I found you and I was like a Victorian lady all of a sudden, looking for my fainting couch. I couldn’t speak. I was dizzy and nauseous. I was shocked but not shocked. After all, I’d thought to look, hadn’t I? And I wasn’t even the only person who knew you then who looked. A lot of us looked.

It’s clear you don’t care what I think, that you never cared what I thought, even when you acted like you did. You were only in it for yourself, you cared what people more powerful than you thought. You didn’t care what the rest of us thought. You didn’t care, especially, what women thought.

That is clear, but I still have to tell you what I think.

What I think is that you should have lived your life in such a way that people who knew you well don’t search the Epstein files for your name. You were the first person I thought to search for! That’s your legacy, man: the first person a woman who once loved and admired you searches the Jeffrey Epstein files for.

He told someone else you were fun but that you didn’t understand money. I try not to think too much about that first part, where he called you fun, but the second part certainly seemed to be true: none of your businesses ever turned a profit, did they, however much you told me you understood things about business that I did not.

You told me that when I left, remember? When I was afraid of one of your henchmen, said he was dangerous, said he wasn’t gonna save you, was probably stealing from you, you told me I was prejudiced against old white men. You told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. You told me I didn’t understand.

Later you texted me that you had some thoughts about diversity you were working on, a whole new approach. I was naive, you said, I didn’t know how to be political, to network, I didn’t understand what it took to raise money, to have power.

Clearly, though, I did understand, didn’t I?

It isn’t because I don’t understand what it takes to get funding, to attain more power, to pursue my own ambitions, that I no longer work in your industry. On the contrary, it’s precisely because I do.

I didn’t think you could break my heart again, but you could and you did. I wanted you to be better, to be what you presented yourself as: a rough-around-the-edges visionary with a secret heart of gold. I haven’t believed that for a while now, but this last, completely predictable insult still knocked me off my feet.

You murdered every ounce of regard I ever had for you and then you pissed on the remains. I’ve scraped the pile off the ground, though, put it in a tupperware and saved it up. I’ll bring that meal to your funeral potluck and serve it to your guests. Hot dish straight from hell. Bon appetit!

****

To be clear, I’m not accusing you of raping children. I’m just saying you’re a wildly mediocre con man of loose morals, and I’d be sorry I ever gave you any of my time at all except that I still love so many of the people I met while doing so, good people, better people than you will ever be. We wanted to do some good in the world and we thought you could help us do it, and we were wrong, but we’re still out here trying.

Anyhow, fuck off forever, you pathetic asshole.

Worst regards,

Amy

He did this because he was/despite being a brown Muslim immigrant socialist who openly and actively supports everything Ezra Klein and his ilk told us we should probably just give up in order to win elections against creepy men supported by billionaires and Nazis.

We do not, it appears, have to do this. We probably don’t have to be excited about candidates with Nazi tattoos either.

I was sorry we were not still in New York when the news broke, because I heard that people were shouting and crying and popping bottles on the streets there, I heard that Not Like Us was playing at the victory party, I heard there was a lot of joy.

I felt a lot of joy myself, and I almost cracked open the bottle of champagne that has been patiently waiting in our fridge since early September, even though that bottle is actually waiting for some other event. But Max didn’t want to drink champagne and actually I had to fluff him up to feel excitement and joy about the election results at all.

“Well, this is good but people are going to get disappointed when it turns out he can’t actually do all that shit in his platform” is the paraphrase of his general mood.

IT STILL MATTERS, THOUGH, I said to him. We still get to be overjoyed that a long-shot socialist candidate mobilized a million people, got an entire nation excited about him, kicked Andrew Cuomo’s ass, scared the shit out of the billionaires, freaked out Alan Dershowitz so much that Dershowitz said he would blow his own brains out if Mamdani won — okay, no, since I bother to fact-check my newsletters by hand, unfortunately that is not true, he did not say that — and came out swinging for policies that, whether or not he can deliver on every single one of them, are the RIGHT policies, are some of the basics on which a livable NYC for everybody must be built, are not too much to ask for, are the very beginnings of imagining a future in which oligarchs, demagogues, and fascists are defeated, in which profit, cruelty, and control are not the gods before which we all must bend the knee and be broken.

Hmm, that was one long-ass sentence.

Anyways, so Max agreed we were allowed to be joyful in this moment, WHATEVER COMES NEXT. And we toasted the moment with a delightful orange wine, and we left the bottle of champagne unopened in the fridge.

&&&

“What about this champagne, Amy? You keep mentioning it.”

Okay, I’m gonna try to lay out the argument here.

The bottle of champagne is in the fridge so we can break it open when Trump dies.

I don’t know when this will be. I do know that, whatever the live-forever grifters tell the oligarchs who are afraid to die —

and even though I don’t believe in hell, if I were those guys, I’d probably be pretty scared to die anyways, because Pascal’s wager takes on a different magnitude when you’re actually a monumental macro-villain —

and I’m pretty sure Dante would boot out one of the guys that Satan has in his three mouths or else grow Satan some extra mouths to make room —

I do know, despite the Bryan Johnson-sponsored nighttime-erection internet-of-things cock ring, despite blood boys and on-demand magnesium infusions, despite preventative full-body MRIs —

I do know that everyone dies.

Everyone. Every single person in the history of the world has died. Even Henry Kissinger died, although it took him an excruciatingly long time. This means that Donald Trump will die.

And when Donald Trump dies, whenever that is, I want a bottle of bubbly already chilled so I can celebrate.

&&&

Yes, I said that. I will celebrate when Donald Trump dies. I celebrated when Henry Kissinger died. Not with champagne, but with memes, as the internet does.

When Trump dies, I want champagne. I want memes. I want people shouting and dancing in the street. I want “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” playing on repeat from everyone’s apartment windows. I want bonfires of Donald Trump presidential portraits torn down from post office walls.

And I want all of those motherfuckers still in charge when he dies, if he dies in office, to know that he was hated, that Dante would have shoved Donald Trump up one of Satan’s assholes, where Satan’s asshole teeth will endlessly chew him up and shit him out, only to hoover that shit back in again and start the whole process all over, endlessly, for eternity.

Hell, I’ll write that Dante fanfic myself.

&&&

I understand that in the current environment it is risky for me to say these things. But, well, I can’t be fired, because I don’t currently have an employer, and I would like to clarify that these views are my own, that even the champagne taking up space in the fridge is entirely my idea, that no one else is responsible for my Dante fanfic.

&&&

The champagne, specifically, became a Thing when the internet started its first round of “Is Dear Leader dead?” over Labor Day weekend, 2025, when he was briefly AWOL. There was wild speculation. There were conspiracy theories. There were Weekend At Bernie’s memes. Amongst people I spoke with about this, there were mixed feelings: yes it would be great if that motherfucker would just stroke out and die (recent speculation on Trump’s obvious and continuing health problems suggests he may have had a stroke that weekend he was missing), but we’d still be stuck with all these other cartoon villains, of which I offer this very incomplete list: JD Vance, Russ Vought, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon. RFK, Jr.

These men have collectively done an immense amount of damage to the entire fucking world, such that it’s hard to know which of them will go down in history as the biggest mass murderer of the 21st century — Satan will eventually need to grow a lot of new assholes — and if Trump dies in office these guys will still be in power.

Nevertheless, Trump’s death in office would be a tremendous moment of possibility, what the ancient Greeks used to call a kairos.

This is because he has no adequate succession plan. He is too stupid and too narcissistic to groom someone for that role or allow someone else to be actively groomed for that role in his presence. Of course JD Vance is angling for it, but JD Vance, even if he divorces his heathen wife and marries Erika Kirk, a blond Christian woman (another internet rumor), does not have the charisma that Donald Trump has.

No, I don’t personally think Donald Trump is charismatic. But I know that his kind of charisma works for a uncomfortably large minority of humans living in the United States, and I know that there is no other US-based fascist right now who has that kind of charisma.

Don’t just take it from me, take it from Steve Bannon, who just the other day said:

Look, we have to understand that if we don’t do this to the maximum—the maximalist strategy—now, with a sense of urgency, and in doing this, seize the institutions... if we don’t do this now, we’re going to lose this chance forever, because you’re never going to have another Trump. [emphasis added]

There will be disarray when Trump dies. There will be chaotic power struggles. Factions will factionalize even more. People who feared Trump’s wrath may become bolder, or at least fear other peoples’ wrath instead. If we as dissidents continue to organize, to grow our own power, then we will be more ready to seize that moment.

And, I submit, the more of us who are out there in the streets popping bottles and dancing like the Berlin Wall just fell, the more likely this is to happen.

Which is to say, put a bottle of your favorite bubbly in your fridge, and get ready to party.

&&&

This was actually supposed to be a historical essay about Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who was the fascist dictator of Spain for 36 years until his death in office in 1975, but whose anointed successor, Juan Carlos de Borbón, the grandson of the last king of Spain, turned out not to be especially committed to Francoist fascism, and instead worked with the opposition to transition Spain to democracy, albeit flawed.

I knew almost nothing about Franco before a casual remark someone (I can’t remember who) made during the Labor Day death watch.

“When Franco died,” they told me, “it was said that the people drank all the cava in Spain.”

I latched on to “all the cava in Spain” because it is an incredible image — a people released from bondage to an evil person celebrating that release so determinedly and excessively that they used up all the traditional celebratory beverage in the country. I imagine Spaniards asking Frenchmen to drive some cases of champagne over for them, asking the Italians to send their prosecco, we are out of the celebration beverage, send more, we are not done celebrating.

With this sparkling image in my head I went looking for more information about this event, about Franco himself, and about what happened after his death.

I looked specifically for news articles about the reaction to Franco’s death by the people, and unfortunately I found nothing to suggest that all the cava in Spain had in fact been drunk that week. Of course many people quietly celebrated, in some places more than others — The New York Times reported that “In such contentious regions as Catalonia and the Basque country, champagne bottles were opened in private to toast a long‐awaited opportunity for change.” But Spain did not run out of cava.

Plenty of people were still afraid. This was a consolidated fascist government that had ruled from 1939, when, with Hitler’s assistance, they won the Spanish Civil War. The idea that it might just go away must have seemed impossible. And yet, it did.

Franco was not a dumb man and he ruled for a long time. Unlike Trump, he was concerned with succession and he had chosen his longtime right-hand man and Opus Dei fanatic, Luis Carrero Blanco, as his successor.

In his Christmas 1969 speech, Franco said, regarding the succession, “Everything is tied down, securely tied down.” 1

Blanco became Prime Minister in June of 1973. In December 1973, he was assassinated by Basque Separatists in a dramatic car bombing in Madrid. It is well worth reading the Wikipedia entry on this bombing, which includes a statement about the bombers’ reasons as well as the information that many Spaniards quietly approved of and joked about it, saying Blanco had become “Spain’s first astronaut,” because the bombing threw the car spectacularly far into the air.

Thus, in 1973, Franco, his health failing, was left without a successor.

Nothing was tied down, after all.

&&&

In the summer of 1975, pressed for time, he tapped Juan Carlos for the role. Juan Carlos swore loyalty to the principles of Francoism and parliament appointed him as Franco’s successor. Franco died, finally, as all men do, on November 20th, 1975, and Juan Carlos was crowned two days later.

Immediately upon his death, dissident political parties (all illegal under Franco) released statements demanding change. A group of dissidents in the military, several of whom were then under arrest, released a statement insisting that the crowning of Juan Carlos should not occur without the agreement of the people. In his speech at his coronation, Juan Carlos was conciliatory.2

By 1977 political prisoners had been released and those who had fled in exile were allowed to return home. The first free parliamentary elections since 1936 were held in June 1977.

And, by the end of 1978, a new constitution had been ratified and Juan Carlos had signed it. Francoism was over.

&&&

Obviously the story is a little more complicated than that; stories always are. Spanish democracy is not perfect; one fascinating little tidbit I found during my Franco research was “the Cassandra Case”: the story of a young woman who made a series of tweets between 2013 and 2016 playing on the ‘Spain’s first astronaut’ joke about Carrero Blanco’s death. In 2017 she was convicted of “extolling terrorism,” although the conviction was later overturned. I came across this story not long after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and it’s one reason I didn’t write this essay back in September when I was first digging into the Franco stuff.

And, whether or not Francoism is truly over is still a site of debate. When I started down the Franco rabbit hole, besides old news articles and Wikipedia entries, I also did my favorite research trick and looked up college course syllabi on modern Spanish history to see what the readings were. Most of them were in Spanish, unsurprisingly, but I found a book called Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition, and I was able to check it out from the Boston Public Library.3

Anyways this is a whole book about the legacy of Francoism in modern Spain, and it’s a pretty interesting on how one country responded to its fascist past, what was buried and what was revealed, and how people felt about it forty years later.

Despite these complications, Franco’s death really did usher in an era of greater freedom. Under Franco hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, sent into exile, or held as political prisoners. And, a brand new constitution is no small thing. (We sure as hell could use one here in the US, because ours sucks.)

A NY Times article on the 2nd anniversary of Franco’s death in 1977 writes “The bitterness of the extreme right was apparent in the speeches at today’s rally. Blas Pinar, head of the New Force Party, said: “Forty years of Spanish history were built up by Francisco Franco and this Government has destroyed it in two years.”

&&&

When digging into Franco’s death, I found article upon article upon article in the New York Times, going back decades, reporting on his state of health, sickness, or definitely-not-sickness.

In the last couple of months before his death, his state was followed so closely that it reached absurd levels; please enjoy this screenshot from the last 10 days of New York Times coverage, and feel free to scroll through decades of their coverage on his health here.

Then, upon his death, we get this report from the Times:

General Franco died after a tenacious five‐week battle during which he was repeatedly described as showing unexpected strength. In the final medical bulletin a team of 32 doctors, who had resorted to extraordinary measures, including three operations and reduced body temperature, to keep their patient alive, indicated that they had continued to seek to revive him to the last.

The final clinical diagnosis included Parkinson’s disease, acute miocardial infarction, acute digestive ulcers with repeated massive hemorrhaging, peritonitis, acute kidney failure, thrombophlebitis of the left thigh, bronchial pneumonia and shock.

This is some wild-ass medical shit going on, and I go into it so deeply to point out that nobody insists on doctors doing this kind of desperate shit unless they are really, really afraid of what will happen when the person in question dies.

These are the actions of people who know they don’t have it all tied down.

&&&

So absurd was the reporting on Franco’s ‘long battle’ (and the battle itself…) that Chevy Chase famously joked about it on the December 13th episode of Saturday Night Live (then in its first season), saying, in Weekend Update (three weeks after Franco’s death): “Our top story tonight: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Chase expanded on the joke for several weeks afterward and it later became a catchphrase with its own wikipedia entry.

“Forty-five years later,” wrote Faber in 2021, “the SNL skit has lost little of its punch, or for that matter, relevance. Franco is still dead, of course; but he also continues to be held in contempt, to garner praise, and to dominate the headlines.” 4

&&&

I give you this very long story about Franco for three reasons:

First, as a reminder that the study of history matters:

History matters now more than ever, and we do not have to leave it only to historians, students, or miscellaneous ‘history buffs’.

I am not a historian, a student, or a history buff. But I got interested in something and I did a little research, for which I used zero AI, by the way, and I learned some interesting things. Wikipedia, newspaper archives, and paper books from libraries are all free access to history. Reference librarians still exist, for now. Professors still exist, for now. Access to history, our own and others’ is still possible. We must ensure it remains so.

Second, as a hopeful example:

Franco’s fascist dictatorship fell and, as the rightists complained, was almost completely dismantled in the two years after his death, in part because he did not have an appropriate successor in place.

Donald Trump’s fascist dictatorship is NOT fully consolidated, and he has no obvious successor. Bannon is desperate to consolidate power NOW because he knows there is only a slim window of time to do so.

He knows, in other words, that it is not “all tied down”.

Third, as instruction:

Donald Trump will die, as all men do. It might be soon. It might be while he is still in office. Those of us opposing fascist rule must continue to HOLD THE LINE against them; refuse to let them consolidate their power. And when Trump does die, we must be prepared to seize that moment as the opposition in Spain was prepared to seize the moment of Franco’s death. One way that ordinary people can seize the moment is in celebration.

So keep that bubbly on ice, people.

Unfortunately, if Franco is any model, Trump’s death will not mean we will get to stop hearing about Donald Trump. We will all be stuck hearing about Donald Trump for the rest of our lives, because there will be no escaping his grotesque legacy. Indeed, we should insist on continuing to talk about Donald Trump, even as we can’t stand to hear his name, because if we stop talking about Donald Trump, we will lose access to an incredibly important piece of our history, and when someone with his level of charisma and tendency toward fascism pops up again, we will be unprepared.

&&&

In conclusion: celebration is important, even if the future remains, as it always is (and I give thanks for that!), undetermined. Like all men, Donald Trump will die, and when he dies we should celebrate, and if we have not already overcome his fascist government, we should recognize it as an auspicious opportunity to do so. We should be ready for this. And, because he has no successor and because he is in ill health, WE MUST HOLD THE DAMN LINE now.

Also GO ZOHRAN! The other day, high off his victory, I finally joined the Democratic Socialists of America, after years of not quite wanting to because I objected to this or that about them. The DSA is running the candidates most aligned with my own values, within the two party system, and sometimes those candidates win.

Last remark: when I talk about Trump’s death, I am explicitly and only talking about the fact that he is an old man with health problems, and old men die of old age, eventually. That’s it. Saying that I will celebrate when he dies of old age is not a celebration of political violence. It’s a celebration of bad people finally dying and being endlessly chewed up and shat out of Satan’s asshole.

If anyone feels like illustrating this vision for me, sans AI, I will pay.

PS: It took me many, many hours of research and thinking and writing to come up with this issue, and I stuck with it because I felt I had something really important to say and because I think being willing and able to struggle through learning and thinking and writing is so critical. If you appreciated this effort and you can afford to, I would appreciate it if you donated to a food bank or food pantry near you. Thanks!

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My dear Reader: I do not have any fucking clue what I am up to.

I’m writing this quick and dirty because I have been stuck on sending newsletters even though I have a million things I want to say and my schedule is capacious enough that I should be able to find the time to say them.

But the words are all jumbled up in my mind and I know they are just the best words, the cleverest words, I have all the best words, she says, giraffe and airplane and rhinoceros, I can ace your cognitive test, like Our Dear Leader has been bragging, but words are just words, they need to be put together in the right order, they need to have meaning, they need to be chosen deliberately by a human mind, I would not ask you to read words that were not, but that’s why I haven’t sent you any newsletters, because when I go to write the words down I can’t immediately make them meaningful, intelligible, and it HURTS, it burns, master, it burns, it feels bad, and then I stop almost immediately.

Oh look, she has no grit, she failed the cupcake test, she doesn’t know how to grind, she’s a quitter, she’s a loser, she’s a flake.

I mean, what I am is someone who spent April thru August trying very hard not to die, and so yeah, I guess my grit got ground down, it’s hard to come back from that, I’m trying to have some compassion for myself, but also I really want to send something out to you all because it is one of my most fundamental beliefs about the world that my words can make a difference.

But, ugh, I hate all those words I just wrote and now I want to cry.

***

Let me try again, with lower standards this time.

I’m sitting now in a coffeeshop across from where we’ve been staying in NYC, and it’s not the best location for the moment due to the fact that they are loudly digging up the street, but another woman just came in as well, driven to this coffeeshop because the one she usually goes to has a gas leak and we are commiserating about the noise and the coffee shop guy closes the door for us to block out the noise — and — here we are, in community….

***

Last week I was walking back from the Soho Trader Joe’s and I tried to bum a cigarette off a nice woman I saw sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette. “Oh, I bummed this one,” she said apologetically. “I don’t let myself buy them anymore”. I laughed. “Me either,” I said. Another day I was sitting outside Penn Station and I watched a woman bum a cigarette off a guy sitting next to me. Three minutes later he turned to me and asked did I want one too. “hah, you saw me looking,” I said, “but no. I mean, yes, but no. But also I just think it’s heartwarming, the bumming of cigarettes.” He looked at me like I was a little daft, which I am. But the bumming of cigarettes is a microcosm of mutual aid, as is the provision of a lighter. In this paper I will —

And — community —

***

Speaking of community, speaking of mutual aid.

In late August, I started volunteering for my local food pantry. I show up and help unload trucks. Acorn squash, limes, diapers, soap. Carrots, lettuce, eggs, granola bars, milk. Ramen and canned tomatoes. I live in a town with a lot of wealth, but people are always lining up for the food pantry. For me, it is simple, straightforward work. It is physical, it is social, it is IRL.

I didn’t really used to think of a food pantry as political, but of course a food pantry is political. A food pantry declares that people should not have to go hungry in the midst of plenty. A food pantry is not trying to disrupt anything, turn a profit, address theoretical future existential risks to humanity. A food pantry is addressing current existential risks to humanity, to actually existing humans right in this minute, just as the Gaza flotillas have been trying to do. A food pantry does not think that poverty or hunger mean you are defective or immoral or lazy, it does not comment on these topics, it simply provides food.

