Show Notes
This week, Patricia checks in about initial feelings after the election and offers a few bits of advice on where to focus your energy first.
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Sound editing by Jen Zink
Transcript
EP 027
Music: [Intro Music]
Patricia: Hi friends, welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia, and I’m recording this show on November 7th, 2024. Hi everyone, just me today, Nicole is running around the house. We are getting ready to go on a little trip and we’ll, we’ll be back by the time you hear this show, but I still wanted to get on here and record something.
You know, the past few days have been a lot and I wanted to check in and I still wanted to be able to give you something. So, right now, as I am recording, it is two days after the election. Everyone is pretty raw. We actually, on election night, got an invite to hang out with some friends, and so, it was actually good for us to do that instead of isolating as we tend to do.
Everyone has a lot of feelings right now. You may be going through the five to seven stages of grief, depending on, on who you ask. Could be sadness, anger, shock, rage, despair, fear. All of these feelings are legit. They’re all valid.
If you can cry, please consider crying. Crying is release. It’s going to trigger that parasympathetic nervous system. It’s going to hopefully help you lower your heart rate. I know crying kind of helps me release and then I’m able to focus afterward instead of focusing so much on avoiding crying or avoiding feelings. It’s really important for you to feel these feelings right now.
And you’re going to continue to feel these feelings. It’s not like, okay, I’m done with grief. And now I could do something. Like we are going to be doing things while we also feel like garbage. I want to shout out other Black women and femmes out there. We tried. Please get some rest. I hope we can all get some rest and get some peace. We tried to save this country that hates us, probably doesn’t deserve it.
You know, we talked about should Black women save the U.S. in a previous episode that I’ll link in the show notes. But, I hope, I hope we can all get some rest. I want to put it out there that if you were hopeful, you were not foolish or sorry for the use of this word, you are not stupid. Hope is very hard. It takes strength to hope.
Hope is necessary. I would not be here if my ancestors did not hope. We would not be here if our queer elders did not hope. Hope is very important to carry forward with us. Personally, I think cynicism is lazy. I think it’s easy. Cynicism is not creative. Hope is difficult. Hope takes creativity and curiosity and imagination.
And, yeah, this country is built on genocide and slavery. Many of us kind of looked at that and we are not surprised at the outcome. And maybe the country in its current iteration doesn’t deserve to be saved. But us, each other, like you here listening and your loved ones, and me and Nicole and our loved ones, and everyone who is hopeful. We all deserve joy and care and basic human rights.
It is real easy to spiral right now. I know we’re publishing this, you know, a week after the results. Some folks may still be spiraling. We are all panic, no disco and in this moment. It is not a good time to be making big decisions, and eventually by the time this episode airs, we’ll be focusing on what is next in our own lives.
I’m not going to cover a lot of the big possible actions right now, uh, there’s a lot of people covering that. I think we need to first talk about some basics. Are you eating regularly? Are you hydrating? Are you taking your meds? Are you bathing? Are you getting out of bed and continuing to go to work or school?
I think especially work, although it seems ridiculous to be working at a time like this. Rent still needs to get paid. We still need to hold on to our health care if we have it. For now. And also, are you isolating or are you connecting with other people? That could be in person, that could be via DMs, via text, it all counts.
We still need to care for ourselves during this time. This is your first action. Stay alive. If you got to do it out of spite, then persevere out of spite. It’s kept me going this long. Do not hand your power over. Do not hand your joy over.
Rebecca Solnit recently said, the fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything. And everything we can save is worth saving. A couple of initial actions, like we said, it’s incredibly easy to spiral. Here are, hopefully, some easy lifts. If you have the privilege to have a passport and the ability to travel, get your passport renewed, even if it doesn’t expire for two more years or something. Get it renewed.
Some folks, if your passport is within a certain window, you can renew it online. Other folks are gonna have to mail it in. Related, have copies of all your documents in one place where you know where they are and where they are accessible. If this is something you’ve been planning on doing, now is the time to do it.
I also need us all to really think about our online presence. Especially if you fall under the queer umbrella. If you need to do a bunch of blocking, you need to make certain accounts private or scrape them all together, then do that.
Let’s turn off the microphones for your robot assistant devices. Your Google Home, your Alexa, whatever you got. Let’s turn off the microphones.
And finally, let’s take some stock of our resources. What, obviously, monetary would you have? Medication, how much do you have? Do you need to refill that? What are the skills you have? What are the knowledge you have? The abilities you have? Who are the people you know who’s already in your community?
What are the privileges that you do have? It can help to know what you have, that you can lean on, as well as what you can offer to others in your community. Finally, I know this has been a short one, but Nicole and I are really going to have to think about what future iterations of this podcast are.
Recognizing there may be some things that we cannot talk about anymore. You know, we had a bunch of end of year plans about like, here are the best books we read this year, and here’s what we learned this year. And maybe here are our goals for next year. And, you know, we’re really gonna have to think about what, what that looks like.
And what is self help during these times? What does that look like right now? We don’t want to be ignorant of what is going on. We want to be able to read the room and not just keep on keeping on, you know, anyone talking about manifesting right now is getting a real big side eye from me.
So, let us know what you want or need. Give us a rating to let us know what you enjoy. Write it down, give us a five star rating. It really helps people find us and hopefully we’ll be able to offer things that people find helpful. Finally, I think it’s really important to recognize that good things exist alongside bad things.
Right? You could still celebrate a birthday. You could still delight in kittens. You could still read a great book. And it’s really important to hold tight to those things and let yourself experience joy at every opportunity. Recently, the thing that’s filling my cup is a writer whose work I love, and admired, and admire, introduced me to her friends the other night as a brilliant writer. And as the saying goes, like, nobody can’t tell me nothing now after that.
So that is our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome audio editor, Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com and we will leave a link to that in our show notes.
You can find the full show notes and transcript at eedapod.com. That’s E E D A P O D dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our bookshop link, and the link to the ongoing, Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter. You can currently find us on Instagram and Bluesky at eedapod and email us at eedapod@gmail.com.
That’s where you’re going to let us know what you want. What you need moving forward. We are nothing if not consistent. We are eedapod everywhere. We would appreciate so much if you subscribe, rate us, share this podcast, please. That is the holiday gift we want. Please share this podcast with someone you think who will listen to it. We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon.
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