What do we do now? Ideas for the week after the midterm elections
What a joy the past week has been here in the U.S. for so many of us. In person. Online. Celebrations of standing up to fascism together are everywhere. Folks in other countries are breathing sighs of relief and sending messages of support. And, the action that struck me the most the day after the election was the following share by Brittany Bright on Threads. Almost everyone I knew was breathing, resting, or celebrating. And. It wasn't lost on me that most Black women were already ten steps ahead. Collectively working on the next steps we take and the next set of elections.
Who else needs to be elected? What else needs to be done? So this blue wave becomes a whole damn ocean of people who show up and deeply care represented by people who show up and deeply care. The hard work of democracy doesn't end with better representatives. It never ends. We know this. But Black women. Wow. Just. Wow...
So if you're riding a wave of relief or joy or goodwill now and also wondering what to do next, here are eight ideas. Skim past those you don't need right now—we're all at different places on this wild ride of life. Shut your eyes, take a few deep breaths, feel where in your body you still feel pain/tightness and where you feel freedom/joy. Wonder: What if there's a way to both feel more freedom/joy/aliveness/connection within this body while also working on reducing the pain/tightness/suffering in your body/family/community? Then, choose the one idea that your body agrees that you most need right now. Or, as likely, use these ideas as compost for something even better and invent your own hybrid idea, just for you and your people.
Idea #1 – Make IRL friends a priority and spend more time with them in person
If you aren't seeing friends' and neighbors' faces, and talking to them, in real life, often (at least twice a week for introverts, and I have no idea what to tell you extroverts), take steps to make friends who you can see in person. Often. As a writer with friends all over the planet but few where we currently live, and as a daughter who just spent more than a decade caregiving for a mom with Alzheimer's (so worth it but also SO isolating), starting and running a business (worth it but isolating), and as someone who got Covid and then ended up with long Covid and debilitating chronic fatigue this year (also so so isolating), I myself am starting over with the basics. Starting here, again. With needing more in-person friends and more time with friends in person.
This, too, is leadership. And fighting fascism. I'm old enough to know that friendship is one of the most important tools we have to 1) see what we need when we can't fully see it ourselves, 2) temper the fear and internal control freaks within ourselves (thanks generational trauma), and 3) have the courage to stand up to every bully our culture sends our way and even to stand up to those in masks still out there disappearing our neighbors and their kids while so isolated, deluded, masked, and alone that they could be easily brainwashed into believing they're somehow the good guys. People with true friends don't ever become "Wow! It's so much fun to hurt kids and kill elders!" people. Here we call them fascists, billionaire grifters, and ICE agents.
Recenter friendship.
Idea #2 – Reset your nervous system together
Too many of us still try to feel better alone and many still believe it's entirely personal failure when we're exhausted, sad, sick, angry, depressed, short-tempered, etc. We've been spread so thin by [insert your own myriad of reasons here] that we settle for just crashing on the couch, just scrolling on our phones, just bingeing shows without end, just ignoring or self-medicating feelings away, believing that we don't have it in us to "do the people thing" again today, replacing real life and growth with monotonous and repetitive entertainment, and/or letting go of the collective ways of living and rituals that most humans once had, and that we need, to survive and thrive. We've got to stop settling for receiving far less that what we need to thrive.
When I hear the words "colonizers" or "settlers" now– so popular among my beloved, outspoken, and uppity people– this is what I think of: isolated people settling for far, far less than what's possible together, for both themselves, and for others. Don't be a settler. We all deserve better.
Science will eventually catch up with poets and the good people of Threads and elsewhere and prove that our nervous systems are all connected: that we are collective beings and attached far beyond most adults' current, isolated, wild imaginings.
We must return to gathering and loving gathering. And it can be on our terms. We don't have to return to collective gathering places and groups and people who deeply hurt us in the past and still without the ability or interest in stopping that hurt or changing harmful, cruel behavior today. And. We do have to gather.
We have to see faces and read energy and body language and to make rituals of gathering and conversation and collective learning and collective celebrations. Human beings need each other and we need face time and we need family and meaningful rituals, including seasonal rituals that connect us to the land, to home. Everything that isolated and emotionally neutered people today try to blow off as foolish or not real or too much work and not worth it or not what grown adults do or not masculine or too cringe or [fill in your own stale cultural nonsense here] is actually possible. Totally doable. And. It's made possible simply because we gather together. Everything from stunning sensitivity and intuition and empathy and compassion to generosity and imagination and justice and social change and reflection and forgiveness to music making and poetry and art and humor to foresight and clairvoyance and energy healing to unshakeable respect to just ridiculously this-can't-even-be-possible-it's-so-good good food. It's all possible. It's possible. Because we gather. The time of gatherers is upon us now.
