I am awake with grief. It's 4:07 am and I am awake with the grief of 100 decisions I have made or am making and the waves of closure and initiation that splash in their wake. This is one way that worry feels these days.1
But really, I am awake with the grief of what shapes those decisions. I am awake with the residual grief of a parent I talked with last night — the one who abruptly lost her job after an unelected narcissistic billionaire was unleashed into the plumbing of our shared governance and just shut off the tap on international aid. I am awake with the grief of the unknown thousands of children and their parents who may die because of it. I am awake with the grief of climate-scale catastrophe that I meet with my small bucket of food scraps.
I am awake with grief and also, I am afraid. I'm guessing fear and grief are not unfamiliar to you if you're reading this. Fear and grief have shaped this season along with anger and worry, nihilism and rupture, defiance and protectiveness.
I meant, this morning, to write about how I balance staying informed about what's happening in the country and the world without being overwhelmed by it. And then, I snapped awake at 3am and here I am, awash with grief, awake at an hour that will pull me under come early evening. There's no outside of the overwhelm, I guess. Is awake with grief at 3am balance? Knowing some of what's unfolding, how it's affecting people, and how it may affect me doesn't leave me balanced in any way that's cozy nor puritan nor calm. The feelings math shows me balance isn't the point. Maybe the waking with grief is ballast — it offsets the fear, anger, and worry I filter by day.
I was going to show you screenshots of how I review the news for my substack/podcast Grover Reads the News offering, what kinds of blockers I put on my phone settings so news alerts do not inundate me. How I peeled social media out of most of my life. But the Substackery is full of those hacks this week.
Instead, I want to tell you about the first time I got an iPod shuffle.
What's information got to do with it?
When I was twenty five, I was saturated in a world wherein creating and being part of "alternative" cultures was considered the political work I was meant to do. Zines and off-the-grid music festivals and a veneration of hitchhiking and train hopping and the sense that the world we make in a livingroom with other people who share our cultures and analysis and identities will remake the world as we want it to be.
Some part of that world was very powerful, very resourcing for a person who had been rejected from the world I was raised in because of the identities I had and the culture I refused to recreate. And then, when I was stably housed with a bachelor's degree in hand, I began to see there was possibly a life for me outside the shadowy margins and in the world of stable employment, that I might have access to a world where my actual name might be my actual name. When I was brought into organizing campaigns that were attempting to shape literal futures through ballot measure politics, I was taught that I have unused power that could help people live better lives — myself included.
Then I realized I had no fucking idea who my Senator was. Or my Mayor. Or remember how my high school textbook said a ballot measure worked. I was a poet. I read a lot of books that shared how people felt being oppressed, and I believed them. But my witness and analysis and t-shirts and slogans and poems and potlucks alone couldn't stop the oppression from happening.
So I thought "How do I learn more about (national & electoral) politics without falling asleep on a boring book and without feeling like my very existence was up for debate by the teacher? And how do I do this while working and commuting to a full-time job." I'd heard there was this smart Butch dyke who was just allowed to do a politics show on real live TV, and I liked having a Butch talking national politics in my ears better than basically any other person talking about national politics at the time, and I didn't have a TV nor did I want one, so I ended up trading part of my paycheck for a tiny square with one giant button on that put two podcasts — the Rachel Maddow Show and the Splendid Table — right into my ears as I rode the bus to work and walked around my neighborhood.
I learned how to actually cook that year. I also canvased for a presidential candidate for the first time, called my fucking asshole of a Senator2 about banning the ban on preexisting conditions, and stuck a sign in my yard to that effect until it was rusty and until I no longer lived there. Two years later the legislation went into effect. I am not claiming its outcome, it is just a story about things that happened.
Fast forward to 2020, when I, like many of you, spent untold hours scrolling Instagram trying to find a window into what was happening, what could happen, and what will happen. Those years broke something in my brain and I have backed away slowly from machine.
