Donald Trump has ruined my ability to focus; a satisfying new hobby; secondhand grief

Thought threads, 04

Losing Focus to the Chaos Machine

I don’t want to give credit to Presidents Trump and Musk for anything—except, you know, the disintegration of the very fabric of our democracy—but, the chaos machine that they brought into office has completely consumed my life and removed any sense of calm. Because when I stop and let myself breathe, what they’re doing to America comes rushing back to me and I become terrified, overwhelmed, and fully give into the feelings that we’re moving into Nazi Germany territory.

I hate that I can’t seem to focus anymore because all I want to do is stare at the news, preparing myself for what new awful thing they’re inflicting on all of us. I alternate between terror, rage, and a sense of overwhelm so deep that I’m not sure I’ll be able to crawl out of it. But there’s also just deep sadness knowing what could’ve been. This could’ve been the most boring few weeks (in the best way), with a President who cares about others and genuinely wants to make a difference in a good way. And I can’t seem to reconcile what’s actually happening, how anyone voted for this (I’m still genuinely angry at those who did), and what things will look like four years from now.

The only calm in the chaos I’m finding is through those who are already fighting back - the team at Indivisible, the ACLU, reps like AOC and Jasmine Crockett. I’m looking to them to discover the hope I’ve lost.

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10 Minutes to Block Out the World

To deal with the above mentioned chaos machine, I’ve been working meditation back into my life. Walking/running meditations are my favorite because I can just focus on the ways that my body is serving me in those moments. But I’m also prioritizing a ten minute Daily Calm mediation (through the Calm app) right before I start working each day. Taking those ten minutes to just breathe and block out everything else has become such a moment of solace in a terrifying world.

Aside from helping to deal with the dumpster fire happening around us, another thing I’m getting out of these meditations are questions to ask myself, to focus inward and see how I want to control my own world. In a recent meditation, the question was around optimal anxiety and what I can do to take myself just outside my comfort zone, to do something scary and see what happens from there.

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A Satisfying New Hobby

I started a commonplace book recently and I’m finding it strangely satisfying. I’ve never been someone who saved quotes or favorite sentences from a favorite book. But gathering all of my favorite lines, questions or thoughts for myself, and the works of others into one place has been really cathartic and a fun thing to flip back through.

A recent favorite quote I added is from

kate lindsay

in her

Embedded

piece, “You might just have to be bored”:

“Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off, respond to the text you’ve left on read. Boredom is when you bring a book to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.”

Who can’t relate to this quote? How many of us claim to be SO busy when in reality we’re spending hours of our day watching the lives of other people? I’m determined to become bored more often - and with that boredom comes opportunities like creating a commonplace book.

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A Simple Way to Get the Headlines

If you, like me, are struggling with focus and doom scrolling because of *gestures wildly around*, might I recommend the NPR podcast Up First? They give you the headlines in about 15 minutes each morning. It helps me to feel informed without overwhelmed when it seems as if a fire hose of information is coming for us each day. And I still highly recommend following Jessica Yellin and Sharon McMahon who not only explain what’s going on, but the why’s and how’s of it all.

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Coping with Secondhand Grief

Something I’ve been struggling with a lot recently is the idea of secondhand grief. With the amount of bad happening right now, but nothing personally touching me (at the moment), I’m feeling this overwhelming sense of grief for others. For those who lost their homes in the wildfires. For those who no longer feel safe to be themselves in our country. For a dear friend who just lost her husband.

I’ve never considered myself an empath—empathetic, yes, but not someone who is highly sensitive to the emotions of others—but right now it feels as if all the grief around me is piling on top, making it hard to move forward. I feel frozen in time, not sure where to direct my feelings, or how best to help. Does anyone else feel like that? How do you keep moving?

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I hope you’re hanging in there, my friends. At times it has felt hard to come to this place, not knowing what to say because so much is happening *out there* that I don’t know how to focus on anything else. But sometimes just showing up is the best we can do, and that’s what I’m doing today.