Our ancestors knew– and, if you believe, still know– this. Our ancestors know this. Here's how I know...
"I dwell in Possibility -" (466)
By Emily Dickinson
I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -
Of Chambers as the Cedars -
Impregnable of eye -
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky -
Of Visitors - the fairest -
For Occupation - This -
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise -
**
Even we wandering, nature-loving, loner types must gather now and then to both dwell in possibility, not fear, and to gather paradise, not cruelty. To be thankful beyond words for these narrow Hands.
Some ways of being are far bigger than our individual selves. Many gifts/talents/superpowers/blessings/luck/[whatever your people call it] that we have live between us and among us and around us, not just within us. We are of them, not they of us. We see and experience what we show up for together. Don't believe it? Stop judging. Stop scrolling. Stop trolling. And just show up. Show up. Watch, listen, wonder, feel the energy moving, notice fears and biases shifting, unlearn misconceptions, delight in company of others, and feel the gathering create ample space within you to really, truly, fully, learn. To learn deeply, to the point you'll remember for a long time. Long enough to create. Long enough to pass on what you learn. Long enough to feel yourself a truly necessary, needed, irreplaceable part of the weaving magic of our great known-and-unknowable life.
Regulate that nervous system together again. There are real limits–and even psychosis—trying to do so alone for far too long: see Hegseth, Musk, Miller, and Trump if you need examples. I've had enough examples of that for ten lifetimes. We don't have to live with those individual limits and fears. We are so much more than that together.
Idea #3 – Add one joyful physical activity back into your life and, before you do that, remove one energy-draining activity, event, relationship, or belief
Hi.
Hello.
We're not settling for less than joy anymore.
We're not settling for less than joy for anyone anymore. We're not settling for less than joy for anyone anymore, including you. We're not settling for less than joy. We're just not. That ship hasn't just sailed. It sunk. It didn't work. Couldn't possibly work. Most of us can feel and see that now. And I have every faith that those most harmed by the patriarchy– the horrifically isolated and abused and then self-abusing sensitive little boys still walking around in adult men's bodies– will catch up as their hearts re-connect and come back online.
What physical activity brings you joy? Joy. Ask your body. Your body knows. Add that or add more of that. Also ask "What activity/event/relationship/belief sucks energy from me like a too-big open drain in a small bathtub?" Let go of the event or relationship or belief or part of it or attachment to outcomes or get someone else to do that task—a family member, a friend, a neighbor, join a skill barter/swap/exchange to make it happen, hire it done– or just stop doing the task for a while and see what happens. See if the family or the house or the whole world falls apart. See if somebody else picks it up. See if you're judged for letting it go. See if you care anymore if you are judged. Post-menopausal Me is constantly stunned by how little I care about being judged anymore, by anyone. What others think just isn't my concern. I've become wise, or maybe a cat, it's too soon to tell.
Why drop something before you add something? You tell me your reason. Here's my reason. Because I'm tired of women, nonbinary folks, and good men holding the weight of the world on their shoulders while spinning 10,000 plates in the air and not having time for what matters most to any of us and wondering why we're exhausted, isolated, depressed, and anxious. And...
I say this as someone who has lived with debilitating long Covid chronic fatigue for 7 months now. As someone told by doctors to take no more two or three 5-minute walks a day, at most, because the illness "sets fires in every body system you've got and your body is busy handling and trying to put out ten fires at once, all the time, every day." Returning to daily 45-minute walks, for me, for now, can't even be a goal. Too much exercise makes me crash hard and avoiding crashes is now the big goal I have no choice but to accept as my own. I say this as someone whose neck and shoulders ache all the time from the chronic fatigue inactivity, so now I must sit in the public pool jacuzzi at least once a week just to feel relief, and I get a massage every few months when we can afford one. And I say this as someone whose lymph system isn't working well at all and whose sinuses are chronically stuffed up to the point that my head feels heavy and dizzy most days no matter what I eat or drink or believe or do, for seven months now. Whose body must roll from side to back to belly to the other side, all night, because time spent in one position causes so much pain that it wakes me up. People, including strangers, regularly look at me and say out loud, "Are you ok?"