Yes, I understand there are complexities to the operation of food pantries, but my role is simple: move the food. I like this simple role, one that does not require me to add links or mess with styles, make a slide deck, care about ARR or EBIDTA. I do not have to talk to a chatbot or a tech bro to do the work. I do not have to join the zoom, answer the Slack message, write the progress report. I just move the food.

~~~

If you have been reading the news the last few days, you might have noticed people writing ever more urgently about the food. That is because, while the (US) federal government has the money to continue to provide SNAP benefits in November, but they are choosing not to. 12% of US residents receive SNAP benefits. SNAP, for those who are not US-based or aren’t familiar with current terminology, provides cash for food.

Our government is choosing to deliberately starve the US population.

Other people have written about how cruel and fucked up this is, about the kind of evil people willing and eager to starve their own populations into submission. I won’t repeat them here. I will just, along with everyone else on the internet who gives a damn, tell you that you have before you an unbelievably simple and satisfying opportunity/obligation for the practice of mutual aid and the building of a community strong enough to stand against shameless cruelty: feed your neighbors.

The first and most obvious way to do this is to donate money to your local food bank and food pantry. In Boston this is the Greater Boston Food Bank and my local pantry is the Brookline Food Pantry. If all you do is give money, that is very fucking important, so don’t say “all I did was give money” and feel bad about it. Money buys food, and the food banks can buy more food per dollar than you can.

Also you can volunteer. As I described above, it is hard to find a more immediately feel-good way of spending your time than feeding people. Most importantly, THE PEOPLE GET FED!

Finally, there are other ways to help get people food. Food pantries can’t serve every hungry person, for all kinds of reasons.You might have a community fridge that you can drop food off at. You might get involved in a group that provides meals and other supplies to the unhoused. You might check with your local schools and libraries to see if there are opportunities to distribute food through those channels (even just classroom snacks can make a difference to students who aren’t getting enough food at home).

It’s evil to starve people, but we don’t have to let people starve.

***

Max and I went to No Kings in New York City. This seems like a million years ago now but that is because since then somehow half the White House has been demolished and we are starting a war with Venezuela and ICE is throwing more and more tear gas in the streets of Chicago and we are debating whether a man with a Nazi tattoo and some kind of fishy stories about that Nazi tattoo, a guy who also turns out to have worked for Blackwater, i.e. WAS A MERCENARY, is a suitable Democratic candidate for the Senate. (sidetone: read Tressie McMillan Cottom about hit, she always has a great take.) So much has happened since No Kings that if I hadn’t already started this newsletter last week, when the White House had not been mutilated, I might have entirely forgotten that No Kings happened at all.

It did happen, and it was huge, despite the poor media coverage. It was also a lot of fun. (Yes, we are allowed to have fun while protesting). I hand-rolled a poster from some spare cardboard and the sharpie I carry with me everywhere these days. The poster said “Absolutely the Fuck Not” and it was very popular amongst middle aged women at the protest. Apparently we’re all very angry.

Anyways here I am with my sign:

****

Also while we’ve been in NYC, friend.ai, which I will not link to, has been papering the city with ads, which the people of NYC then creatively defaced. friend.ai is a company that sells a little surveillance pendant you can wear to ensure that you lose all your actual friends. Last weekend the company did some promotional event in a park near where we are staying, which Max and I stumbled upon. Those of you who follow me on bluesky may have noticed that I have a lot of rage toward wearable surveillance tech.

Reader, I saw that friend.ai promo event and I lost my fucking head. There was a guy with a camera and a line of people waiting to yell at some poor person dressed up as the friend pendant. “What is this, do I get to yell about the surveillance tech?” I yelled. “Yes, absolutely,” someone told me. “Just a couple of waivers for you to sign.” “Waivers?” I yelled. “This is a fucking promotional event? Fuck that! Fuck your surveillance tech! People who wear this shit are unfuckable losers!” I yelled, directly at the camera, while giving the double finger.

Max casually walked away to the other end of the park, like he didn’t know me, which he probably at that moment wished were true. I started walking away after I was done with the yelling, but the cameraman followed me. “I’m filming a documentary” he said, “and I’d like to use this footage.”

I got the documentary filmmaker’s number and said I’d think about it. I did think about it. But in the end I told the guy I didn’t think you could make a documentary about a 23 year old tech founder and his dumbass startup without it becoming a hagiography, and I had no desire to play a bit part in a hagiography as the wild-eyed profanity-spewing enraged middle-aged woman, even though I am, in fact a wild-eyed profanity-spewing enraged middle aged woman.

***

Finally, again, I know it was a month ago now that Ezra Klein wrote a completely dumb essay about Charlie Kirk and then had Ta-Nehisi Coates on his podcast (can we get rid of podcasts, by the way? PLEASE???) so that Coates could explain to him how very wrong he was and Klein could utterly fail to understand his point. But I keep thinking about that conversation (I read the transcript, because I don’t listen to podcasts — gift link)

In it, Klein asks Coates why “we” are losing, and Coates matter of factly says sometimes you lose. Losing doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong or, importantly, that your values are wrong because they are out of step with the values currently in ascendance. The values currently in ascendance are cruelty and punishment, exclusion, hate, degradation. They suck.

Anyways, here’s part of the exchange:

Then let me flip that question a bit. Why are we losing?

We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.

See, that feels very fatalistic to me.

It doesn’t feel fatalistic to me. It feels like the truth. Let me express what I mean.

I’m Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m the writer, I’m the individual, right? But I am part of something larger, and I’ve always felt myself as part of something larger. I have a tradition, I have ancestry, I have heritage. What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with, and much of what I do is built on what other people did before them.

Then, after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it, and hopefully, it’s in a better place. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s the history in fact. And then my progeny, they pick it up, and they keep it going.

I can't get this exchange out of my head.

When you read or listen to a man like Coates talking to a man like Klein, it’s immediately obvious which of those two people is more admirable. Coates clearly has wildly more moral clarity, understanding of history, and courage. Coates is grounded; Klein is not. Coates has really thought through what matters to him; Klein has spent his career scrambling to say stuff to stay relevant and feel important.

I keep going back to this exchange because there has never been a more critical time for each of us to clarify our values and to reach for courage. To access the courage of our convictions, we will need to pay more attention to the people who are obviously already doing that, like Coates, and less attention to the ones flailing around trying to make sure that they “win”, like Klein.

***

I started this essay by saying I don’t have any idea what the fuck I am doing. Here we are at the end of the essay, and I see that this is not true.

Sure, in the day-to-day sense it is frequently true: I wake up and try to figure out how to spend my day, I start a neighborhood chat group but I don’t know if it will work or if I am doing it right, I take a drawing class and can’t even decide if I like it or not. I wait for Max at the entrance of a camera store in New York, and while waiting I start talking to the guy at the door, and he tells me it’s a grand opening and there will be prosecco later, so I return to the store for prosecco and I meet a woman there who I think is cool and we exchange numbers and go to a wine bar and then I have maybe a new friend, but maybe not, because I don’t have any idea what the fuck I am doing.

But in a much deeper sense, I know exactly what I care about, and what I’m trying to do. I am trying to orient my energy and creativity and labor towards the moral ground on which I stand, I am trying to live up to my own values, I’m trying to build courage and clarity and strength, for myself and my community. I’m trying to show the fuck up to this terrifying historical moment, with bravery, not cowardice.

Just because it’s difficult and confusing, just because I’m not sure exactly how to do what I’m trying to do, doesn’t mean that I don’t know what that is.

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In the meantime I was gonna write a whole issue about channeling my FUCK NO I HATE IT energy in these times, and then I realized I had actually already done so, back in March. You might be new here or you might not read everything that hits your inbox (!), so maybe you didn’t read it. Or, like me, maybe sometimes you read something and then immediately forget about it. Anyways, I’m sending this one again, but with a few new intro paragraphs, like this one right here, and maybe I’ll add a new closer too. Who knows. I haven’t gotten to that part yet.

Before I reprint my March essay, I also want to make crystal clear that when I say “hater” I mean I unabashedly hate certain things, like AI, and if you would like to read more about what I hate about AI this person already wrote a great essay about it, called, appropriately, “I am an A.I. Hater.” Really, it’s very good, click through and read it. I’ll wait.

….

You didn’t click through and read it, did you? I understand. I hope you at least opened a tab that will haunt you for several weeks until your computer spontaneously restarts, delivering you from your unopened tabs.

Anyways, here’s the last paragraph of the thing you didn’t read; a truly lyrical tribute to haterdom:

I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity.

While we’re on the topic of celebrating our humanity, when I say I hate things, I definitely exclude people. I would never ever hate a person. I would not say I hate a person, even if the person I said I hated again and again said things that made me think that had we met, they would hate me. I would never, ever hate a person who was “practicing politics the right way”, certainly, even though since I don’t have a job I am not in danger of being fired.

I mean, maybe I could say I hate Travis Kelce FOR Taylor Swift, but only because I am a hardcore Gaylor conspiracist (not to be confused with groyper, that’s something else entirely) and really wanted her to get with some other brilliant woman, such as, I dunno, Meredith Whittaker (yes, I’m projecting here). But I don’t hate Travis Kelce himself.

So, we’re clear: I would never hate a person. I hate things, and I often hate ideas, especially ones that seem bad to me. For example, I heard an idea recently, I can’t remember who said it, it was right after Taylor Swift got engaged, but someone had the idea that she should shut up and submit to her husband now that she was getting married. Ditch feminism, become a JD Vance supporter, I think was the idea. I hate that idea. I hate that idea because, as I said before, I think Taylor Swift should ditch Travis Kelce and get with Meredith Whittaker, or I dunno, maybe Renee Rapp? Billie Eilish? I’d ship that. But I also hate that idea because I hate the patriarchy, and that idea sounds like a lot of patriarchal trash to me.

I guess I also hate the idea because it implies that the person who had the idea thought they could just boss around and belittle other people, had the idea that they could just say awful shit all the time and make a whole career of it. And I hate that idea.

….

I feel like the person who had those ideas had maybe a lot of other bad ideas that I hated. But that can’t be right. I heard that person was a True American Patriot, so their ideas must all have been really good ideas that I loved, not ideas I hated. Or ideas that if I didn’t love them, I respected them, as evidence of Good Debating, doing politics the right way, all that kind of stuff. So I must be misremembering all the bad ideas, somehow. It’s all a little bit of a blur, or, like, a hole in my memory, almost… what was that book about memory holes? Seems relevant, but I can’t quite remember why…1

…

Okay that was actually quite a long preamble to this essay, so I guess it counts as revised rather than reprinted. No, it’s reprinted “with a new introduction”. Go me! It’s amazing what I can get done when I’m not paralyzed by suicidality 24/7!

++++ THE REPRINT PART STARTS HERE, YOU CAN TELL BECAUSE IT’S NOT CURRENTLY MARCH. If you want to skip past it just scroll down. +++++

It’s March, I’m miserable, and whatever it is you want me to do, I can tell you what my answer will be: I would prefer not to.

I hate everything. I hate every email and ad I get. Most of my emails are ads anyways. I hate instagram, I hate bluesky. I hate my body. I hate all my clothes. I hate the clutter in my household, I hate the frozen dirty snow still left on the streets. I hate my family obligations. I keep getting angry at people I know, family, friends, even people I know only casually, for not having their shit together more than I do, which is not at all.

I am angry at everything. I get an email from The New York Times Cooking (the only part of the nytimes I look at anymore) and the subject line says “This bright, easy soup is absolutely perfect for right now” and I think fuck you, no it’s not. Who are you to tell me what’s absolutely perfect right now. That soup is far too cheerful, look at it, all orange and creamy, with a swirl of paprika on top. What does that soup know of oppression, or despair? Fuck that soup.

I’m angry that when I opened up the times cooking app to find something for dinner that was not a bright easy soup absolutely perfect for right now, the app wanted me to enable notifications and sign up for more email newsletters about viral celeriac casserole recipes and succulent sheet-pan chicken and vegetable meals. Fuck you app, stop trying to get me to app more. I already paid for you. Just shut up.

I’m trying to help my younger child acquire a real ID, and it’s like some fucking escape room puzzle. Fuck that. I don’t want to. It’s too hard, and it’s deliberately too hard, to dispossess people, to limit their movements, to make them feel insecure and second or third class. This kid’s address at birth is the same as their address now and why do I have to find 3 pieces of paper dated in the last 60 days to confirm they are who they say they are and they live where they have always lived. Fuck that.

Most of the emails I receive these days are ads and I hate them all. If you call a product “must have” a “outfit essential”, “on trend”, “timeless”, “sustainable” “luxe”, “performance”, or “life-changing” I do not want it. If you say there’s a fresh drop or a VIP sale, or a can’t miss one, fuck off. I hate all my own clothes but I hate all the clothes being sold to me too, with their barrel legs and mint greens. I don’t want to wear mint green, and barrel legs make me look fat and old. Fuck that.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but a lot of them are on substack, which I also use, and I hate substack. I hate the constant admonitions to like and share. I hate the subscribe or upgrade or gift button every four paragraphs. I hate that substack offers free gift subscriptions that can only be redeemed in the substack app, which I refuse to download because I don’t want to get trapped inside yet another platform. I also do not want to be part of encouraging my readers to get stuck inside another platform. I don’t want to upsell. I don’t want to nudge. I don’t want to make a course or a drip campaign. Of course I want readers but I don’t want to coerce them. I don’t even want to nudge them. I would prefer not to.

I hate my body and I hate every product I’m advertised that purports to help me get a body it insists I would hate less. There is probably no body I would hate less than this one. No, I don’t need you to tell me how great I look or strong or powerful or sexy I look. I have Instagram for that, but I also hate Instagram. I hate how it’s always urging me to do fun things with Meta AI. Substack also wants me to do fun things with AI that I do not want to do. I want every app I use to rip out the AI. I hate Apple for turning on Apple intelligence by default as though I do not have any choice but to get with the picture about AI. I do not want to get with the AI generated picture. I want all the generative ai systems in the world to be unplugged, today, and their data centers taken off the grid, so that we are no longer using up energy in service to slop. Please take your “start drafting with AI” prompt and shove it. I would prefer not to.

I hate every green button. I want to press the gray button and the tiny almost invisible x that only appears after you’ve already been forced to look at something someone wants you to buy. I do not want to add shipping insurance or pay in four interest-free payments. I hate your free shipping over 99 dollars offer. I hate when you tell me how much money I can save by buying now, during your once a year sale. Must-shop sale. Must-have mules! I do not want your must-have mules, your sweat-wicking t-shirt, your timeless luxe cashmere turtleneck. Fuck that. I would prefer not to.

I hate your curated experiences and your luxury wellness resorts. I hate yoga retreats, trance breathing workshops, VIP coaching packages. I hate longevity tech. If you are the 23 year old owner of a startup that makes a clever product to help me kick my phone addiction, but it turns out to be almost intolerably buggy on my iPhone, I hate you for selling it to me without warning that it is intolerably buggy on my iPhone. I know you were probably counting on me losing it or forgetting to ask for a return label in time to return it. You were counting on me being so beaten down by finding the gray button or the almost invisible link or the late-appearing x that I give up on trying to return the buggy product. You and the entire rest of the world trying to sell me things are counting on that, my basic acquiescence to shitty patterns and dark UX and buggy web apps. You didn’t reckon on all this hate. You didn’t realize how deeply I have become a bartleby, how stubborn I have become in the face of an entire world that is designed to maximize profit, to steal my time, my energy, my attention, and my money. You didn’t understand how even the word Product makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth these days.

Product. Reach. Maximize. 10x. Profit. Growth. Engagement. Recurring Revenue. LLMs. The Blockchain. Upgrade. VIP. Customer. Fuck that. I would prefer not to.

I resent my every interaction with an automated system designed to frustrate or repel me from accomplishing whatever it is I want to do and instead to herd me along whatever path it’s been designed to herd me along, not the path it wants, because an automated system wants nothing, but the path that PEOPLE, human people! put in place in order to maximize the extraction of value from me, mash me up into money. This entire system we have going here is one villainous machine with giant suction cups all over our bodies, sucking out our very lives. Mashing us up into money for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and a few dozen other men. I hate it. I am not here on this earth to be mashed up into money for the sake of Capital. I would prefer not to, and when I mean I would prefer not to, I mean I absolutely fucking refuse to, I’d like to see you try, I am having absolutely none of it.

Call me an ill-tempered luddite. I don’t care. The luddites were actually really fucking cool, I’d be honored to stand in the reflected glow of the luddites. Tell me how Tech has done so many beautiful good things in the world. I will point you to the wanton destruction of our federal government, the cruelty, the carelessness, the violence at the heart of the project the executive branch is currently engaged in, and you will say yes, yes, i see that this is terrible, but surely this is not the fault of the technology itself? And I will say of course not, the tech itself is almost a distraction, the entire worldview of the industry is the problem, the moral bankruptcy of the idea that a small number of Great Men will save us with their especially clever brains and their especially entrepreneurial instincts, just let them automate it all.

You think I will consent to all your cookies because it is easier, but you have not reckoned on my hatred and my stubborness. I do not consent. You think I will fall into line about AI and finally enable it on something or other, but I am Bartleby the Scrivener and I would fucking prefer not to.

I understand, of course, that I should be building something beautiful instead of hating everything, or so I am told by so many of the newsletters that are offering me bold imaginaries of the future and five quick actions I can take today to fight fascism. I am aware that hating everything and stubbornly preferring not to is an unpopular position these days. Too negative. What are you building, though, Amy? What is YOUR VISION for the future?

I do have a dream, and in my dream, lots of us have jackhammers and we are using them on all the asphalt parking lots all over our city and we are planting kitchen gardens and pollinator gardens and drainage gardens and food forests where the parking lots used to be. I do have a dream, and in it, 132 days of the year are festival days and on those days we don sequined dresses and sneakers and we eat and dance all day long, and all the kids are running around playing in the pollinator gardens and the food forests and nobody is scolding the parents for not knowing precisely where their children are at every hour of the day.

Yes, I’ve got a motherfucking dream, and in it, I never have to talk to a chatbot ever again, I talk to a person, and we joke about the weather while helping each other get something kind of annoying done. I have a dream, and it is not to die every day by the thousand cuts of living in a society that cares only for profit, not to spend my precious time dodging upsells and scammers and bots and advertisers and businesses that want my data. My dream is not to be stuck inside of boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes, looking for the grayed out x, not to perceive my entire society, the entire internet, as an escape room I’m desperate to escape from, because instead of a thousand cuts or suction cups or mosquito bites there’s a there there, a world beyond working, getting, spending, extracting.

So yeah, this present situation: I would prefer not to, with a level of refusal that is increasingly approaching what the psychiatrists would call Pathological Demand Avoidance, but which feels to me like a stubborn resistance forged into steel and made stronger with every demand that I accept the cookies, return to my abandoned shopping cart, fill out this survey, enable notifications, watch this ad, add this product too.

I do not want to be thrown in a blender and mashed up into money.

My dreams are bigger than your goddamn subscription service or your luxury at-home magnesium IV infusion service.

Fuck you, no.

I want love and courage. I want truth, democracy, and solidarity. I want to touch grass and talk to humans. I will find none of these things on your internet, Horatio, I must look in heaven and on earth for them.

anyways, find me in IRL if you can. Or send me an email. I still read emails from humans. Substack wants you to comment rather than reply, but I would rather you reply than comment.

Good luck out there. Remember that sometimes stubborn refusal is valuable in itself. Or, at least, I hope so, because that’s pretty much what I have right now.

+++++ THE REPRINT ENDS HERE+++

Anyways, we still need the luck here in September, which is .. not less weird or upsetting than March. We still need refusal, we need noncompliance, we need malicious compliance, we need “oops, I meant to press send but I deleted that instead” energy, and we need mockery and ridicule and we need The Onion (seriously, subscribe!).

I’m gonna work on that Franco thing now. If you want to be ahead of the game on that one, grab a bottle of bubbly and stick it in your fridge. You’ll find out why later.

PS I’m thinking of starting a print edition, if you’d love mail from me, please reply to this email and tell me so.

PPS Fine I will leave one subscribe button here. But I hate it.

I hate this subscribe button

Last Thursday I got back from Vermont. The night before I slept in a treehouse at a hiker hostel south of Woodstock, and then a shuttle driver I’d arranged for —uncharacteristically — mostly I get around in Vermont through bumming rides from people I know or hitchhiking from people I don’t know — the shuttle driver came at 9am and took me to the bus station in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where I got on the Dartmouth Coach to South Station, and when I got to South Station I walked down the stairs, then up the stairs, then along a train platform, then inside, and down several more staircases, and then I got to the subway. I went on the red line to Park Street and took the C train to Coolidge Corner, and I got off the trolley there and walked three blocks and then sat down on a bench outside a church across from my street, and there I sat.

I took a Klonopin and sat there for 20 minutes or so, trying to be ready to go home again. Then I went home. It was July 31st and I had successfully avoided July in the city.

&&&&

What am I doing here at home? Dunno. What will I do? Dunno. I’m more lost than I’ve been in years, who knows why, though we could all make guesses, offer hypotheses, confidently assert theories as though they are facts.

I’m lost because my younger kid just graduated high school. I’m lost because I have no job and do not like the job I did for decades anymore. I’m lost because of the fascism, because of the genocide, because of the climate crisis. I’m lost because of perimenopause, because the planets are misaligned, because of the air quality, because of too many microplastics, because of some inflammatory process no one understands. Maybe you’re lost because of B Vitamins, have you checked your B vitamins, my therapist asks, grasping for straws.

Actually, I know why I’m lost, it turns out. I found that out while I was bumming around Vermont, but I don’t much like the answer.

