A Little Relief

Once a year, I tell myself that it’s okay to break routine.

Specifically, I’m talking about this newsletter — each of the last two years, I’ve had a month where I just … didn’t get it done. No explanations, no excuses — I tell myself, again, that it’s okay to break routine. That none of my free subscribers or few active social media friends are clamoring for a mixtape shrouded in a few anxious thoughts. That this is an exercise in practice more than it’s a commitment, and that I deserved to allow myself some grace.

We all deserve that. But: it’s hard.

There’s a pattern that happens when the news gets difficult. Our minds look for relief wherever we can get it, so we try to “come to terms” with what we learn. This is not to accept it, or to ignore it, but to understand that it is real and nothing is going to change how real it is. Coming to terms with something delivers its own risks: we might become complacent, or we might become despondent. Usually, though, we just want relief.

We’re all in this same boat, and we just want relief.

In fact, a boat might be a decent metaphor for this constant rise and fall, rise and fall. Let me try it on for a bit.

When life is a struggle — whether that’s due to some bullshit in the news or some bullshit in your life — relief comes in weird places. We’re on that boat, but the waves are never uniform. We dip below the water, into the trough, our stomachs getting a bit queasy, our minds a bit sick. We’re looking at a wall of water that feels insurmountable and it crashes on us and we’re despondent and frustrated and we wonder when we’ll ever dry out and then, by definition we feel things start to swell again. We rise toward the crest, and the crest might be nothing but it FEELS like something in comparison. We see the horizon again. We see the sky. We feel the sun. Simple things that now feel like everything, and our hope feels outsized because we’re simply happy for bit of relief.

We crest, and then we start back down.

Yes, the constant stream of bad news sucks. What sucks even more is the oscillation between crest and trough, the relief and the crash, knowing that the relief is temporary and the crash is inevitable. We feel frustrated that we believed in that temporary relief, or we are mad that we enjoyed the relief despite knowing we were heading back down. We want that relief to be real, and it never feels real if it eventually goes away.

This might seem maudlin. I guess it is. The rise and crash has been exhausting, and so I almost skipped this month’s newsletter. I let myself do that once a year, you know, and then I give myself grace.

And then I stumbled upon a Bluesky thread I’d saved from earlier this month from author Mishell Baker, who is currently battling an incurable cancer. The thread is worth a read — especially if you are like me and fretting the deconstruction of democracy and the struggle to raise teenagers at almost every point of the day — but I can sum it up like this: Fight as hard as you can when you need to fight, but don’t waste the non-fighting hours worrying about the fight. Give yourself the relief you need, and be okay with it.

Or, as Michell says:

…Every minute you focus on that horror when you are not actively doing something to evade or improve or ameliorate the situation (receiving chemo, taking Zofran, listening to the doctor, etc.), you are WASTING WHAT’S LEFT OF YOUR WILD PRECIOUS LIFE.

You deserve all the grace you can give yourself. But: you also deserve the good things. Those moments of relief. You don’t need to self-flagellate in order to make it through. You can fight, but you can also still play. You can take a month off, but if you want to say something you can also just say … whatever this is that I’m saying, I guess. You can make a mixtape and watch a documentary about a sports team and play fucking Pokemon and it doesn’t mean you’re ignoring things.

It’s just a new version of grace. It gives us the energy to keep fighting.

So I didn’t skip this month. Honestly, how could I — the new Japanese Breakfast album is wonderful, and I also wanted to share this weird mashup with Ani Difranco and the dude from Pearl Jam, and also remember how cool Daveed Diggs is?

Do what you need to do. Skip, and give yourself grace. Or, go to the beach. Both are okay. There’s always another crest on its way, so get what you can out of it before you’re back in the trough.