Nope. I'm not ok. Not even close. Thanks. How about you?
But I can still see, still observe, still feel, still reflect, still laugh, and still write: all my favorite things. I do more of all these things now. So believe me when I say. Don't add anything into your life that is emotionally draining. Center joy. Drop energy suckers and if you can't yet then start imagining what would need to happen for you to drop a big energy sucker. Imagine letting go. Imagine letting it/them fall. Letting them drop. Surrounding yourself with who and what you need to let the energy suckers leave. And to stop inviting them in, or back. Wow is it hard to let go of energy suckers when it's still on you to save everyone and everything.
So figure out what physical activity, and where, and with whom, you can add, that brings you– specifically you– joy. Walking with my dog, and often my partner, in the fields and woods, and noticing changes in nature, and picking berries and picking up leaves and seeds and plants and tending wild places we love and touching and talking with trees brings me joy. Always. Even when it's raining.
Add your joyful activity and only that. Drop everything else you can.
When you have the energy, figure out what the biggest energy suck is and start there. Remove it. That's HUGE! What this is changes with time, like you do. By the end of August this summer, for example, for me, it was watching my partner take on all of the of the cleaning and all of the cooking on top of his busy work schedule for months on end with no break in sight. All the while knowing that his hard months– late October through November (or December, January, or February, depending on the year), the time of year his little brother died unexpectedly and so young– were just around the corner. I shifted from feeling grateful for him and all he did to feeling alone all the time and worrying all the time. I grew lonelier and lonelier and then resentful and angry and terrified, until I didn't want to get out of bed at all. If he goes down this year too, like I have, we're fucked. So we talked. We're now hiring some of the housework done, and we're leaning on more people in the community who create pre-made meals for locals, and we center on love and togetherness during the difficult late-fall season for him and difficult late-winter season for me. So we have more time for fun, walking, working together, helping and connecting with others together, and just being together.
I'm just so Goddamn tired and sore all the time right now that I can't deal with also being lonely or worried all the time, too. So fuck all the rest of it. Drop all the rest of it. Set down what you can't hold right now. Here, we need joy and movement.
Idea #4 – Set aside time and space for imagining bigger and better together
A lot of us have been just trying to survive the Trump era of unchecked white supremacy, violent and cruel and short-sighted and unhinged patriarchy/capitalism/fascism, and tech billionaire grifters who think they're untouchable gods and somehow original or smart for throwing Nazi salutes and stealing from everyone and everything around them until people grow ill or starve or die or revolt. [or the Netanyahu era or the Putin era or your version of these monstrous, entitled, disconnected-from-reality men]. Fellas, ya basic. Worse than basic. Y'all are basic for 1826. You're dead-and-buried basic.
Being in always-attacked-mode can temporarily shrink our ability to trust, to wonder, to follow curiosity, to believe in our own power to make change, and to imagine the new and dream differently together. I'm personally committed to imagining better again. To getting all the way back to the me who is fully herself, that is, fully centered on wonder. And for me, that means getting together regularly with friends and neighbors and other poets and creators, in person, not just online, to imagine more together than we can alone.
You don't need special expertise to do this. You do need to really miss it or really want it. You need to want it so much that you don't care if people see you or your work or your family and your home (if you host) at your worst. You need to want it enough that you stay with it through the hard, bumpy, parts. The hard parts teach us more about ourselves and how we return to safety and trust and welcome and creativity and joy together than anything else possibly can, and, they remind us that we can do hard things together and alone.
My friends and I pulled together a short book back in 2015 about how to gather regularly to reimagine. It's called Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space. You don't have to turn your home into a free community coworking space or crafting space or hang out space, like we did, to get ideas about reimagining what you/we want, community building, and community-level reimagining from this book. I'm planning to re-read this book this winter, because the past 11 years have been so exhausting and so isolating, and my present is also so exhausting and isolating, that I struggle to remember everything we once did in service of reimagining, and I could really use the reminder and the help returning to the shared field of imagination.
