How To Make A Place Where Nothing Bad Ever Happens

1. Set up a tent indoors, in the most private space available.
2. Arrange LED lights and/or galaxy lamp in a pleasing fashion.
3. Plug in a phone charger outside the tent so that you can control your music and will know if there is some big emergency, but do not bring the phone inside the tent. The arrangement of static-prone nylon and metallic poles inside a tent creates an electromagnetic field that would instantly brick your phone. This isn’t true, but tell yourself that it is.
4. Add Bluetooth speaker/earbuds, connect to phone, put on “Lo-Fi Hip Hop For Study And Relaxation” stream.
5. Obtain all loose cushions, pillows, sleeping pads, blankets, and stuffed animals in house. Arrange in roughly oval nest.
6. Place “Caramel Cheesecake Cookie” wax cube in warmer, activate. (Outside the tent!)
7. Set up small reading lamp, stack up books about fluffy and inconsequential topics.
8. Invite tentmate(s) for snuggling or companionship. Be clear this is not a conversation space.
9. Turn off room lights. Enter nest. Zip door closed.
10. You are not on Earth anymore. You are on a space capsule flying away at unfathomable speed and you do not even receive radio transmissions from Earth. Soon you will land on a new planet full of life and possibilities, but not yet. Right now, in transit, there is nothing expected of you. Right now your universe is six feet wide and nothing in it can hurt you. You are floating in warmth and softness and the nowness and the realness of the blankets against your skin. Things might or might not be okay out there – who knows? Every one of the billions of planets around you has its own billions of stories and none of them are your problem. Things are okay in here, and as long as you are in here, that is all that matters.

(All steps are optional/circumstances-permitting except #10, which is mandatory.)

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So That’s How You’re Coping With The Election, Huh?

Yep! And I’m not even ashamed of it. In 2016, I cared about US federal politics, I followed it closely, and what did it get me? Internet arguments. A spot in some protests where we chanted shit like “RULE OF LAW! RULE OF LAW!” Insomnia. Encyclopedic knowledge of all the weird peripheral Trump characters like Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus. Podcasts. Thinking maybe Robert Mueller really was going to blow the whole thing wide open. Internet arguments. Livestreams of Senate hearings. That one guy who would tweet “BOOM!” every time that some assistant’s assistant assistant testified that the assistant’s assistant may or may not have violated some act of Congress that hasn’t been enforced since 1925. Safety pins. Internet arguments.

What all these have in common is that they do exactly as much good for the world as making yourself a denial tent.

I wasn’t participating in politics, not really. I was participating in something that functioned essentially like a fandom – lots of lore to learn, big discussion forums, lots of speculation and analysis – except that a fandom is supposed to make you happy and this very much did not. For every thousand hours of anger and anxiety, I probably did five or six hours of quasi-useful Resistance work like protesting or fundraising. That’s… not nothing, every raindrop raises the sea and all that, but it’s a pretty goddamn poor yield. I could have spent 9995 hours jacking off and gotten the same outcome. Probably should have. At least I would’ve been happier.

Worse than the wasted time, though, was the wasted hope. Sometimes I thought maybe it could really happen, maybe in some way or another the world would come to its senses and everything would go back to normal and the news would be boring again. I would like to tell you that I never really believed it… but I believed it enough that the first few times the hunt for “principled Republicans who value country over party” failed, I did feel something. But each time, I felt a little less. By mid-2017 I didn’t expect good things to happen, but I sure was mad that they weren’t.

(Yes, I’m aware that thinking of the Obama/hypothetical-Clinton administrations as “boring news” is part of the problem. This is not a post about how I have only ever had correct opinions.)

Bottom line was, I cared about the things happening in this country. And the angrier I got, the more the anger itself felt like caring. They say “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” right? Well, I sure was paying attention! I was paying so much attention I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t enjoy anything!

While all this was going on, I was drifting more and more to the left politically, which is fine in itself, but (at least online) there’s a real fine line between “both parties are capitalist pigs, the people have to rely on each other” and “both parties are capitalist pigs, we’re cooked, RIP Earth it was nice while it lasted.” There’s a genuinely admirable desire in leftism to fix everything, to not settle for incremental percentage-tweaking but to demand big changes that set society on the path to utopia, and, well… it’s not that I think they’re wrong, but it sure can wring the last few drops out of your hope gland.

And then things got worse. Then it went from “just” political beliefs to becoming extremely personal. Then there was a plague and I’m a nurse and I tried to be a good person and make Noble Sacrifices For The Common Good and instead the consensus emerged that I was a dumb sucker who ruined my own life because of propaganda. I guess I was a dumb sucker; I did thousands of COVID tests and contact tracings and N-95 fittings, I went a year without touching another human being outside of work, and a million Americans died anyway. Because I was bailing out our boat with a teacup while MAGA was filling it back up with a firehose. Then there was a massive campaign against trans people and… I cannot think of a thing more precisely aimed to torment me in particular than a massive international online campaign to convince the world that my body is disgusting and I’m a sexual predator.

And then 76 million people voted to do this all over again.

Kind of impossible not to care about that, right? Personally, emotionally, politically, morally, of course you gotta fucking care, right?

And then you realize that all this caring has added 30 points to your blood pressure.

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How to stop Being angry Even Though You’re Right

I started reading about anger management. It didn’t help much. A lot of the mainstream psychology resources on the topic are basically about convincing you that you’re wrong to be angry. Take some deep breaths, journal out your feelings, and you’ll realize that your friend didn’t mean to be rude! It’s possible that this works great when this is the full extent of your problems. Psychology professors really love examples like “you got cut off in traffic” and don’t so much love examples like “you got reminded, over and over again for years, how disposable your life is to the American political machine.” Have you considered that the American political machine was probably just having a rough day?

It’s hard to calm down when calming down feels like giving in. I start thinking things like “oh yeah, I’m sure the bastards would love for me to develop ‘coping skills’ to make myself docile and ’emotionally regulated,’ wouldn’t that be convenient for them.”

But would it? When I feel okay I have more time and energy to make myself inconvenient. (I do have less cutting comebacks on social media, but sadly some compromises must be made.) Probably the happiest and most hopeful I’ve been since COVID hit was when the first vaccines came out. I signed up for vaccination clinics and I gave hundreds of shots and they were not less effective because I forgot to give them with passion. My community didn’t need me to be a Good Person, they needed antibodies.

There’s other times I feel like calming down would be a sort of betrayal of people less privileged than me. I tell myself “you’re just justifying childish self-indulgence, not everyone has the luxury of a little play-pretend tent when they can’t deal, why do you think you deserve to roll around in pillows while others are suffering?”

But it’s not about what I deserve. It’s about what refuels me enough that I can help in the ways that actually help. The mostly quiet, private, and boring tasks of helping someone get their immigration paperwork in order, or working an extra shift to donate your pay to a bail fund, or being someone’s support person while they’re recovering from surgery. Red-hot rage is a sustaining emotion for fighting in the literal punchy-punchy sense, but it’s a lot less useful for fighting in the sense of not giving up the fight.

What I’m really doing in the tent is trying to break down the vanity and the immaturity of thinking anyone wants or needs me to have Correct Emotions. Because all this caring is making harder to give care. It’s making me undervalue the kinds of resistance to power that don’t feel cathartic or heroic, the kinds where successes are small and uncertain – which happens to describe nearly all the things I’m actually capable of doing. Letting myself wallow in “of course I’m opposing fascism, look how hard I’m crying about it” is vastly more self-indulgent than a blanket fort. I don’t want to come out of the tent docile. I want to come out useful.

The most important thing you can do about hate isn’t hating the haters. It’s undoing their work.