I’m lost because I’m not really lost, I seem to be going nowhere in particular because I am going somewhere very particular, I pretend I am lost because then I do not have to admit where it is I am going, because I’m not supposed to be going there.

&&&&

If you want something very badly but you’re not allowed to have it, not allowed to be it, not allowed to go after it, then anything else you do will look scattered, unfocused, passionless, empty. You are unconsciously trying to go toward the thing that you want, while consciously trying to make yourself go anywhere else at all. But the body knows where it’s trying to go. You can try to drag it some other direction, like an unruly toddler, but it’s exhausting. You can get your body to pretend to go some direction other than the one it wants to go, but even if it sort of does that, it lacks conviction. It’s an imitation, a bad play.

Sometimes this is something we want or need sexually, or something about our identity we’ve been deeply denying, or we are in the wrong job or the wrong marriage or the wrong body. In those cases, if we are willing to face the hard thing and make a big change and risk a kind of metaphorical death, we can actually head toward the thing we want. We might get there.

But that’s not the case for me.

I spent five weeks bumming around Vermont this summer, backpacking and hitchhiking and sitting around at hostels and cabins and borrowed ski condos and at the tops of mountains on the decks of ski huts. But the whole time, I was dragging an unruly toddler around with me, DO THIS FUN THING INSTEAD, LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL THE MOSS IS, LIFE IS A GIFT, while the unruly toddler who knows exactly what she wants is trying to yeet herself out of existence.

There is nothing right now that I want more than death. I do not want this to be true, but it is. Naturally anything else I do lacks conviction. I am, as Buffy sang in her musical, only going through the motions. I cannot give myself my heart’s desire. I just drag myself along anywhere else but where I want to go, hoping if I can hold out long enough I will stumble across something else that I want more than I want death, or that eventually death will lose its death grip on me again, for a while. This isn’t wishful thinking, really. I’ve slipped out of death’s death grip plenty of times before, in fact, every time.

But it’s a curious trick. I deny and distract myself, I do the things I know I should. I have a walk. I go to a yoga class. I clean the sink. I look at the sunset. I write. It feels empty, of course, it feels meaningless. It certainly doesn’t feel right. It’s not hopeful or life-affirming or nourishing. It seems to have no heft or reality, even to me. I’m just holding the line. Or — here’s the game of thrones reference! — I’m like Hodor, a giant man who could only speak one word, “Hodor”, and whose entire life purpose turned out to rest in a single plot-critical act, holding the door against the army of the dead. “Hold the Door!” people yelled, and Hodor did.

I’ve held the door before.

Anyways, I know I look like I’m not up to much of anything, but I am.

I’m holding the door.

PS if you want to help me hold the door, you should know that I don’t need arguments, or exhortations, they will do me no good. I know the arguments, I have made them all myself. What I need is distraction. I need James Marsters in a trench coat, I need bad romance novels and stinky cheese and patio drinking. I need Jazz hands. Jazz hands are no substitute for joy, life purpose, actual desire, appetite, dopamine, a zest for life. But they do help hold the door.

Every day I wake up tired, and also wired. In a dream last night I am riding a rollercoaster without the safety harness, I am trying to shit in a doorless bathroom stall while some leading man in his twenties is trying to talk to his girlfriend, who is standing in front of me, partially blocking his view of me straining.

I know it probably doesn’t look like it but I do try to partially block this view, the one of me straining. But then eventually I want to be seen. I want people to understand why I said I didn’t want to meet up for that drink after all, am not coming to that party, can’t make it to the protest this time around — why I am leaving, soon, as soon as I can, for the forest. Why that’s necessary.

This morning I glanced at the news about Israel and Iran, skimmed the articles about the No Kings Protests, and fully read an read an interview with Miranda July:

We weren’t looking at a divorce manual, in other words, but “permission to be undone”. No wonder some people were angry. That is an incredibly dangerous licence, socially. A lot of things really rely on women who’ll hold it together for others, regardless of their own feelings.”

Of course, I am constantly coming undone, and in a Buddhist sense that’s always true for everyone all the time and also okay, it’s the recognition of this state of undone-ness or the allowing of it that is enlightenment itself. So why do I not feel Enlightened? Seems unfair.

It’s really the best thing for everyone that I go to the woods again soon, because as much as I don’t want to put it this way, because I think I’m a narcissist with Munchausen syndrome who got electroconvulsive therapy for the attention, it feels again like leave or die. Every day I ask myself what I want more than I want death, today, and there’s a enclosed shelter up on The Long Trail you can only get to by walking, with a little porch you can sit on, and it overlooks a beaver pond and I remember the sounds of the frogs croaking there, and I want to go there again more than I want death.

I feel such powerful shame about leaving, however, that dying sometimes seems like the easier choice. If I leave, I am still exposed to the knowledge of peoples’ possible anger with me, their disappointment. I can still ruminate on their needs that I have declined to meet, by leaving. If I’m dead, I leave more anger, more unmet need, but I do not have to feel it myself.

Guilt is a wonderful instrument of control. I must hold it together, regardless of my own feelings, for other people. Whether they actually want or need me around, whether they are or are not perfectly fine with my going, is irrelevant, actually, because whatever they themselves feel, I have burdened myself with the feelings I imagine they might be having about me. I felt abandoned when my parents left me as a young adult to go sailing, therefore my kids will feel abandoned, therefore they will be angry with me, therefore leaving is selfish, therefore it would be simpler to die.1

Yes, I understand this logic is unbelievably flawed, it is a fucking abomination of thinking, it is so obviously incorrect. That’s the demon in me, I guess, mining the rich veins of society’s misogyny, already twisted, so it can twist them up even more, to torment me.

In Foucault’s terms, I am disciplining myself, but, like, waayyyyy too hard, more than the usual amount. And if I’m not careful I’ll discipline myself right into the grave.

&&&&&

I’ve had to stay off the socials, tried to stop texting angry missives about politics to people I love, tried not to reply to customer support emails complaining about AI support agents.

I saw my doctor yesterday (a new one) and I didn’t bite his head off for trying to use an AI listening agent to write his clinical notes, I just smiled apologetically and refused to give permission. I also didn’t fill out any of the screening forms, I declined to answer any questions about drug or alcohol use, wouldn’t step on the scale. “Will you at least tell me about your family history?” asked the new doctor. “Everyone lived forever, even the ones with congestive heart failure and diabetes and dementia.” I said. “That’s great!” he said. I don’t know this new doc yet so I didn’t make a joke about why, for me personally, it is not great.

Our health center switched EHR providers since the last time I was there, and the data was a mess, so we spent some time cleaning it up. Meds I hadn’t taken in years had shown up out of nowhere, and diagnoses that I don’t remember getting. I did not have myeloproliferative disorder in 2012, I said to him. I had a lot of shit wrong with me in 2012, but that was not one of the things. Also, I said, I do have bipolar disorder, but it is not type 1, it is best categorized as type 2.2

And it’s pretty stable on the seroquel? he asked. I laughed. “No, it’s extremely unstable, but what are you gonna do?” I had already mentioned that I had a psychopharmacologist, so he didn’t look alarmed. If I’d filled in the depression screener, he probably would have been highly alarmed, but I hadn’t.

&&&&&

The other day I went to a concert and saw Sophie Hunter. Her most famous song is CVNT, and it’s a lot of fun, you should go listen to it. But the song that’s been stuck in my head the last few days is called Mic Check. Here are some of the lyrics:

Bitch I still do it for the vine (Yeah)
I do it for the personal essay
I'm 'bout to write (It's a memoir, so)
I do it cause my personality is bad vibes
I don't like myself and
I don't like you either,

And this:

No I'm not doing well
I'm not looking good
If I'm just being honest
I got one foot in the grave and
I got one in the comments

Not sure what Sophie Hunter’s DSM diagnosis might be but this sure sounds like a classic mixed state to me. Wikipedia says

A mixed affective state, formerly known as a mixed-manic or mixed episode, has been defined as a state wherein features and symptoms unique to both depression and (hypo)mania, including episodes of anguish, despair, self doubt, rage, excessive impulsivity and suicidal ideation, sensory overload, racing thoughts, heightened irritability, decreased "need" for sleep and other symptoms of depressive and manic states occur either simultaneously or in very short succession.

If you think this sounds like hell, you would be correct. Like the woman said, “[M]y personality is bad vibes.” It’s not fun for anyone, the person who feels this way or the people they are around.

It’s particularly absurd for me to ruminate on how I’m letting other people down by leaving for the forest again. Nobody who has ever had to live with me in a city in July wants to live with me in a city in July. Or, let’s be honest, anywhere. July Amy is the worst version of Amy, no contest.

&&&&&

A lot of people I know are at protests today, and I’m so glad. Me, I meant to go, I did, I meant to go to Boston’s combination protest march and pride parade, and then to a party, and when I woke up I felt so terrible that I knew I could do neither of those things.

Instead I am going through the bathroom drawers gathering up the sample sized tubes of toothpaste from the dentist, to donate, and crying.

Instead I am ordering venison protein bars, helping my younger child with a college-related administrative issue that has no joke already taken up 10 hours of my time, worrying about the cats, crying.

Instead I’m doing my laundry, filling out the return form for some glasses I ordered, cleaning out the refrigerator, crying.

Instead I’ve been digging my nails into my arm, letting the cat dig her nails into my arm, watching the goddamn knives, as I do. Crying.

&&&&&

I think you either understand or don’t how a knife can speak to a person, but maybe it’s only because I understand the language the knives speak that I also understand the language the mountains speak, and the moss. Or maybe it is possible to love the world so much you can’t hear knives whispering destruction at all. I wouldn’t know, but I do know life and death are Janus-faced, they cannot be pulled apart, whatever the tech bros want to believe about the possibility of their own immortality.

Maybe everyone understands the language of knives, but the knives just talk to some of us more than they talk to others.

&&&&&

Wednesday I drove out to western Mass with my pack and did a one-night shakedown hike to make sure all my equipment worked and remind myself why I should keep my base weight as low as possible. I hiked up a small mountain to a spot overlooking a valley to the east. On the trail I found the wing of a luna moth. In the morning the sunrise woke me. I was so calm up there. I was mostly okay. It was coming back that ruined me again.

&&&&&

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Sexton, lately I’ve been looking old, lately I’ve been losing my mind. What else is new? People are concerned, they tell me, and I shrug. No shit. But what the fuck do you want me to do? I have obligations, I’m trying to meet them, and when I’ve met as many of them as I can, I will go back to the woods.

Anne Sexton’s last book is called Live or Die.3 One of the poems in it is called “Wanting to Die”. I read part of it to my therapist:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,   
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

I know I sound crazy, I know I sound fatalistic, I know everyone’s sick of my suicidal ideation, most of all me, I’m sick of it. I’ve already outlived Sexton, she died at 45. Maybe I never ask why, you probably don’t either, you’ve heard enough from me by now to understand the general answer to that question, why. Because a bitch gets tired, goddammit. Because a bitch is in pain. Because if I do not leave myself the escape hatch of death, I’ll feel trapped, and when I feel trapped, I dream of death even more.

So I don’t ask why.

There is a question I can still ask, though: When?

I learned the answer to that question, oddly enough, from Game of Thrones. A fencing teacher from Bravos told it to Arya Stark at the end of Season 1.

“What do we say to the God of Death?” he asks.

And he tells her the answer, too: “Not today.”

&&&&&

It is true this is a dark time for me. I’m sorry to everyone who is sick of hearing about it, worried about me, bored. I’m sorry to everyone I’ve been rude to or gone off on some rant for no reason. I’m sorry for my tone of voice, I’m sorry for sighing so much, I’m sorry for not putting a brave face on. I’m sorry for all the crying and the cancellations. Death keeps knocking on my door, and it’s so fucking exhausting.

But just because Death knocks daily at my door doesn’t mean I have to answer it.

Because even though I’m pretty sure I’m guilty, Death hasn’t found a judge to sign off on its warrant. I know my rights! I don’t have to open the door.

“Not today, Death,” I say.

Every day I start anywhere and do what I can

Today I practice remembering, I allow myself to feel grief.

Today I remember that Mahmoud Khalil is still in an ICE prison in Louisiana and every day he is there is another day he is not with his newborn child.

Today I remember the medics found shot in the chest, hands zip-tied behind them, buried in a mass grave in Gaza along with their ambulances.

Today I remember Breonna Taylor, killed by police as they broke into her apartment while she was sleeping.

Why these three terrible things, why not others, why not all? 

Because only a god could count every shard of destruction, and I am not a god. 
I can only hold three griefs in my heart today without freezing, and I refuse to freeze. 

Every day I start anywhere and do what I can. Holding three true and devastating facts in the mind, refusing to forget. 

On my walk today I watched the sidewalk and the lampposts and the parking meters and the walls.  I saw a pink sticker on the sidewalk that said JD Vance killed the pope. On a lamppost I saw a recruiting poster for the Revolutionary Communists of America, above a poster with the phone number for the local ICE watch. On a parking meter, above a sticker of a flower, a heart-shaped sticker that said Palestine Will Be Free. I saw stickers for Extinction Rebellion, I saw ACAB spray-painted on a wall. 

Every sticker, each poster, every piece of graffiti was put there by a person who believes the world can change, that things do not have to be as they are, that they can be better. 

Every day they start anywhere and do what they can. A sticker here, a poster there. 

Yesterday I met up with a friend at a bar and we talked about an essay by an activist named Kelly Hayes. I drank 2 margaritas and ate 2 tacos and we read pieces of the essay out loud to each other, and we talked about what it meant. 

Every day we start anywhere and do what we can. We smile at someone on the street, we give a man a dollar, we read something for ourselves, we put the hotline number in our phone. We put the date of the protest in our calendar, we make some art, we write our own words. We meet for coffee to talk about the work. 

Every day we start anywhere and do what we can.

The weather was as spring-perfect as it ever is, 70 and sunny, windy enough that I needed a layer in the shade. After I returned the shoes, I went back to the Riverway and tried to sit down leaning against a big oak tree surrounded by moss, but a goose made it very clear that he wanted me to get off his lawn. I settled on a bench instead, and tried to read.

Every few minutes I would be overcome by a feeling that is almost impossible to actually describe, some combination of horror, dread, despair, panic, and doom. Doom, like Poe’s raven has come for me, like I left a beating heart under a floorboard, like I let the Red Death into my castle, like my time is running out. It comes in waves like nausea does, hours and hours of doom nausea, interrupting whatever I’m doing, trying to enjoy a beautiful sunny day next to a river.

I would look up from the book and listen to the wind in the trees and watch the shadows of the trees moving on the grass, and the reflections in the water, and my eyes would fill with tears. I could see the world was beautiful, I could see how beautiful the light was, and the shade, and I could hear the insects buzzing and the geese with their feet slapping against the asphalt like flip flops, and the sounds the geese made tearing out little bits of grass from the ground.

I was fully present, you couldn’t say otherwise, but I could feel no joy.

***

The bench I was on was under a tree and all the time I sat there, every few moments, an inchworm would land on my body and inch its perfect little way across me. The inchworms were rappelling down from the tree on tiny little almost invisible threads, headed to whatever the next stage of their lives was.

Every time I saw another inchworm on me I would watch it for a little while and then gently put it somewhere else, somewhere more congenial to its survival than my body. And I could see that this was also beautiful, the inchworms and my attempts to save their tiny lives, set them better on their way, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt doom instead.

***

The problem with a beautiful day when I feel like this is that the day seems to mock me. It reminds me that even when the conditions for joy or satisfaction or peace are auspicious, sometimes I will only feel doom.

I remember how many days I have already lost this way, beautiful days I could not enjoy, and then I look ahead — I know I shouldn’t, I can’t help myself — to all the beautiful days in my future that will also be blighted by doom. This only makes me feel worse, of course, and then on top of that I add guilt, like I’m deliberately rejecting the bounty set before me. I feel this guilt because even though this can’t possibly be willful, the way nausea is not willful, it still seems like it must be willful, since the alternative is that it is not willful, and if it not under my control then I can do nothing about it, I can’t fix it, I can only live through it.

Live through this, I think to myself, and when the doom nausea fades back to blankness, I go back to my book. When it comes again I look back up at the beautiful world, like a dream I can’t get to, a paradise from which I am barred, and I breathe through it, and cry, and then when it fades I go back to my book. When I look back up everything is so shining and miraculous it hurts, it feels sinister around the edges, it feels wrong, uncannily so, but it isn’t the world that is wrong, it is me.

***

Well, lots about the world is wrong too. It is a strange thing, to know that so much of what is happening in this world is wrong, is horrifying, is obscenities and obscenities, is fascism and genocide, is secret police kidnapping people off the streets — and also to know that if all of those things could be fixed, instantaneously, I would still be sitting on a bench next to a river on a beautiful day, overwhelmed by doom.

***

I am not sure why I am telling this.

I tell it because the alternative is not to tell it and that alternative is worse. I tell it because telling a story passes the time, and the trick to living through this kind of moment I’m in is mostly that: to pass the time.

I tell it because to spin my pain into words is to make of it an almost invisible thread down which, perhaps, I can rappel myself into the future, land somewhere besides death, at least for a little while.

I tell it so as to keep inching my tiny way across the vastness of a world I do not understand, buffeted by forces I cannot control, trusting in luck to get me by and knowing luck is not much of a thing to trust in.

Do the inchworms trust in luck? Do they trust in a human gently showing them to the ground? Probably they don’t, but I like to think of them that way, anyways.

I tell it because there are people in the world who are attempting to erase every word a woman ever wrote, every thought we ever had, every true experience we ever tried to tell. So that all that is left to women (depending on the color of their skin, of course) is to be a tradwife, or an enforcer, or a servant, or enslaved.

If we want the humans of the future to be able to imagine anything else at all, we will have to write faster than they can erase.

***

In service to that goal, I’ve been working on a book about the thru-hike I did last summer, about what it was like and why I did it and how it changed me and what I learned. It has been rough going, as books, I am told, usually are. A couple weeks ago, when I started to feel so terrible that I began to think about suicide every day, I stopped working on the book because I judged that I could not afford to make myself feel even worse.

Maybe that was the right thing to do and maybe it wasn’t. (It’s not always clear, in depression, what will make it better or worse.) I said of course it was just a pause, and that’s what I intend it to be, but you can’t tell the future. In part I hope to keep working on the book, to trick myself into it by writing these essays instead. We will see.

***

Meanwhile, I am getting ready to go back on the trail I did last summer, to do it again. This is why I was buying a new pair of trail runners (that I had to exchange for a non-defective pair). Everyone (i.e. Max, whose opinion is the only one besides mine that counts here) agrees there is no benefit to anyone for me to be in the city in July. So I’ll go to the woods.

I’ll start from the north this time and walk south, to Killington. This is not the whole trail, it won't be a proper thru-hike, but at Killington the Long Trail joins up with the Appalachian Trail and gets more crowded and less remote, and I don’t feel like repeating that part. Still, it’s 175 miles or so, a good long walk in the woods.

Maybe when I come back I’ll know more what the book is supposed to be about. Probably I won’t, because I did not come back from last year’s hike knowing any of the answers to the questions I had last year. I don’t know why this year would be different.

But also, answers are really not what I seek out there.

The mountains don’t have answers, they just are.

***

The other day someone asked me a complicated question: if your shadow were to gain consciousness and start a cult in your name, what would be the first rule of the cult? I said that the first rule of my shadow’s cult would be don’t start a fucking cult.

My shadow does not want a cult, I said, it wants only one thing: my death.

***

Sometimes I notice that over the internet a stranger will say something that makes me think they have forgotten they are not talking to a chatbot. As if my words, whatever I have said, do not come from a conscious being, but exist only in response to theirs, to further their goals or comfort their own anxious hearts.

Another reason to keep writing, then: because I am not a chatbot, and I do not exist merely to serve someone else’s needs.

***

Another day recently someone said with approval that I seemed “active”. They did not mean active like activist, they only meant not sedentary, or sporty, or fit, or invested in healthy living.

I do not think that not being sedentary is a hobby or an interest, as they seemed to believe, and I hate the word active when used in this way.

I am not active, I responded. I’m just in a situationship with some moss that unfortunately happens to live pretty high up in the mountains.

***

It’s not just the moss, of course. There’s the lichen, and the slugs, and the mushrooms, and the trees. There’s the song of the hermit thrush, which a fellow hiker last year said made the sound of a portal opening itself up. So that to walk along the trail was to walk through one portal after another. I like that too.

I also like the emptiness out there, and by emptiness I don’t mean that it’s empty, I mean the emptiness I find in myself. I never felt more free in my body, more solid, than when I was out there on the trail.

It isn’t ordinary life, but it also isn’t fake, it’s just different. It’s at the margins of the world as we know it. It follows different rules. Foucault called places like this heterotopias, but you could also just say they are sacred, that to walk them is to walk a long prayer.

There is nothing out there for me to covet or buy, and there are no mirrors. I don’t have to look pretty. I am not a producer, or a consumer, or consumed. I do not have to produce myself or my hike for the consumption of others.

Out there I am not driven by algorithms or manipulated by content. It is not a curated experience. There is no guru or cult leader, there are no bosses or customers. The oligarchs don’t go there, and there are no superyachts or luxury wellness retreats or surveillance cameras or stores.

There’s just a trail.

The task is arduous, but it is also simple. Keep walking, or lie down and die.

***

I was watching a track competition with a friend who likes watching track competitions. The announcer was interviewing the woman, Tia Jones, who had just won at hurdles, and who was set to run in another event the next day as well.

“What’s your plan for tomorrow?” asked the announcer.

“Tomorrow I’m just gonna put my feet on the ground and run to the line.”

****

On account of my impending backpacking trip, I have, in fact, had to be more “active”. I put on a heavy pack and walk up long flights of stairs, on a path wending behind buildings, to the park at the top of the tallest hill near my home. Then I walk down a different way, and then back up again. At the top of the hill there is a grove of oak trees that I like to stand in for a few moments, to rest, before I go down again.

Exercise ought to make me feel better, everyone says so, but it does not, it never did. I do it now not to be active or fit or toned or mentally well, but only so that when I go to the trail in July I will be a little more prepared for what I will face. The tallest mountains on The Long Trail are all in the north, so I will face them first, and I would like to be ready.

