A few folks have reached out because I have been posting less since the result came in. I really appreciate y'all looking out for me, but the reduction in posting volume is a *good* indication for my mental health, not a bad one :).
I was posting like a maniac and focused on politics in the lead-up to draw attention to Super Swing Districts, trying to spend my political capital, such as it is, with my largely tech audience to advance something that I thought might help. And I feel like it did.
One of the folks who reached out even specifically mentioned that they were using https://github.com/glyph/pomodouroboros for the first time, and it was helping them be productive. And speaking of mental health, that helped more than anything. (Now would be a great time to reach out to your favorite open source maintainer and let them know you appreciate their work.)
But, to the extent that I *can*, I'm going to focus less on politics, particularly partisan stuff, for a while. It's time to rest and recharge.
I do have a *little* bit of analysis I might post next week, but for the most part, I think diving into the numbers right now is maladaptive coping. I can recognize this impulse in myself—thanks, therapy—because at least for me, the *temptation* to dive into cross tabs and historical retrospectives is an attempt to impose order on something that is fundamentally chaotic. Trying to seize control of something that I have fully lost control of. Which is just a recipe for anxiety.
Do not mistake this to mean that I think everything will be fine now. I am, absolutely, grieving this result. I think there will be horrors in the next four years that they will write history books about, if the oceans have not risen to cover everything that they could write books with.
But I could be wrong about that. The horrors are not happening *now*. They are not happening here, and they are not happening to me. Most likely, they are not happening to you, right now, either.
Between here and the horrors, we must each do what we can. And that means helping each other. But it also means doing what we are good at.
There *are* some people for whom that is constantly posting about politics. We need polemicists and "influencers", polling analysts and newscasters. But that's not me. And if it's not you, either, you need to give yourself grace not just to rest and grieve, but to get back to your actual work, even if it feels further from the fight.
We did not lose because you didn't post hard enough, and we will not be safe if you post harder now.
I say this not because I think it is easy to cop out and just think about yourself, but because it is *very hard* to do that. It is extremely easy to drown in the sea of anguish and anxiety that we are all swimming in right now, to read and post and react and worry.
It's *hard* to remember to update your car registration and do your taxes and fix the jira tickets that came in this morning.
But the revolution is not going to come as a knock on your door, where you just get your protest sign and then we all yell really hard and then the world is good again. It is going to be a grinding game of inches. One day you're going to need to drive a friend across state lines, and you'll really need that registration to be current. You're going to run for a local office and you'd better not owe any back taxes. And you're going to need the income from those jira tickets for mutual aid.
Anyway, that was a lot of posting to say that posting isn't what's important, and probably obviously this advice is more for myself than it is for you, but if I can steal Ro Ramdin's signoff, I think this sentiment is more important now than ever:
Take care of yourself, take care of others.
Be kind to yourself, be kind to others.
And remember that somebody out there loves you.
@glyph Yes and... being kind to yourself means you will be more likely to have the health and energy to do all the things we're going to need to do. So yeah, take a walk, take a shower, cook a nice meal for yourself, etc.
@glyph "We did not lose because you didn't post hard enough, and we will not be safe if you post harder now."
Oof.