Investing Energy-What's Working For Me: The News Edition

“When one is engaged in suffering, there is so much more to it than keeping it all together”.

This is a quote from Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, founder of the Trauma Stewardship Institute. She said this in a TEDx talk in 2015 titled “Beyond the Cliff.”

Okay.

So.

There is a lot going on.

I get that it can be hard to focus, and hard to know where our focus is supposed to land. I believe this is by design.

I posted before about investing energy. This summer is similar, since my spouse’s full-time gig fell through and we’re adjusting to another new normal where we work mostly opposite schedules and reconfigure our finances. It’s also a little different, for the above reasons and other more personal ones. But I find myself reflecting more on how to cultivate energy, and how to make more “room in the margins” as Laura van Dernoot Lipsky puts it. (I saw her speak a few months ago and it was transformative. Check out her new book, “The Age of Overwhelm: Strategies for the Long Haul” coming out in July).

These are things that have been working for me. You are welcome to try them. You are welcome to mock me for them. Whatever you want to do, really, but I figured I’d share in case they might help:

I don’t check social media first thing in the morning: this habit was a hard one to break but it really, really helps. If I do check it, I check Instagram or Snapchat. It wasn’t until I made this change that I realized how much it was affecting my entire day.

I avoid click-baiting headlines: If the headline doesn’t state exactly what happened, I look for another news source that tells me exactly what I’m getting into.

I only read one news story per event: I’ve switched from reading the news as a morbid punishment and exercise in reinforced depression to information and resource gathering. There’s a difference between keeping abreast about what’s going on at the US/Mexican border and listening over and over to the recording of crying children in camps. Not doing and sharing the latter doesn’t make you “disengaged” from the news and politics. No matter what your friends who share that meme that mentions disability in its text yet is COMPLETELY INACCESSIBLE passive-aggressively imply about you.

I find one thing I can do: Donating; sending an email, text, or phone call; supporting a local event. Sometimes this looks like a task or a way I approach a project to focus on a vulnerable population. Sometimes I feel like the nature of my work helps me process things in a productive way that others might not get to, and I’m grateful for that.

I don’t read opinion pieces: I mean I’ll still read blogs, particularly about library stuff (oh hey remember when ALA was like "we welcome our insect overlords?" that was fun), but to me it’s enough to know that the terrible things are happening without reading every hot take by Jeff Smith or whoever TF about exactly what this means for the future, or exactly what scene in the Handmaid’s Tale this apparently is. Like, get out of here.

I set a time to leave the Internet: well, you can never REALLY leave the Internet, but I give myself about an hour with my phone to catch up after work, then I try to leave it alone. This was also something really hard. The past two weeks, my phone battery has mostly lasted two full days at a time. My spouse and I have more quality conversations, and fewer of them involve things we saw on the Internet that day.

So that’s what I’ve got. Any other tips?

Hang in there. We need you.

Here is my one of my favorite websites, You Feel like Shit. It might help; it does for me, sometimes.