The fact is, I can’t stand climbing mountains. (I also do not like being on top of mountains, and I don’t like going down them either.) My body complains at walking up the tiniest of grades. “That’s not even a hill!”, Max will say, but I know what uphill feels like, and left to my own devices I will avoid it whenever I can.

If you want some assurance that my shadow isn't winning, it is this: yesterday I twice walked up a hill I didn’t have to with a heavy pack on my back. The only reason for me to have done that was because I expect to live to July, to get to the northern terminus of the trail. To put on my pack and face south.

And then: to put my feet on the ground and walk to the line.

***

Maybe it is self-indulgent to insist on my right to do this AGAIN, after I just did, surely there’s something else I should be doing, haven’t I found a goddamn purpose again yet? Aren’t there fascists to fight?!

Yes, there are fascists to fight, but I don’t want to cede this trail to them. Because just as they would erase all our words, they would erase this trail if they could: a thing maintained on public lands for the public good, built on public money and on donations and on volunteer labor, and by the people who walk it. It is a thing that is also a place that is also a community that is also an idea and a journey and it is also love and joy and frustration and defiance. It does not turn a profit, it has not been packaged up and sold, it can’t be ground up and snorted. It is not made up of lies and memes and clickbait and distractions, but of earth and sky and water, of spruce and fir and lichen and moss.

You can’t ask chatGPT to summarize it for you, you cannot deepfake your way through it.

If you want to know what the trail is, there is only one way to truly find out: put your feet on the ground and walk.

***

But that’s true of so many things, isn’t it? The only way to really know them is to experience them yourself. I can try and try to explain to you what the doom nausea feels like, but if you haven’t felt it yourself you don’t really know. I could ask ChatGPT to take the five hundred pages of my miscellaneous writing about the trail and turn them into a book, but it wouldn’t be a very good book, and I wouldn’t have written it.

We don’t read a book but by reading the book and not a summary of the book, and we don’t make art but by making it. We don’t find out what solidarity is by contemplating it, but by creating it, and we do not experience any freedom but by acting as free people.

I don’t know when my feeling of doom will pass and I don’t know when or how or if I will complete the book, but my feeling of doom is a real feeling that deserves to be written, and if the book becomes real it will only be because I made it so, word by excruciating word.

There is so much that is not real these days, and it is so easy to be consumed by it all, to be lost in that funhouse of lies and distractions. It is easy to spend all our time in the spectacle. But the spectacle is stealing our freedom and thinning our souls.

The real is still there, though. They can make it scary and unpleasant, but they can’t make it disappear. And we can get nowhere else, nowhere better, unless we start from what is real. That is why they want so badly to distract us from it.

I’d rather live in the real, even now, when I don’t like living much at all.

Hello, it’s the Amy with clean fingernails, the one from the slightly alternate universe.

First, if you’ve recently arrived on Jessitron’s recommendation, welcome. This may or may not be the kind of thing you were expecting, it is almost never directly about software systems. Conversely, if you are in software and/or like thinking about complex systems and are not following Jess’s work already, you might like the kinds of things Jess writes about.

Next, I am going to talk about despair, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation (my own), but mostly as a jumping off point to talk about it as a particularly acute political problem under fascism, one for which it is helpful to understand generally how to work with such feelings, something I know a lot about because of my own personal mental health history.

Anyways please take care of yourself and do not read further if you do not want to read about suicidal ideation.

VERY IMPORTANT: I do not need you to “check in” on how I am, because yes it’s bad but I know how to deal with it. (I do have an ask, at the very end of this email, but it’s just an ask and I will be fine if you do not do the thing I ask.) I definitely do not need you freaking out about my ‘safety’, so don’t fucking do it. Which is to say: this is not a suicide note or some kind of parasuicidal “cry for help” or any declaration of intent; it is the EXACT OPPOSITE of that. If you get to the bottom of this email and you do not understand why that is true, read it again. If you want to know more about why I don’t do shit like that, here is an entire post I wrote about why threatening suicide is a very bad life choice.

Some personal context

For the last few days I have been suffering through a bout of relentless suicidal ideation on top of intense feelings of hopelessness and despair. For example, yesterday I cried because I could not give 50 years of my life to someone else instead, who I think would probably enjoy it more than I do, and the thought of having to live for another 50 years was completely intolerable, which fact I found depressing in itself. (Am I sure I have 50 years left? God, I hope not, but I might.)

Anyhow, as a person with manic-depression (or bipolar disorder, or spicy-sad brain), this is nothing new. Informants all agree that I was an inconsolable infant. In third grade I stayed after school one day to tell my teacher that I thought there was something wrong with me because I never felt happy. The first time I remember fully articulating a serious suicidal urge, I was 14. (To put this in perspective, this means that if you are under the age of ~35, I have been not committing suicide since before you were born).

I have never made a suicide attempt, but I am also never without an idea or several of how I’d do it. My suicidal ideation usually comes along with excruciating and frankly indescribable emotional pain, but it doesn’t always. Last summer I experienced significant suicidal ideation at a time I would have otherwise described as one of the most expansive and joyful times of my life: while thru-hiking Vermont’s Long Trail.

Something like 5-20% of manic-depressives will die by suicide. Something like 50% of us will attempt it at least once. Statistics are not facts about any individual’s future, of course, but these statistics are not exactly promising. Even so, I persist.

I tell you all this so that you understand that — even though I lead a very privileged and in many ways objectively amazing life — when I write about hopelessness and despair, I know what the fuck I am talking about.

Hopelessness and Despair as a Political Problem (I mean, duh)

A fascist regime undertakes a war on facts, that part is clear and easy to see and understand. The Trump administration and its propagandists lie, constantly, shamelessly, and about everything. This is annoying and corrosive and means that it takes us actual effort to even insist on basic facts about reality, for example, that Elon Musk’s Nazi salute was a Nazi salute.

But it also undertakes a war on feelings, on our capacity to feel them, on the kinds of feelings we feel, and even the very idea that certain feelings and associated values/concepts might be desirable, like empathy, love, mercy, hope, and joy. It makes war on our feelings because it is a very good way to control people.

It is especially convenient to a fascist regime if the people who are against it feel hopelessness and despair.

Lucky for us, this problem is not new and we do not have to here in the US under Donald Trump solve it from scratch ourselves. We have many, many sources of information and inspiration to lean on here. Maybe you’re fond, like I am, of Rebecca Solnit, or maybe you’d find some inspiring essays in the compilation The Impossible Will Take a Little While, or in the movement/book/website Active Hope, or in the writings of Vaclav Havel, or the collection Let This Radicalize You. I’m reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom right now, and he’s got a lot of great thoughts about this stuff too.

But whoever it is you read or watch or listen to, the message is largely the same, and so, based both on my wide reading about the topic and my years of personally grappling with it, I will summarize what I think are the most important things to know about it here. Please note this is an artisanal, handmade summary that has not been touched by a chatbot, so all errors and shitty writing and unnecessary repetition and typos are entirely my own fault. Still, I hope you find it helpful.

1. Hopelessness and despair are natural reactions to a government that does not value human life, human freedom, human dignity, or human futures. These feelings are natural reactions to both the actual practical impact of living under such regimes;

2. AND hopelessness and despair are natural reactions to such a government behaving and propagandizing in ways intended to produce hopelessness and despair in their populations, because people who are hopeless and despairing are easier to control.

3. BUT, we can fight hopelessness and despair on multiple fronts:

4. We fight it practically by pushing back against the practical impacts of such a government. When a judge orders a grad student released from ICE detention, that grad student is now practically in a situation that inspires less hopelessness and despair than one who is not yet released from ICE detention.

5. That practical success is then a fact about the world that we can then use to counteract feelings of hopelessness and despair generally, for all of us, by celebrating and publicizing it. We therefore fight hopelessness and despair for ourselves by acting for practical good in one or many of a million different ways, and then being sure to recognize and celebrate when those actions result in a positive change.

6. Even when our practical actions do not appear to result in a positive change, we fight despair and hopelessness by understanding the reality that the future is unpredictable, and that when we ourselves act in the present we change that unpredictable future, even when we may not now or ever see the results of that change. Maybe this seems obvious, but from the bottom of a well of hopelessness it does not seem obvious at all, it seems like an impossible leap of faith. For a deep dive into my personal experience with this particular truth, see this post about that time it turned out that a story I’d written when I was sixteen changed the life of someone I happened to meet pretty randomly on twitter decades later.

7. This unpredictability applies both individually and across society; we just don’t fucking know what will actually happen in the future. (see #14 below for a slightly different related perspective on feelings and the future).

8. Often, when people are talking themselves or other people out of hopelessness and despair, they will note that feelings are not facts. I disagree. Feelings ARE facts, but they are a special kind of fact. They are facts about your internal state of being. We have feelings at all because they are critically important information to guide us in our choices in life. I gave a whole talk about this once.

9. Because feelings are facts about our internal state, they are never wrong, per se. They are reports from the ground. It is always a mistake to ignore reports from the ground. Do not stamp your feet at your feelings and yell “that can’t be true, and it sure as hell is not useful, stop saying that!” This does not work. When people blah blah about “validating feelings” this is what they are trying to get at. But you can’t just validate your feelings and move on, something else is needed.

10. While feelings cannot be false, their relationship to other kinds of facts in the world is verrrryyyy tricky. Feelings are pretty easy to manipulate; that is what all effective propaganda does, see #2 above. They are also annoyingly susceptible to bullshit we TELL OURSELVES. “I’m weak, I’m guilty, I’m a bad person, I did that wrong, so-and-so hates me” are things we might say to ourselves that might cause us to have feelings of hopelessness and despair. There is an entire field of psychology - cognitive behavior therapy - that is dedicated to helping people ameliorate/reduce the impact of our thoughts on our feelings. CBT can be exhausting because it’s a lot of work to constantly be arguing with ourselves about the factuality of our thoughts, but it’s important to understand the relationship and the importance of presenting ourselves with ample factual information that counteracts the impact of our negative thoughts on our feelings. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your feelings are trained in part on the thoughts you feed yourself, so, like, you gotta balance your diet. (You are almost certainly not doing this right now) See #5 above.

11. We can manipulate our own feelings in a whole bunch of other ways too: blah blah motherfucking meditation, wellness crap, sex, friends, nature, music goddamn gratitude journaling, and other shit that works but is frankly just fucking CRINGE. Not only can we, WE SHOULD. Under a regime that aims to undermine our sense of agency and hope and joy so we do not have the energy to act against the regime, deliberately acting to shore up our own and others’ sense of agency and hope and joy is, in fact, a critically important form of resistance, even if we all understand it cannot be the only form of resistance or else we will become a Reductress headline.

12. Another thing we can do with our feelings is accept them and do the thing we think is important anyways. There is also a whole kind of therapy that is based in doing exactly that; it’s called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and the idea is that you accept the reality of your life (including but not limited to how you feel) and you decide what is important to you and do your best to act on what is important to you despite the feelings. We do not have to have hope in order to take action. Obviously it is very helpful to feel hopeful when we are acting, but it’s not required. We may find that a practical action that leads to a practical result instills hope in us where we had none, and that’s great, but if it doesn’t, we can still observe that our lack of hope exists in conjunction with other facts that indicate that a practical action we or even someone else took had a practical positive impact in the world.

13. In other words, hopelessness and despair do not prevent us from acting in ways that reduce hopelessness and despair generally and practically even if we struggle to reduce our own feelings of hopelessness and despair. We can inject hope into the world even when we ourselves feel hopeless. I am attempting to do that right this minute, in fact.

14. It is also very, very important to understand that while feelings are a kind of fact, and need to be respected as such, one thing they are definitely not is facts about the future, or even predictions (which remember, are also not facts about the future). (Oddly, they are like statistics in this way). Thoughts can be predictions (and lead to actions): “hmm, tariffs are fucking up the supply chains, that means we might run out of stuff, therefore I will buy extra imported cheese now so in the future I can treat my feelings of hopelessness and despair with parmigiana-reggiano.” Feelings are not predictions.

15. A feeling is not a prediction in two ways: a feeling does not predict the actual state of the world in the future, and, somewhat counterintuitively, it also doesn’t even predict how you will feel in the future. It is easy for people to slide from having a feeling to believing the feeling is saying something about the future, but a feeling is a fact about a current internal state, and a feeling doesn’t know a goddamn thing about the future, either internal or external. The future is hard enough to predict by reasoning about it, since actions we take in the present change the future in unpredictable ways (see #6 above). It is much harder to face the future when we believe that our feelings are remotely predictive.

I am alive today because I understand the above facts about feelings, and especially about feelings of hopelessness and despair. I understand that hopelessness and despair can be both induced and ameliorated, and I understand the various ways that can happen. I have many tools at my disposal to ameliorate them. I understand that my own hopelessness and despair do not prevent me from taking action in the present — yes yes, they can make it really fucking hard, but they do not necessarily prevent, they do not completely foreclose the possibility of action — and that my actions today may result in less overall human hopelessness and despair even if they don’t move the needle on my own.

I understand that my feelings of hopelessness of despair are not predictions about the future of the world or about how I will feel at any point in the future, and that this remains true even in the face of my well-informed prediction (based on past experience) that I will probably feel a lot more hopelessness and despair in the future.

The overall trajectory of my emotional life has been and remains, understatedly, not especially cheery. Yes, I expect that to continue, and I even have some pretty solid predictions about when I’ll feel bad vs when I’ll feel less bad, but still, shit’s gonna happen that I definitely do not expect and it will make me feel ways I can’t anticipate. I can’t tell you how exactly I will feel in three hours, much less tomorrow, much less next year.

The future remains open. It really, really does. Not open to anything, but more open than we often believe.

the tl;dr, which is also tl;dr!

In fighting fascists, facts matter more than ever. But the special kind of facts that are feelings matter too. Like I said above, fascists would rather we pay less attention to external facts (which they are lying to us about) and more attention to our feelings, because those are so easy to manipulate (especially if you’re so willing to lie about the facts). In On Freedom, Snyder writes “if we lose track of the difference between ‘it is true’ and ‘it feels right,’ we are not free; forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.” This is also true in the other direction: they are hacking our brains to make us feel hopeless because we are easier to control when we feel hopeless and when we believe that our hopelessness is a fact about the world and about the future, instead of a fact about our own present internal state.

When we understand that truth about hopelessness we are able to act in the face of it. There is SO MUCH prior art here about this; I have tried to give you an overview, based in part on my own experience and what I have had to learn in order to survive. But if you are feeling politically hopeless, then I invite you to take this as an opportunity to seek out more information on this critical aspect of surviving and overthrowing fascism. It is in itself generative of hope to learn how others have found and made it when they needed to.

Finally, one way I generate my own hope is by trying to offer some to you. In turn, since I am in a rough patch where I am currently undersupplied with hope, if I have been helpful to you perhaps you could hit reply and tell me so.

xo, Amy

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PS I think this newsletter is too long, repeats itself too much, and probably sucks. But I also believe that even my shitty imperfect newsletters might make the future more open than otherwise, and I don’t have a newsletter editor to help me fix it, so I just accept that and send the sucky thing anyways.

More resources, from other people:

• Here is a podcast on mental health and collective survival from Movement Memos.

• Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark and MeditationsInAnEmergency

• Active Hope

• Let This Radicalize You

some other stuff I’ve written about this (with pull quotes!):

“Learn to Manufacture Hope”: “It sucks that my brain can be so easily lost in nightmares. But it’s made me very good at the production of hope, and hope is a currency that always holds its value, whatever the billionaires do.”

“Three icebergs, two internet miracles, and one mint-condition set of Sassy Magazines”: "When we make time to do the things we feel called to do, regardless of whether we can see or measure their impact, and whether or not we can even say what impact we think they might have or why, whether or not we even do them out of hope that they will have a positive impact — we change the world.”

“The Owl of Hope”: “Hope is not Annual Recurring Revenue and it’s not Stock Options and it’s not a Series C and it’s not an IPO and it’s not RSUs and it’s not TC: 400k. It’s not Ritalin or Concerta, it’s not Lexapro or Abilify. You can’t mint it as an NFT or mine it like crypto. You can’t earn it. It’s not VP. It’s not CTO. It’s not a Competency Matrix or a Performance Review or a QBR or an OKR. It’s not Observability or ChatOps. It is not a new Team Collaboration Tool, now with Kanban View. It is not a new at-home blood test or a chatbot that teaches you CBT. It is not any kind of business thing at all. Hope, like Soylent Green, is mostly made of People. And also, sometimes, Owls.

How to be creative when your back’s against the wall: bell hooks tribute edition: “But we do not have to die of existential despair. There are people who have been teaching about this, writing about this, living it, for a long time now, there are technologies we can use to turn our energies to the work of surviving together in some kind of world worth living for.”

Thanks, I hate them all: 5 wellness tips you hated the last 1000 times you saw them on Insta and 1 tip that’s maybe useful: “Centering hope is the most important thing I know to do for myself and for everyone I love and for the world and that is why I talk about it constantly. I can’t tell you exactly how to do it. It doesn’t fit neatly into a checklist and there definitely isn't an App for That…”

A painting I made, just because

First some housekeeping:

for creative and/or legal reasons or just because I’m feeling personally chaotic, I now declare this newsletter to be a work of fiction. It is written by a fictional Amy Newell who lives in a part of the multiverse so nearly indistinguishable from our own that to jump to it you do not have to do anything so complex as leaping onto a massive butt-plug shaped auditor trophy inside of a local IRS office (won’t exist in this timeline for much longer apparently anyways, amirite?) or even give yourself five paper cuts.1 All you have to do is sneeze. Just find some dust bunnies and inhale them and sneeze and there you are, in this, the fictional near-reality version of the world.

I am a fictional Amy Newell who resembles the real Amy Newell almost exactly except that this version inexplicably has MUCH cleaner fingernails. In this world, when I write to you about protest opsec or how much I love cigarettes or how hysterical I’ve been lately, or when I try to explain how I once was in a blood cult so I can guarantee you that whatever was said in that book Careless People the reality is like ten times more weird, you know that it is fictional. It is fictional in exactly the same way that the narrator of all my poems over on my companion website is a fiction, in exactly the same way that identity itself is a fiction, the author is a fiction, words are fictions, money is a fiction. I went to Harvard when it was overrun by Maoists2, you see, and there I learned that the Author died just before anyone who was not a white man got to write a book. Aww, shucks, too bad, I said, I guess I didn’t have anything interesting to say, I’ll just be over here in the Schlesinger Library examining their vintage lesbian porn archives.

Flash forward to now, where I, fictional Amy, am supposedly writing a book about my thru-hike. This, Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record informed me the other day, “borders on ambitious.”3 You see, a woman once wrote a book about a solo woman thru-hiker. That was back in 2012, and it was a very successful book, they even made a movie about it, it was touching, Reese Witherspoon starred in it.

There is obviously not room in the world for a single additional book about a solo woman thru-hike, it would be ridiculously ambitious for me to think I could write one, and even if there were room for one more, well Ye Olde blah blah has just reviewed such a book. So check back in 2038, I guess, when a woman might get another chance to write a book about a thru-hike, if she can manage to resurrect the Author by then.

Now, for the serious part, also fictional:

Don’t let anyone tell you last Saturday’s protests weren’t a success, or didn’t change anything, or weren’t enough, or did it wrong somehow. Last Saturday’s protests were a massive success on the part of many, many people, and many many organizations. They were large, they were everywhere, they were decentralized, they were creative, they were fun, and — while many newspapers tried to avoid saying too much about them because, presumably, they don’t want to piss off Trump, who is predictably angered by large crowd sizes that aren’t his — they were all over the social media.

Maybe 3, maybe 5 million people were out on Saturday. There’s a number people float around, that if 3.5% of the population is mobilized, they have a very high chance of overthrowing a dictator. This is oversimplified of course. That number comes from Erica Chenoweth, who studies nonviolent resistance movements at Harvard (for now, anyways, while they still allow woke Maoists to roam the campus and haven’t deported them all to a gulag in El Salvador). You can read more about their thoughts on this number here. On Saturday, at the lowest estimate, we got almost halfway there, and that is just the people in the streets.

There’s another protest planned by the same coalition of groups for Saturday, April 19th. Many of the TeslaTakedown protests happen weekly. There’s something planned for May Day as well, and there’s probably stuff happening down the street from you too. Check last week’s newsletter for my handy (fictional) step-list on how to go to a protest, and some ideas of what to do if you can’t go to a protest.

Protests aren’t everything, but they do matter. They help us build solidarity with one another, they help us feel less alone, they help us feel that we have agency and that we are fighting. Plus they can be fun. More on that below.

The most serious part:

If, like me, you spend too much time on PurpleSky, the fictional social network in this, the fictional near-real universe where I have clean fingernails, you might have heard people freaking about about the Insurrection Act of 1807. I know, I know, in addition to having to care about some law from over a hundred years ago that sounds frankly a little alarming, I also did not think I would ever have to hear the words Smoot-Hawley again after acing my AP US History exam, but here we are, having to re-learn history through a new form of art that goes somehow even beyond farce.