Idea #5 – Help those most harmed, and still being harmed, by the cruelty-and-violence-centered executive branch of the U.S. federal government that's still trying to run things today
For you that might be elders or children or Black families or trans friends or veterans or Indigenous communities in the U.S. Or the land herself. Or animals. Or it might be people, friends, overseas or across borders targeted by our leadership's insatiable, disgusting love of stealing from the poor, watching people suffer, using weaponry on civilians, and hurting and killing living beings for profit. For me, the people I see who are most harmed are people facing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, because of dear friends there and the hundreds of thousands of entirely preventable dismemberments and deaths we've all witnessed, and also immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the U.S. in general. People I love. People I've worked with. People I adore because they make this whole world, and this country, far, far, far better, simply by their open and generous and brave presence, and unique perspectives, and expertise at community building. People who've changed me for the better in countless ways.
If you're looking for a focus now, help those facing genocide because of the U.S. government and help immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers and others fearing for their lives here at home. There are elders, whole families, and children on their own locked in cages and cells in concentration camps all over this country right now. Cold. Hungry. Being fed magot-infested food and dirty-on-purpose water. Tortured. Raped. Denied medical care, privacy, basic dignity, and access to family and attorneys and the rights required by U.S. law. ICE has brutally detained more than 600,000 people since Trump's inauguration in January 2025. Many people they've detained have been intentionally disappeared from state to state, or out of the country, so that their families and attorneys can't even find them. Today 72% being held by ICE have no criminal record not even a speeding ticket. Can you say the same? No speeding ticket or parking ticket? I can't. And legally speaking, even being here illegally– such as if your visa expired before the government got its act together to renew it on time, a common issue– is legally akin to getting a parking ticket. It's not a jailable offence, let alone one warranting torture, disappearance, starvation, families ripped apart, or a death sentence.
If you're looking for a next step and want to help, this seems like a damn fine next step here.
People and their families and friends are still being harmed, taken and held, beat up, run over, or shot without cause, and hunted by ICE in businesses and schools and places of worship for nothing more than the color of their skin– citizen or not– or for following the rules and showing up to regularly scheduled immigration-related appointments. Ask people in the affected communities near you how best to help. Often help is just groups of neighbors who care who are working closely together instead of worrying alone. Organizations that help are a good place to start too. For example, we can join or start following the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and Defend Migrants Alliance, and state-centered branches and organizations. Here in WA state, that would be organizations such as the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network (WAISN), or Worker and Farmers Labor Association (WAFLA) and the Washington Growers League (WGL), or Immigrant & Refugee Health Alliance, or Casa Latina— I'm no expert but I know they all serve targeted populations.
You can start by reaching out to any group of neighbors or organization that serves those hurting the most from brutal, federal, cowardly, illegal, fascist policies. Help them. Show up for them in person and online. Listen. Serve meals. Babysit. Bring supplies. Drive. Make safe spaces. Teach. Translate. Whatever they need. And if you have the resources, donate money to immigrant defense funds and to those fighting in your state legislatures and elsewhere to put an end to our government and disconnected-from-reality "leadership" treating human beings, our neighbors, like less than garbage.
Idea #6 – Figure out who needs to be elected next or who needs to lead next and start to support them now
Who leads and who governs– at every level– matters. The people most harmed by the current system and regime already know the answers to "Who needs to be elected next?" Follow their lead. Black women know. Hispanic women know. Indigenous people know. People in the disability community and the LGBTQ+ community and especially in the trans community right now know. More white women than ever– those with the time and stubborn or cross-generational, unshakable inclination to love all women and all kids– know, too. Follow their leads if you're struggling to know who needs to be elected next.
Here's one idea, from Brittany Bright. Connect with and donate to this important 2027 campaign in Mississippi: Priscilla W. Till for Governor of Mississippi. I'm pretty sure that deeply rooted Indigenous nations and Black women in southern states know more than all the rest of us put together about who needs to lead and who needs to be elected next at the national level. In a world held together by relationship, connection, trust in each other, faith, and hope, those who need each other and love each other the most are our leaders. Usually that's groups, not lone individuals. All great poets, musicians, women, and prophets– and their gatherings– said as much. And we all know who that is when we feel it. Even those still constantly fighting to hear their own bodies, the land they're on, and their true selves.
Idea #7 – Connect with the people and organizations that busted their asses and flipped state elections blue to minimize harm and to those still on the brink and in mourning
Help locally. And also, The States Project did some great work this year: check out The States Project. Look at what happened in the states they choose to focus on!
