Well, it’s been about a year since the election. My husband told me that some people are planning Screaming Parties to celebrate the occasion. I have to admit, the idea holds a certain appeal.

The trouble is, I seem to be Out of Feels. I’ve checked all the closets, dusted under every bed, and even cleaned up several Piles of Horror (you know the kind I mean… 6 months ago it was an accessory to a short to-do list but now it’s 15 times bigger and has spiders living in it), but I’m like the Monty Python cheese shop which is uncontaminated by cheese. Screaming without feels seems questionable.

I am politics-averse. I make no secret of this. Chalk it up to an INFJ personality, a dislike of raised voices, a deep-rooted skepticism towards mob responses and tribalism, whatever. The deck is stacked against me getting anything personally fulfilling out of political engagement. Generally my only motivation to get involved in the political realm involves feeling intensely negative about something. So what am I to do on those days I can’t muster emotion to drive action, but there’s still stuff to do?

The answer is, I do three things. Two are specific, and one is broad.

Specific Thing #1: Sign up for the Americans of Conscience Checklist created by Awesome Human Jennifer Hofmann.

You can read all about it by following the link. The weekly checklist is composed of straightforward, non-partisan actions you can take to defend your democratic ideals. Hofmann is a superhero for putting it together.

Specific Thing #2: Make it a habit.

I recently had one of those moments where I thought “there really should be an app that does <X>,” only to spend two seconds searching and discover that there IS an app that does X. In fact there are multiple apps that do X. In this case, X = give me an RPG-like framework to track the things I need to do and earn XP for it. My wacky gamer brain LOVES this concept. I’m basically rewarding myself with pretend currency, and I’m eating it up because I am a GIANT NERD.

I’ve cleaned up the mess in the bedroom, organized my desk, cleared a 6-month backlog of shredding, and (of greatest relevance to where this post started) participated in the Plus3 initiative to Get Out The Vote for Virginia, all because of this marvelous little app giving me the power to claim XP for it. If you find the notion appealing or simply intriguing, take a look at Habitica. And let me know if you sign up, there are rewards you can only get by doing “quests” or “boss fights” with a group, and Mama wants more cute digital pets.

I’ve spent some time pulling away from the seemingly-endless cascade of horrible things vomiting forth from the current Presidential administration, and now I need to come back to action. The bad is not stopping, and neither can we – but we don’t have to go forward motivated by fear, stress, horror, and panic. We don’t owe anyone those responses. The appalling indecency and divisiveness of our 45th President isn’t normal and we should never accept it as such, but we can make our responses to these situations habitual. As soon as the Americans of Conscience checklist fires up again, I’ll be coding tasks into Habitica and earning heaps of XP.

This segues into the General Thing: Lean into the pain.

This is a weird one for me. I used to interpret ideas along these lines as masochism and withdraw from them rapidly and without deep consideration. Maybe it took parenthood for it to click – there’s nothing like taking care of an infant to beat the snot out of one’s formerly unshakable standards for How Life Should Be.

The point is, all the negative and painful feelings are bound to come up for as long as the United States of America is processing this infection. The pain is a neon sign that shows us where we need to pay attention. The pain is a call to arms for the white blood cells. It’s just a variation on the same pain as yesterday. It didn’t stop us yesterday, it can’t stop us today, and it won’t stop us tomorrow.