So here’s the deal: People are worried that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act on April 20th and then it’s a whole Reichstag Fire situation and all the skies are falling and we find ourselves suddenly under military occupation by our own military. This is unfortunately a real thing that could happen. April 20th is the date people are freaking out about because that is 3 months from Inauguration Day, when Trump directed Kristi Noem to “research” whether we have some kind of military emergency going on at the southern border that would qualify as an invasion and justify the use of the Insurrection Act.

I have no idea what will happen, but some very smart people who love democracy have put a lot of effort into gaming this out and I am going to link you to two posts that explain the situation clearly and tell us what to do if the thing in fact happens. No, I don’t expect you to click through and read those posts now, I hardly expect you to make it through this newsletter. In this economy? A whole newsletter? How much immediate-release d- amphetamine salts do I think you have access to anyways, right? You gotta hoard that shit, since RFK jr is coming for it and bringing you measles instead.

In fact, by this time next year you’ll be trading your spare lexapro for my spare ritalin (joke: I have no ritalin), and no one will be able to even read a single 147-character twat (which is what we call posts on PurpleSky, here in the Amy-with-clean-fingernails universe) without losing focus, switching to a semi-private ad-sponsored browser window and gargling “vintage lesbian bigballs” so that a Ghibli-themed chatbot version of a DOGE bro can auto-generate deportation porn so depraved you will set your own eyeballs on fire and never finish reading the twat. Aren’t you glad this is all very fictional and you don’t have to set your eyeballs on fire because of something unspeakable a deepfake (but is it??) Kristi Noem did to someone in a prison?4 I sure am.

Did I say this was the serious part? Yes, it’s the serious part. If April 20th or some other day rolls around and you read a minor reference to something called the Insurrection Act five screens below the fold on Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record, and you think “boy, that sounds scary, what should I do” that is the time to remember that I gave you these links. Go to your email and gargle Fictional Amy Newsletter with Clean Fingernails Insurrection Act and here you are, click through to Waging Nonviolence’s “What to do if the Insurrection Act is Invoked” and Indivisible.org’s “Could Trump Invoke the Insurrection Act? What to know and how to prepare”.

Yes, I too wish this world was a giant leap onto a butt-plug-shaped award distance away instead of just some dirty fingernails distance away from the real world, but, you get what you get and you don’t get upset, or so I was told by my younger child’s preschool teacher once, years ago, when what you got wasn’t… all this.

Here we are at the not-serious part of the newsletter!

Whew, we made it! This part is not serious because it’s about feeling hysterical and as we all know only unserious people with lady-parts get hysterical, people who are so hysterically ambitious as to think that there might be room in even just one universe for more than one book about a solo lady thru-hiker, that is how unserious and hysterical this section is…

So, I admit: lately I’ve been feeling a little hysterical. It’s been getting hard to know what is real and what isn’t, and what is important and what is not. I wake up and think Sun Salutation, 10 pushups, Meditate, Work on Ambitious Book Project, Activate and Organize, GO. Then at the end of the day I realize that what I actually did was bulk buy 3 kilos of cocoa powder, make sauerkraut, and spend seven hours crying and staring at the mini-fridge in the corner of my art studio wondering when the people in the wallpaper are going to come and take me away. This is particularly disturbing since my studio does not have wallpaper.

I find myself weeping hysterically over a skirt that I ordered that wasn’t the color orange that I had hoped it was. I decide that all my problems would be solved if I got my hands on enough GLP-1 to lose 10 pounds, even though I literally spent every Season Three White Lotus episode complaining about that one girl who was way too skinny it was painful to look at. The other day like a dying man I took a whole drag off someone else’s cigarette, half-convinced it would immediately turn me back into summer 2018 Amy screaming WHY IS MY JUUL NOT CHARGED??! at 6 am. (It did not). I scroll PurpleSky, like six twats and re-twat one of them, and then 10 minutes later go through and unlike and un-retwat, just in case the government is watching. If the government is watching, this entire newsletter was dictated to me by minecraft ransomware, I had no choice but to paste this photo of a protestor holding a sign that says Oligargle my balls on it, the ransomware was holding my Klonopin prescription hostage.

I find myself hysterically questioning every relationship in my life and every choice I have ever made. Who even am I? This miasma of unreality, this hysteria and confusion is just migrating around like a wandering womb, making me question everything. Do I like wearing leather pants or do I just like the way my ass looks in them? Or do I like how other people like the way my ass looks in leather pants? Does it depend on the definition of the words ‘ass’, ‘leather’, and ‘like’? Do I even want an orange skirt? Is cracking a non-alcoholic beer at 11 am alcoholic behavior, or not? Should I buy an entire wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano and store it in my closet next to the sauerkraut? Should I liquidate my boot collection and buy several gallons of vanilla extract and a whole Jamón ibérico, which I could hang in the closet next to the cheese wheel in the space I free up from liquidating the boot collection? Should I bother working on an ambitious book about a solo woman thru-hiker or should I just take photos of my Maoist boobs and post them on OnlyFans so as to be completely transparent that I am the Bad Kind of Female who is not only Hysterical and Woke but also Slutty? Why not both!? (In this, the fictional world, my fictional boobs are both hardcore Maoists, even though in the real world my left boob is more of an anarchist and the right one leans a little bit more socialist. Yes, there is lore explaining why this is, but that’s for another day.)

Why am I telling you that I am feeling so hysterical? It is certainly not so I can more easily be shipped off to a labor camp in Texas to (Parker Posey voice) have a GRAND MAL SEIZURE5 from abrupt discontinuation of Klonopin.

I’m telling you this because under the circumstances feeling hysterical is actually a completely fucking normal thing to feel.

Fixating on small things we have some hope of controlling, like being sure not to run out of the cat’s insulin needles; feeling unreasonably angry at people around us; questioning whether our entire lives aren’t just delusions; obsessing over our overuse of semi-colons; — which, if you think I’m using them weirdly here, I also think I totally am, but that is how we do it in PurpleSky dirty-fingernails world, okay!?! — worrying that people on the street are following us; fantasizing about doing bad things to cybertrucks; spending too much time in the vintage porn stacks; deciding it’s time to learn to make our own kombucha; getting into arguments with strangers on Tinder; binge-eating; micro-cleaning — none of this is optimal, okay, none of it is good coping skills great job resilience your Oura ring gave you a butt-plug shaped award for how awesome your metrics are, you and Cory Booker have got it dialed in, you don’t even have a blood boy but you are WINNING at Thriving Under Fascism —

…

okay, you are not winning at that, there is no Oura award, even though it does feel like every day is somehow 25 hours of standing at a lectern shouting WHAT THE EVERLIVING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

but that’s okay…

I mean, because really, does anyone want an award for Thriving Under Fascism? We are feeling this pain because all of this is too, too real. The reality is that it is I, the Amy with dirty fingernails, who is writing to you right now, as much as I wish it were the Amy with clean fingernails who gets to say “did you see what Dril just twatted on PurpleSky?” out loud in public.

This is real, and it fucking sucks. We cannot thrive under these conditions. Even the most privileged among us cannot thrive under these conditions. But blessedly, we do not have to. We can be hysterical and scared and sometimes a little too reactive and be mad at our friends over dumb shit and drink a little too much wine and spend too much time in the vintage porn collection and vaguely consider getting into iPhone arbitrage or making mead or moving to an abandoned nunnery in Malta, and we can hate our bodies and our laundry piles and our handwriting and our dirty fingernails and that is all okay because all that means is that we are human, marvelous complicated endlessly creative hopeless pathetic needy little freaks and incredibly brave weirdos who are paying enough attention to know how utterly fucked up this situation is and that it is not fucking OKAY.

I’m hysterical because hysteria is entirely called for here, it is a migrating hysteria that attaches to all kinds of random shit because it’s creative, my hysteria is so creative precisely because I am so creative, and in my creative hysteria, and in yours, there lies a secret superpower: the irrefutable proof that unpredictability is an inherent attribute of the universe, of this timeline and every other, that each of us fucked up hysterical humans has within ourselves a vast, inexhaustible well of creativity that cannot be predicted by any olibro’s generative fantasy chatbot servant, and it cannot be controlled. It is our birthright as humans, this unpredictable creativity, it is entirely ours to wield, and it is unbelievably powerful.

We are in a completely fucked up timeline, yes, a dystopian prison of a timeline, but I really believe that we are creative enough to find our way out of it. Every one of us just needs to redirect a tiny portion of all that wild chaotic hysteria into creatively participating in making some other future that is less unbelievably shitty than the one that we are being force-fed and told is the only one that can possibly exist. This is a lie. The future is not already determined. The guys who want to tell you it is determined, that they have determined it — they haven’t accounted for our creativity because from their perspectives we are not real people, we are NPCs. We don’t count. So they haven’t accounted for us.

They have not accounted for me deciding to clean my fingernails (or get them even dirtier), or for you deciding to bake an olive oil cake, or for both of us independently showing up to different protests with signs that read Oligargle My Balls. They have not accounted for everything we are capable of fermenting in our hearts and in our kitchen cabinets and in our closets next to the parm wheels and the thigh high boots. They have not even accounted for our next dance craze, and they have absolutely no idea how to account for giant puppets, poets, or people who stand by their principles.

They have not accounted for our humanity. The other futures we can make are not far off at all.

***

I’ll leave you with a piece of this poem by Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, which I quote at every opportunity because I love it so much (but go read the whole thing!):

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

here’s to losing our minds and leaving false trails,

xo,

Amy (the one with the dirty fingernails), and the other Amy (with the clean fingernails)

PS if you haven’t already, please stop getting your US news primarily from Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record or The It Sure Is Getting Dark Here in DC Post, and get it from The Guardian instead. At the least.

It’s Friday, April 4th.

I haven’t been talking about specific protests recently but if you hate what is happening to the United States right now, and its impact on the rest of the world, tomorrow, April 5th, is set to be a very, very large day of protest, and I bet very much there is a protest near you that you could get to. Among many other organizations, Indivisible.org is helping to organize the protests and you can check their website to find one.

In the Boston area, where I live, the protest has Ed Markey speaking and the Drop Kick Murphys playing. I anticipate it will be relatively safe, well-organized, and family-friendly. 1

***

Protesting isn’t the only thing that needs doing in these times, of course. It is not the only thing I do. But, in the same way that singing along with taylor swift in the rain together, eating together, watching a baseball game together, and other group activities can feel joyful and inspiring and encouraging, protesting together can do that too. Feeling solidarity together can do that. And, look, big crowds are impressive and they do move minds, and not only do they move minds, in their visibility, they move others to action who are afraid to be the only ones acting.

Anyways, if you can’t go to protests for a million various valid reasons, not to worry, there are so many good lists of other things you can do.

BUT, if you haven’t been to one before (I wonder if this can be anyone who reads my newsletter, but I honestly don’t know, so let’s assume it’s someone), and you’re not sure how you feel about them or what to do, I want to encourage you to consider showing up at one tomorrow (or any other day). I made you a handy steps list (shoutout to my younger kid who came up with ‘steps list’ because they hate the idea of “checklists”) if you’re not sure how to do this.

STEPS TO GO TO A PROTEST (Tomorrow or any other day)

1. Find a protest to go to. For tomorrow: Find a planned protest here. You do not have to RSVP to it. Just note the info about when and where. For any other day, Mobilize.us has a searchable list.

2. Find a friend or two, to go with you, and make a sign if you feel like it. (Don’t let no sign stop you from going. There will be plenty of signs.)

3. Bring a mask and some food/water and some throat lozenges because there’s often a lot of call-and-response yelling.

4. Be careful with your phone. (I personally tend not to use my phone at all during protests, but my opsec has pretty much always been better than Pete Hegseth’s, so.) At the very least, a. turn off biometric ID on your phone — ie make it use a passcode instead of your face or fingerprint, and b. don’t post pics of other people’s faces to the internet.

5. Know your rights. I have a printed version of the MA know your rights in my backpack.

6. When you get there, feel free to take a few minutes around the edge or scoping it out from afar to get a sense of the vibes. Just like with a date or anytime you’re in a new situation, you have every right to decide the vibes seem… off and just.. leave again. But: please expect that not everything someone says or every sign someone is holding at a protest is going to be something you would say or a sign you would hold. A resistance movement that has any hope of moving the world requires us to come together through difference. If there turn out to be a ton of obvious Nazis at your protest and they seem belligerent, yeah, get the fuck out of there. But try not to police everyone else’s messaging to death.

7. During the protest, pay attention to what’s going on around you. Just like with any large gathering of humans (not all protests are large, but a lot of the ones tomorrow will be, especially if you show up), a group of protestors can be a little unpredictable at times. And cops are a little unpredictable pretty much all the time, so pay attention to the interactions of police and protestors. Just like with a date, you can also leave anytime in the middle of the protest if the vibes start to feel off, or you get tired, or your throat hurts. You can leave and come back. You can sit down at the edge for a while.

8. Have fun, feel empowered!

9. Go home and celebrate your taking action!

If you can’t get to tomorrow’s protests, don’t worry, there will be more. If you want to go tomorrow or some other day but are new to this all and want more advice or reassurance or encouragement, feel free to email and ask me. I’m here for you! I’m not an expert on any of this dissent/resistance stuff, but I’m also not a total newb either.

I had a whole lot of other stuff I was going to talk about today, but I just got my second mpox vax and I’m still feeling a little under the weather. Here are a couple quick hits:

This poem is super worth reading

Saw No Other Land the other night, worth seeing.

I just always read Rebecca Solnit straight through.

Anyways, happy Friday folks, and I promise you, whether or not you look at what the stock market is doing does not change what the stock market is doing, so I hereby give you permission to just ignore that whole situation for the moment. There is a lot of stuff that is entirely beyond an individual’s control at the moment and that is one of those things. That said, the bigger and more effectively we protest the faster we replace this grotesque regime with one that isn’t intent on burning down the world as fast as (in)humanly possible.

xo,

Amy

ps

don’t forget you can forward this to friends. i am not, as you all know, trying to ‘grow my audience’ particularly, but I want to be as helpful as I can, and “my friend/parasocial acquaintance/ex-girlfriend from high school/former boss wrote this little thing about protests that I thought you might like, do you want to come to a protest with me” is a very, very effective way for you personally to also have a direct personal impact.

People trust people they know. They care more about what someone they know says than someone they don’t know. If someone they know says listen to this person you don’t know but I do know, well, any salesperson in the world will tell you that is worth more than practically any other kind of recommendation. You are holding that amount of value in your hands right now! Fuck the stock market, you could do one of the most worthwhile and powerful things in the world right now and hit forward and write a little note to someone who trusts you.

And no, this isn’t just about this newsletter or tomorrow’s protests. It’s about the power you always have, not to crush your resistance goals or meet your protest OKRs, or master effective communication, but just to share information, ideas, inspiration, and also the work with people you know.

pps that was a very long PS that probably should have been a totally different essay. oh well.

Well, it’s finally spring.

I’m supposed to be writing this book, about my thru-hike. I am writing it, but slowly. More slowly than I’d hoped and planned. I’d set myself an aggressive timeline and I fear I won’t meet it, because my attention is fragmented. Fragmented attention is bad, of course. It’s unfocused. It doesn’t get shit done. It meanders. It’s not hustling and goal-oriented. It’s not a deadlift, it’s not free-climbing el capitan. Once I described living through my despair by saying it was like free-climbing el capitan in a rainstorm. Clinging to the side of a cliff while the rain pours down, the rain that wants to wash you away like the itsy-bitsy spider. First thing in the morning the Long Trail is criss-crossed with spider silk, not from spiders building their webs but from their travel. They pass in the night, on the breeze, and you come through in the morning and cut the silk with your trekking pole, or close your eyes and walk through, until it is stuck in your eyelashes. Everywhere you look, the world is glittering with the passage of the spiders. I know this paragraph doesn’t make any sense, it’s not focused, it’s not getting shit done. Sometimes that’s what I need, though.

I need to keep howling, and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense.

***

I have been painting a lot this week. In the “fine art’ sense. I don’t think I’m very good at it. When I rented the studio of course I had grandiose aspiration. I would become an Artist. I would be a Writer. I would be an Activist. I would be all these things. But I don’t believe I’m a very talented Artist. I believe I’m a talented writer, but not a disciplined one. I believe I am a lazy, indifferent, merely wanna-be Organizer. In fact, I’m a wanna-be everything right now. I have no value in the world, I do not earn enough money to count, I’m too old to birth babies, too crazy for anyone to want me to. I am too old to be hot, I am too depressed to be useful.

Lucky for me, what I am is not really relevant. There’s just what I do.

I don’t think the paintings I’m making are very good, but I’m making a lot of them. I am not writing the book as quickly as I could be, but I’m writing it. I’m not doing as much political stuff or sure enough that it’s useful as I’d like to be, but I’m doing some stuff. I’m pushing ahead, as best I can, through the anxiety and the fear and the horror and the rage. Through the despair. I could just lie down and die, and I often want to, and I spend more time than I’d like just … nothing. I still spend more time on the internet than I would like to spend. I hate my phone and I pick it up anyways. Also, I howl.

I think about taking up smoking again. I love cigarettes. I love nicotine. For what future am I preserving my lungs, anyways? I put in another order for two more cases of imported biodynamic wine from our wine guy, because I like biodynamic wine and I like funky cheese and if I must live under this regime I will drink the wine and eat the cheese. I plan another summer hike, same trail, other direction. If we are to live under this regime, we must live. We must go on living even when friends cancel trips to the US because they don’t want to cross our borders, even when every day comes a new insult to our intelligence, to our freedoms, to truth. We keep howling.

Some days I feel like I am being crushed. I vibrate with rage. I call my senators to leave messages about how they should get rid of Chuck Schumer. “Hi, me again, but seriously, fuck that guy. He’s not up to the task before him.” When I call my rep an actual human answers the phone. “Rep called Mahmoud Khalil’s actions ‘despicable,’” I complain to the human. Does rep know that many of his Jewish constituents are also against the war? What actions is rep referring to that are ‘despicable’? Don’t you think that calling someone ‘despicable’ is a convenient way to legitimize their deportation? I don’t like the tone.” Human is polite, says will pass message on to Rep. Thanks, I say, I will keep howling.

Other days I forget to breathe. I take long walks with a friend, we take pictures of weird stumps and note the graffiti. In Allston, the various communist parties have been busy with wheat paste. It’s festive, bright red, everywhere you look. In my art studio I post Timothy Snyder’s twenty lessons On Tyranny. I like “practice corporeal politics” a lot. I try to go to things in person. I put my phone away and look people in the eye on the street. “Let’s meet IRL,” I say to people. (Let’s meet IRL, I say to you.) When I am walking around town taking a picture of a vacant lot or a crushed eyelash curler on the sidewalk, I am forced to breathe, because my body needs the oxygen.

When I am dancing with friends, I have to breathe, my body needs the oxygen. When fucking, I have to breathe. My body needs the oxygen. The lesson here would seem to be that if I cannot breathe, the last thing I should do is sit hunched over my computer, reloading the news again and again. The news does not make me remember to breathe.

In order to truly howl, we must breathe. Take deep breaths and keep howling, bitches.

***

It’s spring, the whole world is humming and things are growing even now.

Heather Havrilesky tells me that “falling to pieces is another way of rising to greet the sky.” I am falling to pieces but I keep howling.

Rebecca Solnit writes:

Here's what I think is true but only our actions can prove: the Trump regime is a Cybertruck, meant to look aggressive and intimidating, a bully car, but also one sloppily made to low standards, one that falls apart as it goes, with pieces that can be yanked off by hand. It shouts that it's strong, but it's weak. It shouts that we're weak but we can be strong, together.

Here’s a really useful essay on Organizing, that I especially like because it gets at this fear that I have that I’m not a real Activist or a real Organizer, that I haven’t read the right books yet:

The first secret is that organizing is simple.

The second is that you're probably already doing it.

There are thousands upon thousands of pages, infinite books, chapters and zines, innumerable podcasts and videos telling you how to get started organizing. Many of them are helpful, but many more of them function as gatekeeping disguised as help. They are full of specialized jargon or ominous warnings about the law or advice on how to manage internal conflict or long thoughts about money and pros and cons of being non-profit or ideas about how to build particular kinds of internal structures.

And all of those things can be helpful, even necessary, at various points in the process of building a project, but the aggregate effect of the discussion is to make organizing seem like something inaccessible to all but the most dedicated or hardworking people. It's intimidating as hell! Look at all those things you need to know! Reading such texts the inevitable conclusion for many people would be "this isn't for me, I can't do this."

The essay goes on, of course, to reassure each of us that we CAN do it. With suggestions. It’s worth a read.

Another thing that is worth the read is this summary of the decision of the judge who ruled against the Executive Order banning trans people from the military, complete with the best quotes. I love me a scathing judicial decision. It is how a judge howls.

***

One thing that helps me is I won’t watch or listen to any of those guys anymore. Not Trump, not Musk, not Vance. Not their spokespeople. I will not listen to or watch things in which I even might have to hear them speak. I do not need to hear the shit they say or watch them saying it to act against it, and I do not consent to be subject to the noxious stream of verbal abuse and lies that they projectile vomit every time they open their mouths. I don’t even read 90% of their bilious written statements. It doesn’t serve me. It’s abuse, and I want to expose myself to as little of it as possible. I don’t want that shit worming its way into my brain, mutating in my nightmares. I do not need to see or hear it to acutely understand that it is happening.

I fill the air instead with the sound of my own howling.

***

Yes, it is happening, and it is very bad. Oh, also, I don’t read the New York Times anymore, not for my news, because I think it downplays the bad, and I don’t think it is helpful to downplay the bad. I read The Guardian instead. The New York Times is not fully reporting the news, and it is not fully reporting the direness of the situation we are in, and what it does report tends to be a week or two behind what the Guardian has reported, so The Guardian it is.