There is still so much more work to be done. Many women and nonbinary folk–and the paying-attention-to-all-people men– of Idaho and Florida, for example, are simultaneously happy for others in the country today and also feeling alone, unseen, and mourning for themselves today. A woman from Idaho on Threads said that she can't believe how stunningly few of her neighbors care whether she, and all women there, live or die. She's hurting now. Trans people in Washington state and elsewhere facing clueless and cruel bigotry are feeling the same. Farmers taking hit after hit, on the brink of losing their multi-generation family farms, feeling similarly scared. Pick a place where you know people are still scared, mourning, and still fighting bigotry, lie-based fears, and uphill battles, and connect with people there. Check in with your friends and colleagues in these places. Friends feeling hopeless and alone. And give them and their organizations your time and/or money, if possible. Make plans to spend more time with them or to listen from afar, and to help them.
Complacency is not an option. Leadership is everywhere love is. So is rest. We know that now.
Idea #8 – Connect with and donate to the people who will fight– in the courts– against cruel and discriminatory measures that have passed in your area
Here in Washington state, today that would be donating to: No Hate in WA State, the ACLU of Washington state and others like the WA State LGBTQ Commission. Through all our blue-wave joy, here, we also weep. A transphobic and misogynistic measure passed here in Washington state this week. This creepy, strange, and complicated measure targets transgender kids and all girls who want to play sports. From Washington State Standard "The measure requires students in K-12 sports to undergo a physical examination. The measure adds a requirement for medical professionals during those exams: verifying a student’s sex assigned at birth. School boards, or other school governing entities, would be required to create the rules on what sex verification would look like. It would rely on “one or more” of the following methods: 'the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels,' according to the initiative." More specifically, this measure targets girls who want to play sports. ALL girls. The misogynists and pedophiles among us must be giddy with pleasure and anticipation. And who will be paying for multiple special tests for girls who want to play sports? Poor families? Already-struggling school districts and teachers paying out of pocket for simple school supplies?
Check in with your trans friends and with all people who are girls old enough to understand and with people who have and love girls who want to play sports at school. It boggles the mind that adults who managed to get through school and sports themselves without having a special bunch of doctors and school officials rummaging around in their underwear and running expensive genetic tests first would vote to allow officials to look into their kids' or grandkids' underwear and require additional invasive and expensive testing just for girls. The measure opens the door for unhappy parents to come after girls playing sports at any time, demanding that any girl "doing too well" playing sports get more genetic testing or additional genitals viewing by strangers. And our genes aren't black and white, friends: we're all complex as hell.
Personally, I wildly underestimated the self-blinding bigotry and voter apathy present in my own damn "progressive" state. Progressive my ass. I'm livid. If there are problems to overcome, let the Goddamn adults come together, in that moment, and overcome them, together. Not all trans kids. Not all girls. What cowards these adults be.
The girl within me who was too shy to play sports in school 45 years ago—and that was back when special officials weren't mandated to peek into our panties and test our genetics first—would like to personally punch some people in their damn faces. Every transphobic and misogynistic bigot. Every voter who didn't vote in a state that makes it so stunningly easy to vote. And every millionaire/billionaire who funds and pushes through these let's-hate-each-other nonsense measures so that regular people fight each other and don't notice their pockets are being picked by grifters and the uber-rich. The adult in me knows this discriminatory and unconstitutional measure will be challenged in court here in WA and that our state constitution would literally need to be re-written to allow for this kind of gender-based bigotry to be enforced state wide. Still.
Barf. Horrifying that it passed. I'm fed up with trans people and children being thrown under the bus by adults who should know better.
We're not going to let this happen to our kids, are we Seattle? So that's where I'll be sending some of our dollars and energy next. And we don't even have kids. No, I take that back. All kids are our kids, we know it, and we act accordingly. So if you come for our kids, you're going to have to come through us– all of us Mama Bears, Papa Bears, Auntie Bears, and Grandparent Bears– first.
That last idea got a bit ranting. Sorry about that. It just stings to watch adults continue to put up barrier after barrier in front of girls and trans people. Just people wanting to live and be people.
Hope something in this helped. Let's not put all our faith and hope in the newly elected officials this time. Let's figure out ways to have more faith in ourselves and in our neighbors and communities. Because leadership and love are everywhere. And if we expect a few hundred people to change the world– in a still stunningly antiquated system– while millions don't also participate and do their parts, then we're just going to continue to be disappointed in who we are as people, communities, and countries. And I'm tired of that. Aren't you?
