In reply to Brett Douville.

It’s always good to hear from you, Brett. And I’m sorry to hear about your neighbor. It’s good to value connections with neighbors considering so much of the 21st century is designed to isolate and divide us.

This post is essentially my grappling with the idea of “not my problem” and “it won’t affect me.” Trying to find the line between a lack of empathy and a desire to set boundaries. I’ve had to remind myself “it won’t affect me” just to stop the fight-or-flight response from making me physically unable to go on: “am I in immediate danger? Or am I just having a panic attack about things I can’t control?”

And I do believe that just like we don’t believe that everyone in society needs to be a surgeon, not everyone in society needs to be a political activist. It’s not actually accomplishing anything to try and be plugged into news that we can’t do anything about. There is exactly one responsibility we all have, and that’s to vote intelligently and reasonably. Everything else is extra credit. And it’s extra credit I’m not cut out to be working towards, considering the state of my mind the past couple of days.

Best of luck to you too, finding community and developing your art skills, exactly the kind of thing that should be making the bulk of our time. I’m hoping to give myself and other people more grace for narrowing our focus and being more realistic about our influence.

(And just because I’ve seen it mentioned today: never forgetting that “half the country” goes both ways. There are tens of millions of people who chose decency over selfishness and division).