Yes, it is happening, but the crocuses are coming up, nonetheless.

I still believe in democracy, in solidarity, in truth, and in love. I still believe in the crocuses and the biodynamic wines and the itsy bitsy spider. I still believe in dancing.

I’m reading a book series called The Burning Kingdoms, by Tasha Suri. In book two one of the main characters goes to a library in search of knowledge that will help her in a very bad political moment.

Another character asks her what she is doing:

“Sometimes it is necessary to act and plan, simply to know you're still capable of it," she said. "To assure yourself you are still fighting, even if your circumstances do not alter."

(They are attacking the museums and the libraries. We must not let them succeed. The American Library Association is fighting it. “Remember professional ethics” wrote Snyder. The ALA did. Neither Columbia University, nor Paul, Weiss seem to have remembered, but the librarians did. The librarians are howling. )

I still believe in libraries. I believe in education, I believe in scathing legal opinions. I believe in me, and I believe in you too. Howling together.

***
I saw this on bluesky today:

They will continue to tell us that someone got fired, deported, imprisoned, beaten because they did something wrong. They were criminals. Their actions were ‘despicable.’ A photo was found in the trash can of a group chat that suggests they might harbor sympathies. We can’t fall for this. They are lying to us, shamelessly.

Some days I can’t breathe. Some days I want a cigarette. Some days the wind howls in sympathy with the howling inside my heart, grief and rage for all we are losing, but I will not merely be a prophet of our destruction, I will open my mouth wide, howl at the moon, howl at the crocuses, howl for my freedom and yours.

Keep howling, bitches.

I hate everything. I hate every email and ad I get. Most of my emails are ads anyways. I hate instagram, I hate bluesky. I hate my body. I hate all my clothes. I hate the clutter in my household, I hate the frozen dirty snow still left on the streets. I hate my family obligations. I keep getting angry at people I know, family, friends, even people I know only casually, for not having their shit together more than I do, which is not at all.

I am angry at everything. I get an email from The New York Times Cooking (the only part of the nytimes I look at anymore) and the subject line says “This bright, easy soup is absolutely perfect for right now” and I think fuck you, no it’s not. Who are you to tell me what’s absolutely perfect right now. That soup is far too cheerful, look at it, all orange and creamy, with a swirl of paprika on top. What does that soup know of oppression, or despair? Fuck that soup.

I’m angry that when I opened up the times cooking app to find something for dinner that was not a bright easy soup absolutely perfect for right now, the app wanted me to enable notifications and sign up for more email newsletters about viral celeriac casserole recipes and succulent sheet-pan chicken and vegetable meals. Fuck you app, stop trying to get me to app more. I already paid for you. Just shut up.

I’m trying to help my younger child acquire a real ID, and it’s like some fucking escape room puzzle. Fuck that. I don’t want to. It’s too hard, and it’s deliberately too hard, to dispossess people, to limit their movements, to make them feel insecure and second or third class. This kid’s address at birth is the same as their address now and why do I have to find 3 pieces of paper dated in the last 60 days to confirm they are who they say they are and they live where they have always lived. Fuck that.

Most of the emails I receive these days are ads and I hate them all. If you call a product “must have” a “outfit essential”, “on trend”, “timeless”, “sustainable” “luxe”, “performance”, or “life-changing” I do not want it. If you say there’s a fresh drop or a VIP sale, or a can’t miss one, fuck off. I hate all my own clothes but I hate all the clothes being sold to me too, with their barrel legs and mint greens. I don’t want to wear mint green, and barrel legs make me look fat and old. Fuck that.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but a lot of them are on substack, which I also use, and I hate substack. I hate the constant admonitions to like and share. I hate the subscribe or upgrade or gift button every four paragraphs. I hate that substack offers free gift subscriptions that can only be redeemed in the substack app, which I refuse to download because I don’t want to get trapped inside yet another platform. I also do not want to be part of encouraging my readers to get stuck inside another platform. I don’t want to upsell. I don’t want to nudge. I don’t want to make a course or a drip campaign. Of course I want readers but I don’t want to coerce them. I don’t even want to nudge them. I would prefer not to.

I hate my body and I hate every product I’m advertised that purports to help me get a body it insists I would hate less. There is probably no body I would hate less than this one. No, I don’t need you to tell me how great I look or strong or powerful or sexy I look. I have Instagram for that, but I also hate Instagram. I hate how it’s always urging me to do fun things with Meta AI. Substack also wants me to do fun things with AI that I do not want to do. I want every app I use to rip out the AI. I hate Apple for turning on Apple intelligence by default as though I do not have any choice but to get with the picture about AI. I do not want to get with the AI generated picture. I want all the generative ai systems in the world to be unplugged, today, and their data centers taken off the grid, so that we are no longer using up energy in service to slop. Please take your “start drafting with AI” prompt and shove it. I would prefer not to.

I hate every green button. I want to press the gray button and the tiny almost invisible x that only appears after you’ve already been forced to look at something someone wants you to buy. I do not want to add shipping insurance or pay in four interest-free payments. I hate your free shipping over 99 dollars offer. I hate when you tell me how much money I can save by buying now, during your once a year sale. Must-shop sale. Must-have mules! I do not want your must-have mules, your sweat-wicking t-shirt, your timeless luxe cashmere turtleneck. Fuck that. I would prefer not to.

I hate your curated experiences and your luxury wellness resorts. I hate yoga retreats, trance breathing workshops, VIP coaching packages. I hate longevity tech. If you are the 23 year old owner of a startup that makes a clever product to help me kick my phone addiction, but it turns out to be almost intolerably buggy on my iPhone, I hate you for selling it to me without warning that it is intolerably buggy on my iPhone. I know you were probably counting on me losing it or forgetting to ask for a return label in time to return it. You were counting on me being so beaten down by finding the gray button or the almost invisible link or the late-appearing x that I give up on trying to return the buggy product. You and the entire rest of the world trying to sell me things are counting on that, my basic acquiescence to shitty patterns and dark UX and buggy web apps. You didn’t reckon on all this hate. You didn’t realize how deeply I have become a bartleby, how stubborn I have become in the face of an entire world that is designed to maximize profit, to steal my time, my energy, my attention, and my money. You didn’t understand how even the word Product makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth these days.

Product. Reach. Maximize. 10x. Profit. Growth. Engagement. Recurring Revenue. LLMs. The Blockchain. Upgrade. VIP. Customer. Fuck that. I would prefer not to.

I resent my every interaction with an automated system designed to frustrate or repel me from accomplishing whatever it is I want to do and instead to herd me along whatever path it’s been designed to herd me along, not the path it wants, because an automated system wants nothing, but the path that PEOPLE, human people! put in place in order to maximize the extraction of value from me, mash me up into money. This entire system we have going here is one villainous machine with giant suction cups all over our bodies, sucking out our very lives. Mashing us up into money for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and a few dozen other men. I hate it. I am not here on this earth to be mashed up into money for the sake of Capital. I would prefer not to, and when I mean I would prefer not to, I mean I absolutely fucking refuse to, I’d like to see you try, I am having absolutely none of it.

Call me an ill-tempered luddite. I don’t care. The luddites were actually really fucking cool, I’d be honored to stand in the reflected glow of the luddites. Tell me how Tech has done so many beautiful good things in the world. I will point you to the wanton destruction of our federal government, the cruelty, the carelessness, the violence at the heart of the project the executive branch is currently engaged in, and you will say yes, yes, i see that this is terrible, but surely this is not the fault of the technology itself? And I will say of course not, the tech itself is almost a distraction, the entire worldview of the industry is the problem, the moral bankruptcy of the idea that a small number of Great Men will save us with their especially clever brains and their especially entrepreneurial instincts, just let them automate it all.

You think I will consent to all your cookies because it is easier, but you have not reckoned on my hatred and my stubborness. I do not consent. You think I will fall into line about AI and finally enable it on something or other, but I am Bartleby the Scrivener and I would fucking prefer not to.

I understand, of course, that I should be building something beautiful instead of hating everything, or so I am told by so many of the newsletters that are offering me bold imaginaries of the future and five quick actions I can take today to fight fascism. I am aware that hating everything and stubbornly preferring not to is an unpopular position these days. Too negative. What are you building, though, Amy? What is YOUR VISION for the future?

I do have a dream, and in my dream, lots of us have jackhammers and we are using them on all the asphalt parking lots all over our city and we are planting kitchen gardens and pollinator gardens and drainage gardens and food forests where the parking lots used to be. I do have a dream, and in it, 132 days of the year are festival days and on those days we don sequined dresses and sneakers and we eat and dance all day long, and all the kids are running around playing in the pollinator gardens and the food forests and nobody is scolding the parents for not knowing precisely where their children are at every hour of the day.

Yes, I’ve got a motherfucking dream, and in it, I never have to talk to a chatbot ever again, I talk to a person, and we joke about the weather while helping each other get something kind of annoying done. I have a dream, and it is not to die every day by the thousand cuts of living in a society that cares only for profit, not to spend my precious time dodging upsells and scammers and bots and advertisers and businesses that want my data. My dream is not to be stuck inside of boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes, looking for the grayed out x, not to perceive my entire society, the entire internet, as an escape room I’m desperate to escape from, because instead of a thousand cuts or suction cups or mosquito bites there’s a there there, a world beyond working, getting, spending, extracting.

So yeah, this present situation: I would prefer not to, with a level of refusal that is increasingly approaching what the psychiatrists would call Pathological Demand Avoidance, but which feels to me like a stubborn resistance forged into steel and made stronger with every demand that I accept the cookies, return to my abandoned shopping cart, fill out this survey, enable notifications, watch this ad, add this product too.

I do not want to be thrown in a blender and mashed up into money.

My dreams are bigger than your goddamn subscription service or your luxury at-home magnesium IV infusion service.

Fuck you, no.

I want love and courage. I want truth, democracy, and solidarity. I want to touch grass and talk to humans. I will find none of these things on your internet, Horatio, I must look in heaven and on earth for them.

anyways, find me in IRL if you can. Or send me an email. I still read emails from humans. Substack wants you to comment rather than reply, but I would rather you reply than comment.

Good luck out there. Remember that sometimes stubborn refusal is valuable in itself. Or, at least, I hope so, because that’s pretty much what I have right now.

As the sign says, “shit is fucked up and stuff.” I am not sure which of the thousand and twelve million things that have happened in the last month sent me over the fucking edge this time, but it definitely has a lot to do with elon musk, who, let it be said, I did previously flip out over, in December 2022, and let me tell you, it is almost no consolation to have been right about that:

I will always bet against cruelty, not because I think I’ll win that bet, but because I don’t choose every day to go on living so that I can throw in with powerful men who behave badly. Yes, I’m talking about Elon Musk.

Also in regard to Elon Musk, as I tweeted yesterday: My problem with him is not that he's a narcissistic baby, although he is that. It's that he is a powerful fascist with a powerful platform who is using that platform to advance fascist interests & at the same time (and relatedly) is shifting the Overton window on how bosses can treat workers.

Here’s a Woe I wrote about how current developments driven by Musk made me actually lose my whole mind for a minute, and how I got it back. Here’s a poem I wrote about it too.

Okay, it’s actually some tiny, tiny consolation. Because it sucks to keep thinking “maybe I’m overreacting, everyone thinks I’m overreacting, it would be better if I’m overreacting, but I kinda don’t think I am?” One of the things that can get a person down is when things that sound alarming are treated like other people like they are not so alarming. No big deal.

Trump declared himself a king today, and the New York Times described this as a “fondness for regal themes” so yeah, shit is fucked up and stuff.

Anyways, I just spent 5 hours watching season 1 of xo, kitty, a tv show on netflix that doesn’t have just love triangles, but love dodecahedrons. plus there’s a lot of queerness, and plus it takes place in Seoul, a place that seems newly appealing since the gov’t of south korea seems up to the task of preventing an autocratic takeover, and ours, well, jury still out.

Anyways the fuckers have got me down, and I’m in my feels about it, and everything feels very, very, very hard. It’s hard to get up, and it’s hard to go anywhere, and it’s hard to concentrate. It’s hard to drag myself to the bathroom to go pee. It was hard to drag myself to the studio to do basically nothing all day, just to be out of the house, It’s just hard. I am a person who has more than the average share of despair and internal screaming in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. These are probably the worst times I’ve yet seen in my life.

So yes, the fuckers have got me down.

Even when I’m down though, I still know what the truth is. I still know what and who I love, and what I value. I can cling to reality. Reality is not pretty right now, but it has a solidity to it that is reassuring. (It does! Not everything that is solid just melts into air!)

What’s real? Love, that’s real. G.K. Chesterton built his whole theology on top of love. Found in my notebook, from his notebooks: ““the fact unshakeable by doubts or theories that I love a human being.”

Hell yeah! I love a lot of human beings. (So many!) I am not always good at loving them, because loving people is very hard, but it’s also so easy, because people can be very lovable.

Love is real, folks, it really is. And courage is real. Sometimes we do courageous things, and then we lie down on a futon and binge a soap opera about queer high school students. Because isn’t it kind of beautiful, a teenager calling her dad from across the world to say “I think I’m bi, or pan, or … fluid” in utter confusion, and her dad saying “well I don’t know what pan or fluid are, but I’m so glad you’re safe”.

I’m bi or pan or … fluid, too, and yes the fuckers have got me down, but they didn’t make me straight. They took any mention of trans people down from the Stonewall Inn Monument, but we still know the truth. Trump can call himself a king, he can say he is above the law, he can try to steamroll us all into believing it's true, but it isn’t. That man is a liar who doesn’t even love himself, he does not know what love is.

I know what love is. That’s the truth, and I still have the truth.

So yeah, right now I’m down. But even down I am not out, I am just resting in the truth: the awful reality, the terrible things that have been done, are being done, the Nazism, the fascism, the sledgehammers of destruction, the endless lies.

The sun still rises in the east. Trump is not a king. Musk is not an altruistic business genius. He’s a fucking Nazi. Yes, the Nazi salute was a Nazi Salute. No, Ukraine did not start that war. Yes, many people are resisting, in lots of different ways, and lots of us, when we’re not lying on a futon watching tv, are also building.

Resisting and building in the name of love and in the name of truth and in the name of all that’s holy (moss, especially, and slugs and mushrooms, and sunsets).

In the name of all that’s holy, yes, the fuckers have got me down, they sure have, but also, they can’t take the truth or the love from me.

LIKE I SAID:

I will always bet against cruelty, not because I think I’ll win that bet, but because I don’t choose every day to go on living so that I can throw in with powerful men who behave badly.

I’m for the love, and for the truth, even when it’s complicated. I’m for the love and the truth even when I’m slumped on a futon on a floor. I’m for the love and the truth even when I’m so stuck that I think “move, go get your clean laundry” for a full four hours before actually managing to move and get my laundry.

Those motherfuckers trying to spread as much cruelty and misery as possible — I do not think they know what love or truth are.

They have probably never admired a patch of moss in their entire lives. Meanwhile, look at all that moss!

Down but not out, y’all. I’ll be back up, any second now, or, um, just as soon as I get through season two.

xo, Amy

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Well, here we are.

Every couple of hours I feel overwhelmed with despair and I think “why do I feel so bad?” and then I remember. A friend reassures me over text that it’s nearly impossible to be upbeat at this time for more than an hour or two, even assuming that you are not, like me, a person who is congenitally suicidal. “I know, I know,” I write back to him, “but I like it better when I’m crying over ostensibly private, personal, or merely existential pain than when I find that I’m holding all this anxiety, paranoia, and grief in my body due to very real actual wanton and cruel destruction.”

Still, here we are. We persist. I will do what I always try to do and tell you how I’m persisting these days.

First, and this is really important, I’ve heard people say “oh, the resistance has just collapsed, this time around” and that does seem true, from the external looks of things. In prior years it felt like we were all out protesting all the damn time, it seemed, with the crowds in the streets in their pussy hats and the crowds at the airports welcoming immigrants, we were all very loud. And we yelled especially loudly on social media, with our black squares and our slogans.

In contrast, right now, resistance does appear muted.

I don’t really find this to be a sign that resistance has collapsed so much as an accurate reflection of the facts on the ground.

We do not have the organizational capacity or unity or coalition to, for example, mount a general strike, here in the U.S., a thing which truly can be so disruptive as to move even our billionaire overlords to make concessions. We just don’t. I think we are building it — the labor movement has been building it, we can continue to be building structures and engaging in person to person political education that might later result in the ability to call a general strike, but right now I think the best anyone could muster would be something large enough to get the national guard or the military or a bunch of proud boys out there to crush it, but not large enough to actually bring the entire economy to a grinding halt. (Of course between deportations and tariffs, Trump may manage to do that himself).

N.B., I’m not a political strategist or a union organizer or an expert in protest movements or organizing, I have no idea really what I’m talking about here, but this is, in any case, how I see things.

Instead of these loud masses of short-lived street protests and performative agonizing on social media, I think something different is going on.

First, people are scared, and rightfully so. And the fear feels different than in 2017, less hysterical, more real. For me anyways, for the people I am closest to.

I think people are working hard to resist the urge to fall victim to the shock and awe campaign being waged now from the Oval Office and the billionaire’s supervillain superyachts. Which is really important, not to become paralyzed by hysterical fear.

And yet at the same time, pretty much everyone who isn’t a billionaire does have something real and urgent to fear: from their passport being invalidated because of a gender marker to being fired outright for being a ‘DEI hire’ to retroactively LOSING BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP (!?) even though we all know perfectly well that’s wildly unconstitutional, to not being able to get hormonal contraception to losing their livelihood to having their entire construction team or kitchen crew deported or go into hiding to not being able to get their crops harvested to not being able to get the parts to repair their refrigerator to not knowing whether bird flu is coming for us or their same-sex marriage will be made illegal or their children will be taken away from them for the crime of being trans or their health insurer will drop them for the crime of being sick. WHO IS NOT FACING A REAL AND PRESENT DANGER here, except for the billionaires? (If you believe you are not, I urge you to re-examine that assumption.)

In such circumstances, loud resistance, resistance that is obvious to everyone, is a choice, but it is not the only choice. In such circumstances, what you say in writing and to whom you tell your (or other peoples’) secrets — well, there’s bravery, and there’s carelessness, and this is a time to be brave, absolutely, but carelessness is not bravery, it’s just carelessness.

I am a person who writes a lot, publicly, but believe me, I haven’t told you everything I’m up to these days and every single opinion I have on everything, and I won’t. I don’t write down everything I think about and everything I wish for and hope for and plan for. I’ve been using Signal a lot more, and I would encourage you to also. I’m also prioritizing in-person conversations.

There is more to my own resistance than meets the eye, is my point, and I don’t believe I am the only person for whom this is true.

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*****

There are of course some kinds of institutions and groups we expect to be brave in public writing. (Looking at you, every single media outlet that decided to make a “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t” story about Elon Musk’s “enthusiastic gesture”.) And all of us are going to have to be brave in speech and in writing, AT SOME TIMES. But, again, being brave is different from being careless. I think it is a very good time for each of us to make sure that if we get in trouble for something, it was for being brave, and not for careless words written under false assumptions of privacy or ideas about free speech on ‘public’ platforms.

Relatedly: I’m reminding myself that information I have about other people, for example, their gender identity, sex assigned at birth, sexuality, pregnancy or reproductive status, immigration status, parents’ immigration status, disability status — is not mine to share. Like, it’s time to err on the side of caution and assume people would like their privacy EVEN IF in the past I know this information wasn’t considered especially secret. In the current environment, some things people may have considered to be uncontroversial, open knowledge, they may no longer consider to be that way.

It is not my job to be ‘brave’ (careless) for other people by assuming their calculations of risk have not been radically altered by the federal government changeover.

So basically, overall, I am thinking carefully right now about what I say, when I say it, to whom, and to what end. I do not think this is a sign that I am “obeying in advance” but rather a sign that I’m being strategic about risk. You might just call me paranoid, and certainly I have always been on the paranoid side of things. I guess I’m okay with that.

I wrote an essay sort of about this a couple years back, called On Trigger Discipline. You’re likely not clicking through to read it because who has time for that, so here’s the money quote:

Will I stand by everything I said and the tone in which I said it in five years? Can’t be sure. Do I stand by it now? As best as I can, yes. What’s my point? My point is that if you think I can be ignored because I’m just mean or emotional or angry or ranting, I’m just some woman with a newsletter, after all, I’m just shooting my mouth off — then you misunderstand the project in which I am here engaged.

A newsletter issue that’s been through three rounds of review with three different people isn’t a rant.

To the extent that it sounds angry, that is intentional. To the extent that it feels accusatory, that is intentional. To the extent that its audience is not in fact the audience it pretends is its audience, that is intentional.

It just feels like a good time to exercise trigger discipline with our words, both what we say and where we say it, is all. (This does not actually come easy for me, which is probably why I keep exhorting you to do it).

*****

The other side of this is that I’m trying to remember to give grace to other people who I perceive as just ‘going on with their lives’.

I don’t know what other people are doing privately, what they are talking about at their dinner table, what they are quietly slow-rolling at work or stocking up on at home, what they are learning how to do or what they are reading or who they are protecting or befriending or quietly covering for in one way or another.

