Sweaty Subway Strangers

When something is coming that we can’t prevent.

The metaphor: 

Now that Trump’s been reelected, there is so much to dread. To try and process, I wrote a story about another terrible thing I’ve dreaded – a possibility that I thought was unacceptable, but that was very real all the same. As real as a sweaty stranger sitting too close on a train.

The story: 

At one of my jobs, I took over finance and HR during a financial crisis at the nonprofit. I’d been hired as the deputy to the head of operations, and I had learned all the functions from a great boss, but I’d never held the department’s full birds-eye view. Which is why, after my boss resigned in November, I had no good response to our new CEO when she asked me how we’d cover payroll when our six-month runway ran out. If we proceeded as planned, she pointed out, we’d have to lay off staff.

For some reason, you guys, she didn’t fire me: she promoted me. She made me head of the department – no money to hire someone above me anyway – and told me my first job was to cut a million dollars from that year’s planned $5m budget. 

I knew what steps to take: saving money meant cutting expenses or shifting them to be (legitimately) covered by grant funds. It was December, and I designed new trainings and templates for grant budget managers so that in January, they could rework their projections to cover previously unrestricted costs they’d need to succeed. While they worked on that, I reviewed team budgets, telling them which items would be cut if they weren’t covered by grants, giving teams time in February to coordinate with grant managers. And in the meantime, we hustled on fundraising, bringing in more grants. 

I didn’t know whether these efforts would work. In March, we planned to give our accountant the updated projections and he would rerun the numbers. If we hadn’t found a path to save a million dollars, we’d need to cut some of our 25 staff. 

I felt the looming threat of layoffs all the time. The idea sat in the base of my stomach, where my other organs recoiled to avoid it, the way you curl up to keep from touching a sweaty stranger’s shoulder on the subway. I started lengthening my runs, doing 6 or 8 miles instead of 3 or 4, powered by anxiety until my thoughts slowed, the adrenaline dulled. I wasn’t against evolving the org chart, deciding that a role or two had run its course, but I’d seen how it hurt to cut roles that the organization still needed but couldn’t afford. It was a betrayal, a failure of management to the mission that would now be curtailed, to the former staff who’d be unemployed, and to the remaining staff who’d be guilty, morose, overworked. Night after night, I woke up hot at 5am, insides curdled. How had we come so close to the edge? Could I do enough to stop it? 

Throughout that winter, I stayed nauseous with dread. I didn’t know if the worst was coming, but I knew it might, and that I’d be the one in charge of cuts: running the scenarios, writing the letters, telling each person. I worried I’d have to cut my staff and do their jobs, or that I’d have to cut myself, making them absorb my work. I was committed to doing it, if it came to it, to try and make sure it all transpired with integrity. But I desperately hoped it wouldn’t have to happen. 

We wouldn’t know if we’d saved enough until March, and in the meantime, I pounded on the door of the future in my mind, desperate to know what lay behind it, imagining the relief of learning we’d succeeded and the stomach drop of finding out we’d failed. Then my partner Steve gently pointed out that these contortions of hope and dread weren’t helping – in fact, they made life worse. This was why I was sleeping poorly, struggling to focus, jumpy and irritable. I was already doing all I could and my angst couldn’t change the outcome or prepare me for it. 

I had thought of my dread as a sort of penance I could pay to increase the odds of success, so it was both a let down and liberating to realize Steve was right. Nothing mattered but the work. As Elizabeth Gilbert put it, “You're afraid of surrender because you don't want to lose control. But you never had control. All you had was anxiety.” 

As long as I was doing all I could at work, I might as well be calm. I might as well sleep well, seek the resilience to manage the bad news, treat people well in the meantime as we worked hard together. I would still grieve if it came to layoffs. I would still feel like I could’ve done more to prevent them, still try to learn lessons to take moving forward. But that’s where I should focus, on what to do moving forward. I was gained nothing from being a tightly-coiled stress monster.

I thought about this lesson all last month, October ‘24. As the polls held tight, I felt my jaw and stomach clench, and I practiced taking deep breaths and finding what I could truly control. I was so, so lucky to be able to spend the two weeks before the election canvassing in Pennsylvania: helping Harris supporters make a voting plan, trying to win over undecideds, and even when no one answered the doors I knocked, taking thousands of steps each sunny autumn day. Then, on election day, though I didn’t feel I had done all I could, I knew I was out of things to control. 

Years ago, when March came and the accountant ran the numbers, we got good news. We’d saved 1.2 million dollars, we could keep all the staff. In the years that followed, the coalition of staff who’d achieved that outcome also benefited many times over from the collective effort behind that outcome: people across teams and titles now understood financial dynamics, could manage their own projections, could write their own proposals. We had gotten lucky and we were also stronger for having come through the fire together. 

Now, in November ‘24, we are unlucky, and there is so much to dread. I’d known there were non-Harris voters – I canvassed the doors of Trump and Stein supporters, as well as people who wouldn’t vote – but it was devastating to learn how many there were. As the transfer of power approaches, we’re all strapped to a collective conveyor belt, moving towards a dark, uncertain future. Though I’ve been sickened, I’ve found some somber liberation in the clarity of the results: he won every swing state and the popular vote. This is happening, whether I rage against it, resign myself to it, or build up the fuel to resist it. 

So I’ve been trying to think about what resilience would take: the joy and connection, the wonder and wisdom. The perspective and community to meet whatever may come with an active, rooted love that fights, and shelters, and calls others in. People ask me how it feels to have canvassed and lost, as though I would feel it more acutely, when actually, it feels easier to hold. Dreading the election, I did something I could control. Now, dreading the administration, I have very few options, but I can see them clearly: the way I treat others, how I spend time and attention. I can see them as a tiny replica of a larger movement, a fractal microcosm that’s mine to tend, building towards a love ethic strong enough to convert back the many, many voters I can’t control, and caring for my community in the meantime.

It’s not comfort, and it doesn’t make it all right. Declining to rehearse the pain of future losses doesn’t mean I welcome them, but rehearsing them wouldn’t help me face them when they come. Or rather, if they come: because there is so, so much we just don’t know. But I know what’s done, and I know to breathe, and to release dread when I can. I know to build something together, and that good comes from collective efforts, even failed ones. From each of us doing what we can, understanding what we can’t, and reaching out to build something together, either way.

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