counter to my own reality.
Human contact is real, even when it sometimes feels hard. And it’s necessary. Spending time with other people may be the only real antidote to believing the worst things we’ve been told about them.
However you’re feeling now, wrapping up the second week after the election, I hope you’re able to ground yourself in something undeniably real today, and tomorrow, and every day. Indulge in the sweaty satisfaction of hard physical work. Crunch some leaves beneath your feet on a long autumn walk. Cuddle a soft animal or press your cheek to a baby’s fuzzy head. Inhale the scent of something delicious, like warm cookies or a cup of fragrant tea.
Root yourself in what’s real. The manufactured world with its on-demand outrage and fear isn’t going anywhere…but the longer you ignore it, the less it may dictate the beat of your very real, very human heart.
Real (good) reads:
Here are some essays I’ve found comforting and wise over the last couple of weeks:
-I have news for you
“Human history has always been dark – we’ve evolved from impending apocalypse to the next impending apocalypse; we’re built for them – and every dark period of it has been dark in its own unique way. This is another period that is dark in its own unique way.”
is one of my favorite writers, offering wisdom about aging and what it means to be a midlife woman through the lens of mythology, folk and fairy tales, and the exploration of archetypes. I love her incredible Substack publication , and she’s also the author of several excellent books, two of which I quoted liberally in my upcoming book.
This post was one of the first things I read after the election, and it felt like a big, deep breath (as well as a reminder that I didn’t need to rush to “say something” after all.)
-The News ≠ Your Life
“The trouble is that human beings can't really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like "the news cycle" or "history" or "the course of world events." This is the realm in which, pretty much by definition, you exert zero individual control over what happens. So you're denied the basic sense of "self-efficacy" – of successfully getting things done – on which wellbeing depends. (As mentioned, social media gives the feeling of doing something, but almost never delivers, because you almost never have a real effect.)”
My good friend and one of the wisest and gentlest voices of reason out there,
, introduced me to Oliver Burkeman last week, and I was an instant super-fan. This post was also very, very good:“The antidote to all of this, in the broadest terms, is more reality, more immersion in the finite here and now: more writing on paper; more gathering in person and in public; more looking strangers in the eye; more scruffy hospitality; more queueing for the supermarket checkout that’s staffed by a human, if there even is one; more feeling the weather on your face and staring into fires; more living as creatures, not machines.’
Yes. Yes. Yes.
-The Tea’s Made podcast, episode 44
And finally, I hope you’ll listen to this week’s podcast episode featuring another favorite Substack writer,
, about how (and why!) to observe the liturgical (church) calendar.Religious feast days and holidays, many of which my seem irrelevant or at least unfamiliar to most of us, could seem very far from what’s “real”. But Kristin makes a compelling case for how the seasonal, local, multi-sensory observations that used to dictate not just the church calendar but, by extension, people’s everyday lives could help us stay more connected to nature and the physical world, finding embodiment and context that may seem to be missing from modern-day spirituality.
I found our conversation fascinating and so inspiring - and there’s more at Kristin’s gorgeous Substack,
.(A note that the episode has some buzzing/static sound which I wasn’t able to completely remove. The discussion was so good that I wanted to publish it anyway, and I hope it won’t be a detractor from Kristin’s wisdom and down-to-earth insight! I personally find this sort of audio feedback to be a lot less distracting over a speaker, so maybe this is the episode to let play out loud while you’re puttering around your kitchen or driving carpool rather than via earbuds.)
Okay friends, that’s all from me this week. As always, I’d love to hear from you. How are you staying grounded and rooted in reality right now?
Thank You Meagan. Wise words as always.
I'm just sticking my fingers in my ears and going " la-la-la, can't hear you!" for awhile, I've decided. It's all just too much, as you say. I plan to spend the remaining weeks of the year baking nearly every day, doing holiday crafts, reading, drinking tea, going to craft fair, taking long chilly walks, and seeing and talking with the people I love and enjoy having in my life. That feels like the best way to spend the next month or so. 👍