I woke up this morning at around 5 a.m. and turned on the TV – I had gone to sleep last night with the election results not final yet, but not looking good. At 5 a.m. I immediately saw that what I (and so many others) had feared had come to pass – Donald Trump will be President again.
It will still be several months before he is inaugurated and can start to actually do anything, so at the moment there is just speculation about what he will do as President. But there is good reason for concern, especially among more vulnerable and oppressed groups (see e.g., this explanation of Project 2025, and this article about the prospect of RFK Jr. having a significant role in health care).
There is a palpable sense of despair, particularly from people to the left on the political spectrum. As a therapist I’ve seen the fear ratcheting up over the past few weeks with the uncertainty about how the election would go. Up until yesterday I was encouraging a 3-part approach to managing that fear – (1) avoid the news (it’s important to be informed, but as we got closer to the election it was mostly commentary and poll results, no actual news); (2) do what you can (vote, encourage others to vote, etc.); and (3) remember that no matter how the election goes we all remain responsible for our lives and our choices in how we live our lives.
Today, with the election over, I stand by that approach with some modification:
- Manage your consumption of news – it is important to stay informed, but it’s also ok to step back from it now and then. Keep in mind that you might just be getting the same information over and over with no value added.
- Do what you can – we’re done voting for now, but there are still a lot of areas of advocacy out there, do what you can
- We all remain responsible for our own lives and our choices – continue doing what matters to you!
The title of this post refers to “optimism,” so I should say a word about what I mean by that and why it is important in this context. Optimism is not the same as “being positive” – optimism is a belief that things CAN be better (not that they definitely WILL be better – that would be positivity). We need to believe that things can be better so that our actions can feel meaningful.
We cannot, however, control outcomes. We can do everything right and still not get the outcome that we wanted or even deserved. That’s why I focus on optimism rather than positivity – I have to believe that my actions matter regardless of the outcome without totally disregarding the value of the outcome. In therapy sessions I often refer to the idea of “holding goals lightly,” the idea of not letting go of them entirely, but not putting all of the value of your actions on the goal, putting most of it in the actions themselves.
My own “action plan” going into the next four years includes (1) continuing to try to be as good a therapist as I can, so that I can be a better support for my clients, and (2) looking for ways to advocate for the things I care about (along those lines I recently separated from the agency I was working with, that action alone will allow me more time and mental energy to engage in advocacy).
Today, in my view, was not a day for advocacy – my social media post was the following quote from James Baldwin:
“I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”
[Source – Swarthmore.edu]
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