I do not know how to be a person on this timeline. I do not know how to reconcile the unspeakable atrocities this government is doing in my name with the bliss of standing in the sunshine on the first warm day of the season. I don’t know how to cycle between watching children be murdered with weapons paid for by my tax dollars and spotting the first crocus of the season, between watching my government protect billionaires who rape children and sitting quietly at the shore hearing nothing but the waves, between reading about children being held in concentration camps and rejoicing as the first spring song birds return to my bird feeders.

I do not know how to make myself feel the tiny joys (because oh, feeling the tiny joys all the way down deep in your bones is a practice and a discipline and you must do it intentionally or you will absolutely lose the knack of it) and not be completely overwhelmed by the ongoing horrors.

But I do know that for the last year I have felt a tremendous urge to document my days. (Some time soon here we are going to have to talk about my stickerbook and how it’s kept me [somewhat] sane[ish] and [mostly] upright when everything feels unbelievably precarious.) And as part of that, I find myself needing to record the background against which my days are playing out. Because so often I get to the end of the day or the week or the month and feel like I have accomplished far less than I should. And I blame myself for being lazy or indolent or just not good enough.

But when you put it in context—when you remind yourself that you managed to get the cat to the vet (even though a masked man shot and killed a woman on her way home from dropping off her kid at school), and you ate cookies with a friend (even though other masked men shot and killed a man who was trying to help a woman they’d knocked to the ground), and you got the car to the mechanic (even though you just watched a video of yet more masked men kidnap someone on a street you recognize), and you made dinner (even though your country just bombed another country and kidnapped their leader), and you took a walk outside in the sunshine (even though your country just started another pointless war by killing dozens and dozens and dozens of children)—then suddenly those tiny, ordinary things that you did manage to do don’t feel quite as insignificant. Because you remember how much of your energy is going to just surviving the world we find ourselves in. And that is no small task.

So I keep writing it down. Because even the things you swear you will remember forever fade and fade quickly (remember this time in 2020? those first, frozen, surreal days of covid? when we were washing our groceries and sewing masks and dropping flour and sugar and toilet paper off on our friends’ porches? what would you have written down about those days?).

And I want to remember. Because I think it helps with the ongoing quest to figure out how to be a person when the world is on fire. Even if I don’t ever feel like I’m getting it right.

So now it’s your turn. Tell me what is helping you manage right now. Is anyone else feeling the urge to keep an account of their days? Does anyone else feel like they could really really really use a shiny gold star sticker just for waking up this morning and not either weeping or screaming or burning it down or going right back to bed? Because I would very much like to know I am not alone in that feeling…