The age of context-collapsed performative social media “shocked, shocked” reactions is over, and I think it is our job to resist in practical, concrete ways and to continue to live, continue to insist on our right to live, and to be brave when we can be and to be careful when we must, to educate one another on what it means to live under autocracy, to cultivate our quiet little mutual aid networks and private spaces where we can be free and honest and authentic with one another, and to build that connected power for whatever comes next, while saving our breath and our energy from being depleted on every little insanity that is being thrown our way.

The Democratic establishment will not protect us. I fear that for those of us proud to live in Blue states, our blue states will also not protect us. Our media will not protect us. WE PROTECT US.

****

Here are a few other things:

• I have been in tech since 1999 and one thing I can assure you of is it has never, never, never lacked for masculine energy.

• There’s a lot of issues happening right now. We have to pick and choose what things we specifically can focus on. I keep myself up-to-date on:

  • reproductive health stuff - largely but not entirely via Jessica Valenti’s abortion every day.

  • LGBTQ+ stuff, largely but not entirely via Erin in the Morning

  • tech stuff: 404 media, paris marx, people

  • Brookline stuff, in part via our local news org, Brookline.news

  • Everything else, I look at The Guardian a couple times a day.

• a friend sent me a link to this reel (I know, I am also tired of IG) about hypernormalization, i.e. we all know this ship is sinking but we sort of pretend not to know it. I found it helpful.

• this is a very small book. it has some very useful lessons. I’ve talked about it before. It’s good. I like to re-read it.

• I liked this thread on bluesky about continuing to live anyways because time is always short.

• I’m on bluesky but I’m really trying not to spend too much time on any social media at all because it makes me hysterical while also rotting my brain. I’m instead prioritizing: reading books that I checked out from the library (saves money, also prevents governments from closing libraries down because nobody uses them anymore!!!), reading and writing essays, writing long emails to people I may or may not know well enough to be writing long emails to (hi!) and hanging out in person or on the phone.

• thru-hike book update: I continue to write it, my goal (not big, hairy, or audacious) is to have a first draft of it done by my next birthday.

• art update: I continue to make art, and now you can see some of it on my website.

• coaching: yeah I still do this, have a free call to discuss here.

• feel free to smash reply and write me a long email.

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this picture is just cool. there is no other reason it is here.

In December (and these are the only numbers I will give) I spend 12-14 hours in bed, 9 or 10 of those asleep, having nightmares. In December I wake up crying from the nightmares and sometimes I cry all day. In December 2012 I cried so much that I developed a hacking cough and when I went to the doctor about the hacking cough he said my tears were draining down the back of my throat and irritating it. My friend Nat said “Congratulations, you are a walking Cure song.”

Some days I ask Max to go for a walk with me so I’m sure to leave the house. I go to my studio and I can’t think and I feel empty and lost, so I wander around it in a daze making things. I add another layer of paint to a painting that doesn’t seem to be ready yet. I tear open canvases with a box cutter and then I sew them back up again with an upholstery needle and waxed cotton thread. I mess with my lighting and take pictures of myself messing with the lighting. I put on a playlist of Moby, Portishead, and Bjork, and I dance. Sometimes these things make me feel better, sometimes not.

***

I’ve been reading a lot, mostly memoirs, and I’m getting a feel for reading again that is comforting. I was an early reader, a fast reader, a devout, desperate and devouring reader. Like many such readers, as I grew up and the internet and varied responsibilities took over my life, I ran out of time and attention and the knack for it, and it’s been hard to get back, but it’s coming, finally, and it’s wonderful.

There are a lot of things that I can’t do very well in December, but at least I can do a lot of reading.

And — because I am writing a memoir, because I am trying now to be some other way than I had been, to live a different kind of life, the reading feels necessary, important, not just or at least not only avoidance and stasis. I read and I walk to the studio and I do things at the studio and I try to remember that I am not alone in the world, and that even though this December feels like a mildly bad trip of indeterminate length, it’s only mildly bad, not excruciating, or at least, it is not excruciating every single day, only many days. Not as bad as the December I became a walking Cure song, or the one in which I had a demon lodged in my back, right under my shoulder blade, and I could not get it out. Just a regular bad December.

The other day Max was walking me to the studio and I said, apropos of nothing, “I should have voted for Bernie in the primary.” And Max said “You’re going all the way back to 2016 to find something to blame yourself for?” Of course I am, it’s December. Everything in the world is my fault, and meanwhile I am so preoccupied with my own pain that I can barely do any of the things I ought to be doing for the general continuance of my household, my self, my community, etc. Sometimes I make a cool thing though. I made this thing for my younger child’s 18th birthday. It’s got purple twinkle lights.

I took this cool picture while staring directly into a strobe light at the studio yesterday. The dress is a vintage Marimekko dress that does not, at present, fit me, but makes a nice wall hanging for the moment.

***

Okay, but the urge to answer the question this time of year is hard to resist, so let me try to answer, a real answer, not a #wrapped one:

I learned to hike, then I hiked. When I got back from hiking, I learned to be back from hiking, and I rented an art studio and now I am learning to make art again and I am writing about the hiking. Still a lot of despair, but a lot more strength, a little more joy.

I suppose other things happened. But that is the arc of my year, simpler than many previous years, less cluttered, certainly. It looks almost spare, it looks almost empty, it looks almost like I didn’t exist at all, did nothing, had no purpose, like I was a ghost. Ghost pipe, I called myself on the trail. I have been learning to disappear my fraught self, with its Anxieties and Accomplishments (my computer wanted me to say accountability, there, but that is not what I wanted to say), to become more like a ghost, less focused on justifying my existence in the world with a lot of busyness and importance, with a lot of impressive stats.

I have no stats.

Like I said, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but I can give you no numbers on that. I walk a lot more than I used to, day to day, but I have no numbers to give you there either.

I can’t even accurately tell you how many miles I walked this summer on the trail because I did not track them all. It was more than 275, which is the approximate length of that trail, but I don’t know exactly how many more. I don’t know how many .2 mile spur trails to summits or water sources or shelters I walked. I don’t know how many miles I walked in towns, to the post office and back, to the laundromat, to the outfitters, to the place with the kombucha or the french fries or the grilled cheese sandwich with caramelized onions.

I can’t tell you how many pieces of art I’ve made since moving into the studio. I can’t tell you how many photos I’ve taken or words I’ve written. I do not know how many times I have said I love you, can’t count the number of people to whom I’ve said it. Don’t know exactly how many times to how many people I have wanted to say it, and didn’t. It’s more than 0, which is not great, because when you love people you should tell them, and often, we all need to hear that we are loved.

I don’t know how many times I had to prick the black cat’s ear to get a drop of blood to check his glucose levels to adjust his insulin dosage. I don’t know how often I had to tell someone in my household where they could find something they couldn’t find without me. I don’t know how many packets of watermelon flavored electrolyte solution I used over the summer, or how many of those tiny mint chocolate star cookies in the green box from Trader Joe’s I ate.

What I have from the year is a different relationship to my body, an expanded sense of possibilities in the world, a creative life that feels more vibrant — no, vibrato — than it has in a long while, and an urge to keep walking, even if I do not know where it is I go.

I do not expect 2025 to be a relaxed, easy year, for any of us. But I’ve done my best to do the things I felt I needed to do to prepare for whatever chaos we have coming our way come January, and I will try to stay open to whatever comes and what that moment seems to demand of me.

I am going to try not to be distracted by what other people demand of me or what other people think a moment demands of me, but to live really in the self-respect that requires me, as Joan Didion famously wrote, to be able to sleep in the bed I have made for myself (even if that means making my peace with the amount of time I will likely to continue spending in that bed every December).

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect,” wrote Didion.

Maybe the journey I am on for which I have no numbers to give is a journey to give myself back to myself. A chorus in my head laughs derisively at this — ‘you think you ever put anyone or anything else first? Is that what you think? You should have voted for Bernie in the primary!’— but I am trying not to listen to that chorus, it’s not especially kind and it is not especially trustworthy.

I can’t tell you how many times in 2024 I have had to turn my back on that chorus in order to do something I wanted to do, but it’s a lot.

Anyways, that was my year.

And here are some of the books I read this month, in case you want to read any of them too. (These are not links because it felt like too much trouble to put links in, I checked all these out from the library anyways):

• Why be happy when you could be normal?- Jeannette Winterson

• The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

• Circe - Madeline Miller

• Doppelgänger - Naomi Klein

• Slow Days, Fast Company - Eve Babitz

Wishing everyone some measure of joy, plenty of strength, and a shit-ton of self-respect in the new year.

xo, Amy

An example: there’s this abortion fund that operates in my home state of Florida that I have been giving money to for a while now. And I know, because police did this to a bail fund in Atlanta that was doing nothing more than bailing out Cop City protestors who were arrested in the course of protesting, that I could, in future, maybe get in trouble for my donations to the abortion fund. In Atlanta, they made a raid and arrested all the people organizing the bail fund and then they charged them under RICO, for money laundering and racketeering. This is not what RICO is for. RICO charges broadly are intended to target organized crime, not protestors.1

In Texas, there’s legislation pending right now to charge abortion funds under RICO.

I live in a state, Massachusetts, with very good shield laws, but if the shield laws are somehow overridden by the federal government, I worry that my donations could be considered to be funding illegal activity. I worry that I could be arrested just for giving money.

Similarly, in the past year I joined, attended protests put on by, and gave money to a Jewish-led peace organization. Could a government hostile to organizations that call what is happening in Palestine a genocide decide that such organizations are supporting terrorism?

Absolutely.

And the list goes on.

I think about all the things I give to and do that the incoming government will be hostile to and my first, overwhelming, embarrassing instinct is to hide. Stop giving. Stop showing up. Say I changed my mind. I no longer support that. I’ve learned the error of my ways.

Doing this wouldn’t even make me safe, and I know it. I’m not a lawyer, and of course I want all the lawyers pushing back against that kind of bullshit as much as possible, it’s an incredibly important part of resisting autocracy.2 But I worry that somehow I could still get in vague trouble for actions I took in the past, and pretty much anyone can get into trouble with the law just from living their damn life, if the people who make or enforce the law are out to get them, which, incidentally, is why you should never, ever, talk to the police.3 I don’t think anyone’s coming after me, personally, right away, but I sure hope Jack Smith is working on his asylum applications, because I am really, really worried about him.

So I know this, I know there’s no real safety to be had, and yet I still have this overwhelming urge to just cancel all the donations, protest nothing ever again, keep my fucking head down, because actually I do not want to go to prison. I have been locked up and I did not like it. Nobody has even threatened me with a cage full of rats ready to eat my face, but still, I want not to exist in any way that will turn the eye of Sauron upon me.

That urge is exactly what Timothy Snyder was talking about in his essential little book On Tyranny, lesson 1 “Do not obey in advance.” Do not teach an autocrat what he can have for free, because you are afraid. Make him work for his power, at the very least.4

Roxane Gay says something similar in an op-ed in the New York Times (gifted article, so you shouldn’t hit a paywall):

[T]o suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people, for instance, and all of the other critical issues we care most about, is unacceptable. It is shameful and cowardly. We cannot abandon the most vulnerable communities to assuage the most powerful. Even if we did, it would never be enough. The goal posts would keep moving until progressive politics became indistinguishable from conservative politics. We’re halfway there already.

“Shameful and cowardly,” she says. They are harsh words but I know they are true because I feel the urge myself, and that is exactly what it is: understandable, yes, but also shameful and cowardly.

***

I don’t consider myself an Obey person to begin with, certainly not an Obey in Advance one. I tell you about this because it takes a lot of fear to make me a coward, and that, apparently, is the amount of fear I am feeling right now.

But I don’t want to be a coward. I want to be brave.

So, I do what I always do when I am feeling small and scared and ashamed: I write about it. I am afraid, and I’m mortified at myself that in a moment that clearly demands bravery, I’m struggling already to be brave.

I want you to know I feel that way because I bet some of you are feeling that way too, and I want you to know that I am going to keep trying to be brave anyways, and I want you to keep trying to be brave too, however that looks. Whatever the thing you most need to take a stand on is. I don’t mean do nothing but be brave all the time. I don’t mean don't consider risk, don’t consider anything but rising to this moment, but I do mean realize that it is entirely possible that more and more parts of our lives may be criminalized and that therefore we may all end up as criminals, and we if that happens, we will all have to be brave together to tolerate that.

In moments like this I always come back to finding your people, your trustworthy co-conspirators, whether it’s a conspiracy of getting abortions for people who need them or a conspiracy of making soup or a conspiracy of making art about freedom, of speaking the truth to one another.

It has to be a we. And the we has to expand.

We don’t have good words for this crucial activity, unfortunately. “Networking” sounds like a professional mixer in a hotel conference room, “community-building” sounds like a lot of work involving bad snacks and couches of questionable origin, “building trust” like a ropes course, “organizing” like a lot of shouting. And, while I don’t dispute that those things are valuable activities also, none of them are what I’m talking about.

I mean start with 3 other people you trust enough to tell that you are scared and you feel like a fucking coward (which is what I had to do, before I could tell all the rest of you) and maybe you all hang out every other Tuesday night doing absolutely nothing but playing gin rummy and talking about the state of the world, and then you can build something from there. Build to actions. Build to more connections. Build to a larger solidarity.

I dunno, it seems real small and not at all enough, but I sort of think it might be the beginning of everything.

And, also, now is not the time for me to quit giving to the things I care about because I’m scared in advance. Now is the time to keep giving and know I’m among thousands and thousands of other people who are doing the same. There is safety in those numbers. Not total safety, because that’s not a thing, but more safety.

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On an entirely different aspect of the same topic, fear about the future, here are some of my prepper activities that I have been doing. Some of them I started before the election, and others I didn’t start till after. Some of them are always ongoing, because thinking ahead and being prepared for ordinary disasters is just how I am.

These may or may not feel important to you (they might just seem crazy, which I’m cool with) and you may or may not be able to financially swing them, but anyways here they are:

1. Making sure all the electronics in the household are in working order. For example, I’d been dragging my feet on getting my laptop screen repaired. I took it in this week and now it’s done. At the same time, making sure we’ve got household loaner machines for future repair needs. And, making sure everyone is using a good case for their phone. Phones these days, despite costing a zillion dollar and having a lot of glass on them and not liking water so much, we tend to treat like any other thing we’re carrying around in our pockets constantly. So I’m making sure we are protecting the phones with a slightly heavier duty case than is fashionable. Reason: possible upcoming supply chain disruptions and/or tariffs leading to more expensive repairs and new purchases as well as longer wait times.

2. For the same reason, ordering spare parts for household appliances that we anticipate needing soon (for us, this was a washing machine gasket we know we need to replace).

3. Also to hedge against supply chain/tariff/price gouging/inflation issues: stocking up on foreign goods we like in our household. Our big ones are Campari, Scotch, cocoa, vanilla, and other spices, as well as art and hobby supplies.

4. Restocking 3-d printer spools. There’s a 3-d printer in our home, and someone who knows how to use it. If we can’t buy a doodad, maybe we can make it.

5. We already keep a pretty tight hold on our passport renewal dates, but mine was due to renew at a time where I’m not positive we will have anyone left working at the state department to process it. (I know this sounds possibly overly dramatic, and I don’t care. If Elon Musk is in charge of a Department of Efficiency then things like renewing your passport will become the opposite of efficient.) So I sent it off early. If you or your kids don’t have US passports, now is the time. Also, even though we don’t plan to leave the country permanently (we considered that very seriously already during the Bush years, all the way to getting permanent residency visas to NZ, which we did not end up using), I did look again at our genealogy to see whether we could get second passports for any other country. Nope.

6. Vaccinations: I doubt that even if RFK, Jr. is confirmed that vaccines will come off the market immediately, but I’m making sure everyone in my family is up-to-date on vaccinations, particularly the Tdap, which should be renewed every 10 years and protects against tetanus and whooping cough (which is making a comeback in Boston this year), among other things.

7. Medications: I pre-ordered the next bottle of insulin for the cat. I’m making sure we have as much of our necessary meds on hand as insurance will pay for, and I’d advise folks especially to stock up on things like contraception, emergency contraception, and even mifepristone.

8. Generalized emergency preparedness stuff: we have a giant battery from Anker that we keep in case of prolonged power outages, and a car battery jumper in the car, and a hand crank weather radio, and miscellaneous other stuff like that. All that stuff needs upkeep (the batteries drain eventually whether or not they are used; water needs to be changed every so often, etc.). Do I anticipate all of our infrastructure to immediately fall apart come January 20th? No, this is stuff I do anyways. But with increasing climate disasters and decreasing involvement from the federal government (Trump has previously withheld federal disaster aid from states that piss him off) there is no time like the present to be prepared. I’m not talking guns and bunkers here. I don’t aim for preparedness to hold off the masses; I aim for it so I’m in a position to help my neighbors in disasters. Our backup battery won’t power our entire household; but it will charge my entire building’s phones more than once, if needed. Read Rebecca Solnit on disasters if you want to understand my approach more. If you have 0 idea where even to start on emergency preparedness, ready.gov will get you started.

In other news, winter is coming, despite the continued mild weather, and I’m starting to feel its weight and the weariness that comes along with it. Not just weariness, that is not the right word. The feeling of falling, endlessly, down a dark hole. The desire to stab myself in the face, over and over again. Despite everything I do to hold it at bay.

Still, I persist. I get out of bed. I go to my studio and I make art, I write, I send these little missives, I do resistance band workouts, I invite my friends to hang out, I notice weird light as I walk around the city, take pictures of it. I do what I can.

What else:

I am also accepting photo commissions, and if you are local to me in the Boston area and want to collaborate on a photo shoot or just let me take pictures of you, or visit the studio and make some art or conversation or conspiracy together, or play gin rummy, let me know. Smash that reply button or find me at all things www.amynewell.com . I also have some space for coaching clients, your first conversation is free.

Anyhow, onward and thanks for reading.

Till next update, xo, Amy

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It sure has been a terrible, no-good, very bad week for me and everyone I (think I) know. Actually, it’s likely I know more than one person who voted for a different major party candidate for president than I did, but I don’t know who they are. I’m also pretty sure I know some people who voted for a third party candidate or didn’t vote at all, but I don’t know who they are.

I’ll come back to that.

I don’t have anything especially original to say, but those of you who subscribe to my newsletters presumably do so because you care what I think about and what I’m doing, so I owe it to you in this moment to share that stuff with you.

Here’s the tl;dr if you’re in a hurry:

I think we are facing a very difficult time (which was already true, but now with more difficulty). I am feeling a lot of fear and grief and rage over this. I also think that reacting hysterically in this moment is a waste of my precious time and energy, and that what I’m called to do now is pretty much the same kind of thing I was called to do before the election: be Present. from presence: make art. speak truth. love on my people. do the needful.

What’s the needful? What is needful for me and what is needful for you might be different. What was most needful for me last week and what is most needful for me in this moment also different. The needful is responsive, not reactive. The needful is what adrienne marie brown calls “the next most elegant step”. (and you can read about this in her book Emergent Strategy and AK Press is currently offering the e-book free).

On Wednesday, what felt needful was inviting folks to drop by my apartment for junk food and alcohol and commiseration. A few folks did, throughout the day. Come 6pm, I found myself sitting around my dining room table with Max, our younger child, and three women I’ve known for a while but who’d never met one another before. Max made Negronis for the adults. There was kettle corn. We felt better. Less alone. People who didn’t know each other before now knew each other. I put a few more stitches in the web of connections I have here in this place I call home, and I have come to realize, recently, that knitting that web is part of my work, a needful thing.

I didn’t worry that my apartment is too messy to be ‘hosting’. I didn’t worry that what we had in the way of food was sloppy. I just wanted to sit with people I care about and feel our feelings together. Grieve.

On Thursday what felt needful was to keep working on my book about my thru-hike and to go to therapy. Also a friend asked for a recommendation for a lawyer and so I asked around so I could provide that. ( One thing I love about not being an executive at a tech company anymore is that I have slack time to respond to requests like this. Not unending slack time, but more than I ever had when I had a full-time job managing engineering teams. )

Also, I called my mom and texted a bunch of friends.

On Friday we had an important meeting at our kid’s school and we spent time with my brother.

On Saturday one needful thing was to make some art, so I picked an outfit including a sparkling “Abortion Forever” t-shirt a friend gave me a couple years ago, and I went to my art studio and did a photo shoot. What I like most about this photo is that I look like I’m singing or praying in support of my own and everyone’s bodily autonomy, in a combination of grief and joy. It’s an almost religious moment for me, in light and in shadow.

What was also needful was to show up for a friend’s birthday party and dance with them.

At the birthday party I ran into someone in Somerville politics who knows someone I know from Brookline politics. Mostly we talked about rat birth control, but it was also adding another stitch in the web.

And so it goes.

There will be other needful things. I think I should pay more attention to our public library. Town Meeting is coming up, and, among other things we gotta ban rodenticides to protect the raptors and do some zoning stuff so we can have more housing. I have some vague ideas for small-scale participatory art projects that I can do in my new studio space. Again, what I need to do and what you need to do will be different. None of us can do all the things. But assuaging loneliness, leaning into connection, will be important for us all. It is the only way we will not just survive, but resist.

Here’s a couple things I found useful to read this week:

1. If you want to address your grief:

