We can't fix it, but we can fight it.

Facing grief while refusing to despair in a pre-catastrophe moment

Last time I wrote, I told you to dare to hope. And while the hope I had for this election may have made the outcome feel even more gutting, I don’t regret it. When you work on a campaign, you have to hope. It’s hope that pushes us to give the work the best we have, and campaign work demands a lot of us physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Working on a campaign you believe is a futile exercise will make you cynical. Early this year, long before Biden withdrew from the race, I went to dinner with a friend and told her I didn’t think he could win. She said: “If you don’t believe he can win, you probably shouldn’t work on the race.” She was right. I was working on it, and I was miserable (a feeling compounded by my fury over his foreign policy choices).

The last few weeks have been devastating, and I’m working on practicing what I preach. I’ve been encouraging friends and colleagues to take time to rest and process and to “feel their feelings” but the truth is I haven’t been doing such a good job of that myself. I plunged myself straight into the conversation of “what we do now.” I felt grateful to be pulled into projects planning power-building efforts in the states, grateful to have things to do and action to take. Pointing people to their own agency and our collective power will be critical in the months and years ahead. Giving people hope will be paramount: it is the antidote to despair. And despair is exactly what authoritarian regimes want, because it often leads to numbing, apathy, and disengagement that allows their power to flourish.

All of this is true…and…the grieving and the mourning now matters a great deal. I know it does, because I’ve been avoiding the hell out of it. Instead of “feeling my feelings,” I’ve been pushing them away, busying myself with “how to fix it.”

The thing is there is no fixing it. In the last two weeks, as I’ve listened to a podcast or read a social media post, I’ve suddenly found myself wiping away tears, flooded by that realization: the thing I’ve analyzed to death but refused to emotionally process. We can’t live in grief all the time, so it comes in waves. But we’ll be better off if we can allow ourselves to wade into the water and face the horizon. Otherwise, when the waves come, they knock us over. We can’t see them cresting so they catch us by surprise, adding shock to devastation. One of my early memories is being at the ocean with my mom, and her teaching me that you can avoid being knocked over by a wave by diving into it. Diving into grief fucking sucks, but it’s better than being beaten by it over and over again.

The other day it hit me that this experience feels familiar because it’s exactly how I felt at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, right after the shut-downs began in 2020. I understood that something terrifying and terrible was happening, and it was clearly a thing of magnitude that I had not lived through before. There were historical references, and predictive models. But how bad was it going to get? How long would we be isolated? How many people would die? Would the people I loved be safe? When it was over, what would the pandemic leave in its wake? How would the world be different? How would I be different?

I quickly busied myself by starting a grassroots mask drive, matching donors to California hospitals that were running out of PPE (Californians often have n95s in their homes for wildfire season, and my husband works with doctors and was collecting data on what hospitals needed). I got up at 4:00am every morning to do the matching before work began, and returned to matching after work, processing donation forms late into the night. I lost 16 lbs in six weeks. I have no idea how, except that I was so obsessed with this project I probably forgot to eat. My entire system felt like it was on over-drive all the time. I spent much too much time staring at my phone. I was tethered to my devices at all hours. I couldn’t sleep. Then I started reading articles about anticipatory grief and hyper vigilance. I talked to my therapist, and started going on long, silent walks every day. I started taking baths to calm down my nervous system at night. I started cooking from recipe books, for the first time in my life. I started a garden. I started reading books again. Slowly, I walked myself back into my own life, out of grayscale and back into technicolor.

It helps to be a helper. I felt better when I was working on the mask drive, and I’m glad I did it. I believe we helped people and I know that for a time, it helped me cope. And I’m glad to be working now on how we fight back in 2025. But I’m trying really hard not to be consumed by it, not to fall into a state of hyper-vigilance, not to avoid the emotional processing altogether. It is not easy. Every part of me wants to figure out a way to fix it. And that preoccupation with fixing it, as counterintuitive as it might sound, is avoidance.

So in recent days, I’ve brought myself back to this basic idea, repeating it to myself as a mantra (maybe it will be helpful framing for you too): We can’t fix it, but we can fight it.

Maybe that sounds obvious to you. Or maybe it sounds melodramatic. But to me it distills the truth of accepting what has happened, of feeling what has happened, and holding onto hope, even if that hope is a quiet internal current that we can’t always feel, and the light at the end of the tunnel is not visible. Anyone who has had their heart broken will tell you: you have to remember you still have a heart that works, even if you can’t feel it beating. Anyone who has struggled with depression will tell you: the one thing you have to hang onto is a belief that you will eventually feel better, even and especially when it feels impossible. You put one foot in front of the other, until one day you no longer have to think about putting one foot in front of the other.

Right now “fighting it” might mean talking to your neighbors. It might mean volunteering in your community. It might mean donating to groups that are training organizers or facilitating mutual aid. Maybe it’s just spending time in community or with your friends and family. Maybe it’s calling Members of Congress and State Legislators to apply pressure on the issues you care most about. Maybe it’s deciding to run for office yourself. Maybe it’s gathering your energy, and preparing to participate in civil disobedience when the time comes. Maybe, right now, it’s just refusing to tune out and turn away. Some days we’ll have more fight in us, and some days we’ll have less. Some days we’ll quit the fight early, but we’ll get out of bed the next day and start again. I think that’s okay. I think that’s reality.

Our strategic imperatives now are to protect and defend all we can in the immediate term (especially those communities with targets on their back), while we build durable power for the long-term. The second is something our movement has never been very skilled at doing, especially in comparison to our opposition. It will require us to embrace humility and curiosity, to walk the talk, to take risks, rethink, rebuild, and do things differently. It will require us to refuse to abandon our values, and to refocus on what and who it is that we are fighting for, and not just against. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to see from the Left as we mount a fight for the future, and will share more soon.

In the meantime, I hope we can all manage to hold two truths at once: that we must not tune out and give up, and that we cannot force our way to the other side of grief.

We can’t fix it, but we can fight it.

In 2016, I found comfort in Zadie Smith’s essay “On Optimism and Despair”
adapted from a speech she gave in Berlin while accepting the Welt Literature Prize. I re-read her essay the week of the election, and find it to be a good reminder now, too, that we — as a global society — have been here before:

“...If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world — and most recently in America – the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or an other. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along."