Good morning!
This is Issue 70.2 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s news, fermented:
content warning: discussion of abuse and trauma
We’ve made it to Friday!
I tend to feel like this almost every week, regardless of what happened.
Given this end-of-rest moment and the above feeling, today seems like a great day for a few tidbits about ~coping~.
In the past month—usually a slow news month in the US, usually a slow time for the US paying attention to the rest of the world—we’ve collectively experienced and seen countless disasters. Most of these disasters, from COVID to the climate crisis, are on a scale and of a severity that our parents’ generation didn’t experience, most likely.
Here’s my hypothesis: Friday feels like such an accomplishment for two reasons. The first is that there’s disaster all around us all the time, a low thrum or a deafening roar, depending on our circumstances.
The second is that, for many folks, Friday signals the end of a period of time in which our attention revolves around screens, and with screens comes interaction with the apparently tireless news cycle.
This week, ProPublica, a high-caliber investigative newsroom that puts pieces together to better understand the puzzle of oppressive systems, published an article: How We Report on Pain, Death and Trauma Without Losing Our Humanity.
It discusses the challenges of making, often, trauma into something that people can read about and not completely losing yourself.
There are so many jobs that expose us to secondary trauma: EMTs and other first responders, social workers, teachers, criminal investigators, so on. A colleague of mine recently reminded me how taxing it is to spend our days thinking about the complex web of abuse that corporations levy on humans around the world.
The nature of living under oppressive, extractive systems is such that if you do something that’s good for the world, chances are you’ll be interacting with trauma in some way or another. We have to take care of ourselves, per the ProPublica piece—so that we don’t just fully shut down and turn away.
Another resource along these lines is from the All We Can Save project, which calls on us to be “fueled by ferocious love for all we can save.” Their resources for working with climate emotions offers a broad range of ways to interact with climate anxiety and so many other anxieties that bubble up in this time of crisis.
Among other strategies, doing stuff can be really helpful to easing those anxieties. Here are a couple of things:
Sharing resources, if you’re able, with BIPOC folks doing mutual aid work in the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Ida
Hosting a cookout to educate and organize folks in support of ending the exception in the 13th Amendment “that allows for slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.” (!!)
Calling our stupid president (sorry, not sorry) to tell him he needs to actually lead on climate and stop construction of Line 3.
On that note: take some breaths, do something that feels doable, be nice to yourself.
Our fabulous contributors are still trickling back in, so it’s just me and DJ toMoR0 today. Till Monday!
(via)
DJ toMoR0’s low-key Music Show
“And we back, and we back, and we back, and we back, and we
And we back, and we back, na, na, na”
- Chance the Rapper
Hellooooo Digestable family, it feels good to be here again. While we were gone, Yola finally released the album We’ve All Been Waiting For (or just me?) and you can now listen to Stand For Myself in its full beauty. You’ve heard me expound on the regality, the depth, the soul of Yola here before, and never has her sound been more true to the times. Here we have an album that shines, radiating strength and goodness and a take-no-bullshit view of the world. Dance, sing and vibe along to the sweet sounds of Whatever You Want, somehow hopeful breakup song Dancing Away in Tears, and my favorite anti-capitalist jam, Diamond Studded Shoes.
Find this ~DJ~ here in your inbox every other week for the rest of the farming season, or come find me out in the fields where I’ll be bumping the tunes on our tiny rugged bluetooth speaker as we harvest! Want to know what we listen to when we farm? I’ll be posting playlists this season! Follow along and check out the current go-to jam set here.