Taking the Lid Off the Pot

When I get stuck, here’s the list of what I try.

The metaphor:

It’s the second Sunday of the Trump administration. Like last week, I found that sitting down to write a blog was like taking the lid off a pot, only to find dozens of feelings I’d been pushing down all week, shrieking like boiling lobsters. I tried to slam the lid down again, but then struggled to write anything, cut off from the feelings. So, like last week, I’m thinking about resilience.

The story:

The day after the 2024 election, I drove to the Susan B. Anthony House. I wanted to think about fights that were won in the past and the leaders who built them but never saw victory.

The docent led me through the rooms: the sitting room where Susan was arrested for voting in 1872. A painting of the Unitarian Universalist church she joined – the one I now attend – when her Quaker congregation disapproved of her political activity. The bedroom with one of her dresses on display, which she resumed wearing after a brief stint in bloomers when press about her speeches covered her clothes rather than her words. She died there at age 86, 14 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.

A few months earlier, as the polls held tight and my anxiety mounted, I’d pulled out a yellow sticky note and written a list of ways to find perspective:

• History & ancestors

• Old people & children

• Exercise & sunshine

• Music & art

• Other countries & contexts

• Connection & vulnerability

I’d booked the tour when I woke up that morning and saw the news I’d been dreading. I wanted to be able to find my way back from despair or fury to a sense of curiosity and wonder. Those feelings helped me remember to release dread and focus on what I could control, to value being kind over being efficient.

This strategy had worked for me before. For example, when Trump was first elected in 2016, I was working at a global health organization. I was struck by the solidarity offered by colleagues living in countries with authoritarian leaders of their own. I found myself appreciating poetry and visual art more than usual, maybe more than ever before.

Connection also helped me move from fury at the summer 2024 presidential race polls to find kindness for individual voters that I met while canvassing. Meeting them one on one instead of reading about them as a monolith, I felt many were doing their best despite busy lives and active lies, and found myself redirecting my anger to schools, media, and economies that had let them down rather than the people themselves. I thought about this while I walked between homes, crunching autumn leaves and wearing sunglasses to filter the golden October light.

On election day itself, I went to a park with my sister and her kids. Her three-year-old counted out the bases on the baseball diamond, then pointed out authoritatively where the pitcher stands in the middle. I felt my stomach unclench, looking at the world through his sense of wonder. Then I went to a class on Unitarian Universalist values coordinated by the church I’ve been attending, discussing readings on the Beloved Community and love as an action.

Finally, I drove to my grandma’s house, where I knew Gram would offer the comfort of the past plus the ease of not remembering what had happened the day before. She got out wine and Ritz crackers, and we sat in the chairs where she read me Black Beauty 30 years ago. I felt loved again, and able to access love, though I couldn’t think my way there.

I’m often reminded of a webinar I watched in spring 2020 about resilience, hugging my pandemic rescue dog on the couch. Determined researchers spoke in clear, calm voices about how people respond to change in two phases. The first is essentially freefall, and we can’t get to the second – coping – until we stabilize. There are skills and strategies we can use, but there’s no rushing it, and no limit on how long it will take.

I thought of it again yesterday, while I was visiting friends in Washington, DC. One had just lost her government job, and another’s husband is waiting, on edge. We had lived there together just after college, in a white brick rowhouse during Obama’s first term. Someone had news alerts on their phone, which lit up with the new tariff announcements. Instantly, phones were out and heads were down, and we were silent except for indignantly reading out quotes to each other from the various coverage, patients denied for gender-affirming care and biology teachers barred from explaining human reproduction in Florida.

“Okay,” said one friend, finally. “Let’s pick a time to stop the doomscrolling.”

We agreed to give it a few more minutes, and when the alarm went off, we looked at each other, stunned and gutted. Then we looked at the nine-month-old in my friend’s arms, who happily gurgled and grinned at us. Mirroring him, our eyebrows lifted and our lips curled up, and we looked around the room again, old friends back together more than a decade after we’d moved out.

This is not a magic fix. I slept poorly that night, waking multiple times to remember all I hadn’t really processed yet, despite the progress I described last week. The days since the inauguration have felt like March 2020, when each morning brought a seismic change to reality. I have a similar feeling of exhaustion now, worn out by the daily onslaught of news that seemed unthinkable the day before. My grief is similar, too, watching as service providers, aid workers, and program managers are forced to stop providing what people need. This time, though, the barriers are self-inflicted: edicts from our own government that stop the distribution of care. It doesn’t have to be like this – and yet, it is.

Still, there we were, inside together, leaning on each other, caring for a person who’s existed less than a year. Sometimes, when my feelings hurt the most, I tell myself I wouldn’t want to be the kind of person who could go through that experience and not feel anything. It’s that capacity for feeling that makes the connection possible, the curiosity, the learning. That’s where we find the wonder, the heart and the hope.

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