i know that grief is not comfortable. i know that action is a very good antidote to helplessness, and it might feel more urgent and "productive" to jump straight into movement. but i also know that ignoring grief means that it emerges as anger or rage, deep sorrow, depression and anxiety, exhaustion, illness, loneliness, hatred. i also know that dismissing grief denies us the chance to embrace our humanity, to acknowledge that things are deeply broken and difficult. i also know that avoiding grief limits our capacity to rely on others, that in sharing our emotions and needs we deepen intimacy and strengthen our capacity for vulnerability.

and ignoring our grief is a great way to burn out entirely. we need you for the long haul, friends, not just for right now.

2. If you want to dig into practical next steps, 10 things to do if trump wins (updated for the reality that he did)

3. If you’re feeling apocalyptic and like you might as well die rather than face the next several years: Devon Price on saving each other

The future that we expect is just a fiction we tell ourselves, and it has never been guaranteed. And so, when some dramatic change comes, we can focus not on the loss of certainty, but on the practicalities: finding shelter, getting fed, and keeping the people around us as safe as we can. This is already what life is about — and we’re all more practiced in survival than we might think.

Here’s a small iphone data safety tip, courtesy of a commenter on 404 media: “Holding lock and volume (to show the power off slider) also disables biometric ID until passcode is entered” Why would you want to disable biometric ID? Because you are legally entitled not to enter your passcode into your phone when asked by law enforcement, but you are not legally entitled to refusing to show your face for Face ID.

Finally: I know lots of people won’t be with me on this, but I’ve decided not to waste my energy on hating everyone who voted for Trump or didn’t vote or voted for a third party candidate. People in the United States are not the only people in the history of the world to make horrible choices in leadership. Anger, yes. Grief, yes. But I’m not going to waste time hating 74 million people for filling in one bubble I think was a very bad bubble to fill in when there’s a handful of billionaires who funded and planned and propagandized and therefore bear far, far more responsibility for this outcome than any one of those 74 million individuals. I hate the ideologues at the Heritage Foundation and the people who worked on Project 2025. I hate the propagandists like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson who convinced people Trump would be better for them. I hate Elon Musk, a lot, and Trump, a lot. That’s a plenty long list of people to hate. I just cannot hate 74 million people. It’s too many. I would curdle under the weight of all that hate, and how is that useful?

 I will not be shilling for my own stuff this newsletter. But Abortion, Every Day (reproductive health) and Erin in the Morning (trans issues) are good newsletters to support and The Guardian is a good newspaper to support.

xo,

amy

I’ve been busy. For me, the fall equinox typically ushers in a period of increased and ambitious choice-making. You could medicalize this if you want and say the rapidly changing day length induces hypomania, and that’s true enough, but also I rely on such times to propel myself forward, into whatever the next thing is. The part of my self that is Fire sets some blazes going, lights the way. If I’m lucky, what I start in September and October, if I start it with enough clarity and intention, becomes a lighted path I can follow through the winter months, when I have no fire in me, just the memory of it.

I have finally realized, as I settle into my 50th year, that my manic self is not wrong about what I want. Sometimes some of that energy gets shunted into things that are poor substitutes for what I want, like new shoes. Sometimes what I want is neither pretty nor appropriate, which is awkward, but nonetheless, it’s what I want. Sometimes I think what I want is so bad, makes me such a terrible person, that instead of going after what I want I turn all that energy into destroying the part of me that wants it (this gets ugly fast and never works).

I do not speak for other people about what their manias are like, but I have finally accepted that Manic Amy is not fundamentally wrong about what I want, but in fact wants what I want with the flaming clarity of the sunlight slanting through the autumn ivy at my window, the clarity of a still glowing red maple leaf. Manic Amy is not a false prophet of my desires, but often the only person willing to want them so hard that they tumble into reality.

No this is not usually a comfortable time, it does not feel good to be inside the skin of a prophet, it is not always fun to understand what one wants, and it is not always possible to go after it. I have often been too scared to, and that was sometimes, in the past, why I instead bought so many clothes. It is easier to buy things to dress for the person you would like to be than it is to become her, and I don’t mean that dressing the part is not important, but just because a person has purchased too many tiaras doesn’t mean they have become a queen.

I’m sure you’re impatient. What does this all mean, Amy? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Two things:

I rented a room of my own.

I signed a year-long lease of a 320 sq ft art studio about a half an hour walk from my apartment. I decided I have been making do with corners of rooms and rooftops and walk-in closets for long enough, and that to do the work I need to do now, make the things I want to make, I need a room of my own. (Some of the art I want to make is large).

This room has a window, and a door that locks. I will write in it, and I will paint in it, and I will take photographs in it, and I will invite my friends to take respite in it and maybe even, sometimes, I will nap in it. As I always do, I feel like a selfish asshole for doing this, but when I want something so desperately that I am willing to let myself and other people (if necessary) call me a selfish asshole for wanting it, I have learned, finally, that it is a pretty bad idea to insist on making a show of self-sacrifice and not just instead getting the thing.

This particular studio was a remarkable stroke of luck, and the Goddess does not look kindly on those who reject their good luck because other people didn’t get it or couldn’t have it or because someone might think they’re selfish or because they did not have to actually bleed for it. I have bled plenty, and I’ve sacrificed plenty of what I wanted for the sake of some other good, and I am pleased as punch that I let myself have this glorious, glorious space.

The lease starts on November 1st, and I will have a whole year to learn what I can make when I have that kind of space to make it. I’m unbelievably excited about it.

I also committed to writing a book.

Which book? you ask. The one about the thru-hike. But it’s also about a lot of other stuff. It’s going to be amazing, and I’m so excited to finally commit to writing a book. I have a date in mind by which I’d like to finish a solid draft, but I’ve only spoken with a couple of people about that, so far. It’s not ready to be a public date.

I have tried to write a lot of books in my life; in fact, one of the things I have always known I wanted to do is write books. I have a depressing number of journal entries over the years that purport to explain exactly why writing a book isn’t possible or desirable for me. I am full of justifications for why I haven’t done it, can’t do it, don’t even want to do it, will never do it, will die perfectly happy never having written a book, and all of that is bullshit because manic Amy always wants to write a fucking book, says of course you should do this, you have not stopped writing words since you could write them.

Of course nothing else, no amount of newsletter or blog or essay or article or poem or angry letter to blue cross will ever fill that need for you, you can run from it forever if you like but do you really want to die not having written a single book?

No, I really don’t. The book is coming. The flame has been lit. The path is not fully clear but I can see, at least, the next turn.

I hope you want to read this book. I hope you’ll say supportive things to me about it, and maybe throw me a paid subscription if you want to materially support its becoming.

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And I will keep you posted on how it’s going and I will let you know when I have a specific timeline I’m ready to share.

Now for other stuff:

I went to visit my parents in my hometown in Florida, and I have safely returned. The key to coming home safely from Florida is not to accept a margarita from anyone while you are there. If you do, you are condemned to waste away in Margaritaville for half of every year, like Persephone.

I had a few beers, but no margaritas. I went kayaking with my mom and saw some amazing birds. We were in this two-person inflatable kayak that was a little long in the tooth, and sometime during our trip the kayak lost its rudder. My mom and I had to spend twice as much time getting back to the boat launch as we’d spent paddling away, because we kept veering wildly off-course. We thought this was very funny, somehow, and it was very healing for my relationship with my mom, which, like all such relationships, is very complicated and hasn’t always been that great. I also got to enjoy a beautiful moment with my father, freaking out because he changed the channel 20 seconds before the end of a Washington Commanders game that he believed was definitively lost, only to miss an incredible hail mary pass that caused them to win. I don’t really follow football, but my dad’s followed the DC team since I was a kid and it was fun to share at least the replay moment with him. (honestly, it’s worth watching, even if you don’t care about football).

Another day we went out to the wildlife refuge and saw many, many birds, including several Anhingas, whose wings are indescribably beautiful and really don’t look mortal in the least. Also I got sunburnt and am covered in mosquito bites, and somehow Florida mosquitoes make much bigger welts on me than the mosquitoes up here do, I don’t know why that is.

It was a good visit to my parents and to Florida and I’m also very happy to be home in Boston now.

Um, the takeaway I guess is that even if you have spent years struggling with family relationships, sometimes the passage of time or some change in people’s lives or some alchemy just makes them less of a damn struggle, and you get to spend slightly more time loving the people you love and slightly less time at odds with them.

Here’s a sunset I saw on my last night there:

A plug (about someone else):

One of the things I decided to give myself (I know, I’m giving myself a lot these days) is some actual help writing the book that I am writing. I have been working with a developmental editor on the book. Her name is Hanne Blank Boyd and I have known of her and read things she’s written and subscribed to her reasons not to quit in one form or another since before substack was a twinkle in a founder’s eye, and while of course I am a very long way from finishing the book (I’m just starting it!) I feel hopeful about it in part because she has already been so helpful and encouraging about it. Hanne is also running a cool group program for making your dreams real and she also does other consulting and coaching and while I haven’t read all her books, I believe they are all worth reading. Anyhoo.

Two plugs about me:

Coaching/consulting: I like helping engineers and the people who lead them. If you could use some help from a baba yaga type who has been around in the industry for far too long, let’s chat. I’m experimenting with a sliding scale for my coaching so that it’s more accessible to folks who especially might need/want my queer femme bipolar ex-VPE weirdo perspective on their stuffs, but regardless, your first conversation with me is always free (although I do accept tips). Feel free to also smash that reply button and reach out over email.

Photo and art collabs! (boston local, mainly): I hope to do some really interesting photo projects once I move into my studio, and I’m looking for folks who might want to participate or collaborate in one way or another. You might want to do that by commissioning some work from me, or maybe you have a photo project yourself that you want me to collaborate on as a model/stylist/photographer etc. Or maybe you might like to rent my studio for a project of your own! You can just smash that reply button and get in touch with me!

The donkey/elephant in the room:

The US presidential election is nigh. I urge my US readers to cast their votes for Harris and if they mailed in ballots to follow up to ensure that their mail-in ballots made it all the way to be counted. No, I’m not going to sell you some crap about how what’s important is just voting, whoever you vote for. It actually matters a lot to me that we not elect a racist misogynist sociopath who would rule as a dictator and gives 0 fucks about anyone but himself and also would empower other racist misogynist sociopaths (like Elon Musk) .

Yes, I remain enraged at the fact that our nation is aiding and abetting a genocide, but Trump becoming president will not make that situation better. Voting for a third party candidate or not voting so your hands remain clean will not stop that genocide. Voting for Kamala Harris probably will also not stop the genocide, but Trump being president will definitely make it much, much worse. Also it would make so many other things in the world much worse. I understand other people have passionate other opinions on this, and I respect that, but this is my publication and here I get to say what I think.

Jeff Bezos may tell the Washington Post it can no longer make endorsements, but at least for the moment, I am still allowed to, and I endorse Kamala Harris for President.1

Also on the topic of the election:

I would like to remind everyone that this election is too close to call. Don’t look at the polls. Do whatever the things you are doing to feel slightly more like you are influencing things than watching helplessly, if that helps; spend less time watching helplessly, if that helps. I am not especially optimistic, but I am also not preemptively assuming the bad thing will happen, because if the bad thing is going to happen, I can deal with that when it comes.

I’ve been reading this great series of fae detective novels lately2, that my friend Avdi turned me on to, and in one of them, October Daye, the main character, is freaking out about something bad that hasn’t quite happened yet. And she is with the sea witch, a truly terrifying being, and they have the following conversation:

“Stop,” she said, not unkindly. “You’re chasing the tide again, and you’re never going to catch it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your head. It’s got its own undertow, you know, and if you swim too deep, it can suck you down. You can’t chase the tide. You need to stay on the shore and let it come to you.”3

For the next week, we’re all gonna find it pretty easy to be swept out to sea by our own damn brains. Let’s not let that happen. We do not have to drown in this moment. We can stand on the shore with some strength in our legs, holding on to one another, and the tide will come in, and we will do what we need to do, together, and we will not have drowned ourselves in fear and sorrow before the fearful, sorrowful thing even happened. The future is NOT A DONE DEAL, and we do not know exactly what it will bring, however much we pretend we do or wish we did.

Hold your people close, stand strong, and take care of yourself. Read some fae detective novels, do some coloring books, make a good meal, come up with an incredible halloween costume, watch the sunset, love your people. A sea witch told me not to chase the tide, and I’m gonna take the sea witch’s advice on this one.

Xoxoxo,

Amy

PS Here are all my obligatory buttons. I do really like when people click them though! And you can always just SMASH THAT REPLY BUTTON.

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Yesterday, desolate, I trudged my way through an encounter with urgent care. I’ll spare you the details. There were zoom links and insurance cards and pharmacy lines involved, you know the drill. Make it stop, I thought. I also called a phone number three times that was listed clearly on my gynecologist’s website as the phone number to call to make an appointment, and three times it rang forever, then dumped me into nowhere. Finally I called a different number entirely, that was not listed as a number to call to make an appointment, and that got me a “call center” where I could make an appointment.

Also yesterday, walking around Allston with a friend, I encountered a slimy puddle of garbage and effluvia, which I delicately avoided. I waded through 10 inch deep mud in places this summer, mud so deep I nearly lost my shoes in it, but a sidewalk garbage slick was too much for me.

If you’re wondering how things are going for me since I returned from my two months of backpacking in the green mountains, well, mainly like that.

In the mornings, I wake up and go walking, looking for trees to smell. I get very close to an oak tree along the Riverway, I put my face against its mossy bark, inhale. It’s not the same, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s not all bad, being home. I was served an excellent margarita on the back deck of one of my favorite taco joints, with one of my favorite people, and that was fun. I did miss my people. My mattress is just as comfortable as I remember, and after two months of sleeping on the ground or on a wooden platform in a shelter, or in various hostel beds of varying quality, I appreciate the comfort. I have ready access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and soft cheese, and yogurt.

Also, my coffee appears by my bedside every morning, and it isn’t instant coffee, and I didn’t have to crawl out of my sleeping quilt and go find where I’d tied my bear bag and assemble my stove and filter water and boil it before I could enjoy the coffee, it simply was there when I woke up, like magic, which is to say my husband is a magical being, and I’m grateful to be back in his vicinity again, certainly.

*****

I was warned, of course, about all of this. Post-thru-hike malaise is a well-known condition. I feel like I’ve been torn out of place, and also like I was living another life entirely, and even though I have evidence that I did this thing, lived that life, it’s so separate and different from what is here now that it feels like it must have been a dream. A long, strange, mythical, epic dream, something that was sung to me, or that I sang. That the aboriginal Australians call this kind of place and that kind of journey Dreamtime, and that sort of trail a Songline, makes all the sense in the world to me. For two months I sang to myself, counting my steps, mainly, up and down mountains, walking and scrambling and climbing and scooching and trudging north, north, north, and then I came to the end of that trail and that song and that dream, and now here I am, after four hours of riding in a car, deposited back home, in a reality that includes pointless car alarms and inscrutable phone trees and a lot of garbage and not enough of the other kind of trees. Of course it is difficult.

*****

Like many people who go on these kinds of trips, I also thought by the time I got to the end I would know the answers to some of the burning questions that face me at this moment in this, my ‘real’ life. Like what do I want to be when I grow up, for example. I was also warned, along my journey, that it was unlikely I would actually have answers to those questions by the end of my hike, and those people who warned me were right about that too. In the absence of some burning desire to do something different, my default is that I should go back to doing what I did before I left, something in the realm of helping software engineers. I met some botanists and librarians and ski patrol people out in the woods, and those all sound like better jobs to me, but ultimately I’m not motivated enough by any alternative vision for how I earn money to invest in any of those alternatives.

I’m not motivated enough by any vision right now, which is, again, unsurprising, since for the last year I’ve largely been motivated - not just motivated — truly driven — by the prospect of the thru-hike I just completed, and that is now over, and the future after that thru-hike seems just as blank now as it did before I began, despite me now being, in fact, in that future.

When I was hiking, life after the end of the trail was so very blank, so utterly obscure, that it seemed like it was probably just death. And a part of me wanted that, to wrap up the trail and to finally get to be done with life. I was very happy on the trail, for the most part, or at least content, and so it was surprising to me how much I nevertheless thought about death, not, as I often do, merely in moments of excruciating emotional pain, where thoughts of death are understandable reactions to that pain, but as a practical matter, as something that I could choose, not because I was in pain but because I was done with living. After the trail, I could be done, I thought.

Walking over Camel’s Hump I had the idea that maybe if I thought very hard, I could give myself the kind of incurable pancreatic cancer that would justify closing the ticket with a “won’t fix” resolution. If that statement makes no sense to you, that is because you have not had to deal with software bug tracking systems ever, and you should count that as a blessing. Still, I think you probably understood the point. I don’t especially want to be blamed for my own death, and god knows I still blame my friend Jay for his, but I can’t stop wishing something would take me now that I can’t be blamed for.

Of course, because I have told you all that, I will be blamed for any kind of death. This is why people like me can’t get life insurance.

As usual, now is the time I will tell you I do have a therapist, and I do not want or need your inquiries about my mental health. My mental health is the same as it ever was, and I’m still here. Yes, being out in the wilderness in July made me happier in July than I’ve been for many years, many Julys, and yes, that is wonderful, and I am grateful, and also it wasn’t some kind of miracle. It doesn’t fix everything in the world that smells wrong to my soul.

*****

One night on the trail, somewhere near the Brandon Gap, maybe, I pitched my tent in a glade of beech trees. That night at the shelter there was an ex Army Ranger and his dog, and a woman from Florida with her two children, teenage or young adult, both pretty sullen, it seemed to me, as their mother chattered about how they were Eagle Scouts and at the same time harassed them mercilessly about putting on bug spray, and they stared fixedly at their phones barely grunting in response to whatever it was she said. I was glad, watching her interact with her Eagle Scouts, that I was not hiking with my children, that my children were, even, enjoying a summer in which I was not harassing them mercilessly about everything under the sun. I was also enjoying a summer of not harassing my children mercilessly. Sometimes, before I left for the hike, people seemed to suggest to me usually via “just a question” that I was perhaps being derelict in my duty as a mother by leaving my children (aged 17 and 21, note) for two months, a question or a suggestion no thru-hiking father ever got, of course, whether his children were toddlers or teenagers. “I think it might actually be a gift to my children for me to leave all summer” I said to those people. I don’t think they believed me, but I don’t really care.

That’s a side note, though, back to the main story — I’d pitched my tent as far from the actual shelter as I could while still making use of an existing tent site, and so as Florida Mom sat up late with Ex-Ranger I retreated to my tent early, too far away to hear them talking anymore, and I fell asleep to the sound of the wind in the trees.

Around 4 am I woke to a bunch of barred owls, directly overhead, yelling at each other. The glade in which I’d tented seemed to be some kind of owl after-hours bar, and the owls, hooting and yelling, sounded like nothing so much as a bunch of drunk people rounding out a rowdy night by yapping about what they’d been up to. I caught three red squirrels, I imagined one owl saying, and the others shout FUCK YEAH, GET IT GIRL! and so on. It was a little bit terrifying, and a lot intense, and completely unexpected and very awe-ful and beautiful and wild. So wild. So utterly and completely Real.

The owls were every bit as loud as several car alarms going off at once, and every bit as disruptive to my sleep, and even more utterly out of my control, and I didn’t mind at all that they’d awakened me, I felt blessed, I felt Touched, I felt that it was precisely this, the opportunity to accidentally eavesdrop on a bunch of barred owls, that had brought me to this trail, that kept me on it, day after day, mountain after mountain, muddy step after muddy step.

*****

So. yeah. How was the journey? Wild. Feral. Free. Sticky, wet, muddy, steep, overgrown, exhausting. Scary. Grueling. Impossible. Magical. Mythic. Completely unreal, and more real than everything else.

And how do I feel, now that I finished it? Relieved. Proud. Grief-struck. Tired. Empty.

Bereft.

And how is it to be home? Strange. Sad. Impossible. Necessary.

And what will I do now? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

*****

And what did I discover? Too many things to name, right now.

And what did I accomplish? The thing I set out to do, and at the same time, nothing at all. Accomplishment is maybe orthogonal to the trail itself, or, if there was an accomplishment, it was not Mine, but something else’s. Or if it was Mine, it did not exactly serve me. The woman who set out on the trail, anyway, is gone, and I do not yet know who the woman is who returned, having Accomplished What She Set Out To Do.

I sang the song that was that trail, as best I could, and now I don’t know what to sing next. I’m in a kind of purgatory, as the whole, real, not-trail world seems to be to me, right now, a place in which I must work off my sins by waking to car alarms instead of owls and struggling my way through phone trees instead of spruce.

*****

I promise I’ll tell you more about the journey itself. I have funny stories and weird stories and incredible stories and scary stories to tell. I have jokes to make. I have lessons learned. Yes, all of that. But today, in this moment, all I can do is point in the direction of an inexplicable dream and patiently live through its aftermath, which after such a dream really couldn’t help but be anything but a rude awakening.

*****

Here’s a picture of me at the end of the hike, though, looking Happy and Accomplished and Badass, so you can pretend, if you like, that this is a simple story, where a woman set out to conquer something and succeeded. Hashtag goals, if you prefer that story to the messier one. Though I suppose if you prefer neat stories you probably don’t find any of mine very satisfying, because my stories, like me, are always Messy AF.