But my time in that square window did draw me deeply into local organizing with a police abolition and community care campaign and eventually organization. It did allow me to connect with others. Knowing what was happening and allowing expert Black leaders to help me connect the dots between the murder of Black people by police and the system that creates these conditions gave me the tools I needed to take meaningful action with other people.
Facing the present
There are many, many ways of knowing. There's the felt sense, what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears, what others tell us, what we wake up awash with. I've made some big life decisions with too little information. I've made other decisions with a lot of information and felt really grateful for it. I've been deeply overwhelmed by too much information, and some kinds of information stick to me and I have a difficult time psychically detaching from it — some stories, some images, some kinds of harm.
I do know, however, that knowing what was going on — never all (because that's literally impossible), always some — has made me more able to connect with my world and the people in it with more integrity, more empathy, more effective use of the leverage I actually have, and it's given me common ground to connect with people who I don't share a sub-cultural history or ethos with.
I worry that knowing too much — following too closely — will have the effect of psychological warfare on some of my fellow travelers. I see the cracks already in some of us. "Do you have your app timers set? Can you check the source of that…. again?"
And I also worry that the fear of looking at what's happening, of hearing at least the broad outlines of what's changing, what's changed, will splinter us into even more isolated realities in which shared and concise action in response to dangerous and dire conditions will grow more and more difficult.
I really appreciated this reminder by Kenyon Farrow — a longtime leader in the worlds of prison abolition and HIV/AIDS. He's someone I've long looked to as a model of loving his people while taking principled action for justice against and sometimes within institutions.
This is to say: hello. I'm here on this plane, awake with grief, ballasted by years of learning and grief (the same griefs and other griefs) and making mistakes and trying again. We need you here with us — on this plane and also present, to some extent, about what is happening to others, what is and can happen to ourselves. We don't have to take the breaking headlines to the face. There are other ways of knowing.
The tagline or mantra of Grover Reads the News is "We don't have to face it alone. We can do it together." I truly believe it.3 Because I certainly have a desire to shut down and build my garden and take my friend a casserole and sing with my friends and that's that. And I certainly have the capacity to obsessively track every breaking piece of shit announcement and insult and dangerous as fuck decision being made in the executive office and elsewhere. I have so much empathy for both responses.
Literally, read the news
Since the eve of the election, my news practice has been like going swimming in the ocean two times a week (mind, a grain of salt here because I've never actually swum in the ocean as a regular practice). I tell myself "Okay, it's time." I listen to a mainstream news summary podcast while I walk the dog. I scan the headlines. I click to read more. I click to read more. I think "but wait, what about this part that went to court last week" and I search for what happened with that. "What's happening in the rest of the world?" I search and scan that.
Just like the iPod shuffle shaped my year of electoral-politics-and-cooking and my Instagram years shaped me into local organizing borne from the largest protest movement in US history, this Era is one of me being shaped by algorithms of the search and the news digest while trying to keep my own psychic autonomy and political commitments. I try to stay deeply connected to my own curiosity. I look at my list and think, "I wonder what the headlines at the 19th are today." "I often read really interesting stuff about the Right in Rolling Stone. What did they write about this week?"
I put time boundaries on it. My kids help this way. They will come home. I shall not be recording this podcast when they do. I have bills to pay which means I must do client work. The dog needs walked. I shall not research for more than two hours twice a week. I will fill my hands with books when I desire to lean on the counter scrolling. This is what's working for me now. What will be? I do not know. I do know that I want us to face it together.
If you’re not already, you can Subscribe to the twice a week news summary delivered with grounded connection at: https://groverreadsthenews.substack.com/subscribe or listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts (like Spotify or Apple Podcasts).
Tract: a major passage in the body, large bundle of nerve fibers, or other continuous elongated anatomical structure or region. Also, a short treatise in pamphlet form, typically on a religious subject.
Truly asshole. The stuff of nightmares, like this nightmare only less techy. Burr of North Carolina. And also Kay Hagan who is less a stuff of nightmares.
Together in facing the news and together in the literal work that need done to care for each other, to change the political conditions, to resist and dissent and exchange information.