Downshifting on America’s Birthday
I have a friend who told me last month that she flinches at the sound of her own phone. Not at any specific notification. Just the buzz. Her body had learned, somewhere over the last year, that a buzz usually means something is on fire, and now it reacts before she does.
Baby, your’re a firework, even if your government is disappointing you and triggering past disappointments
She turned off notifications, she plans news breaks, she practices decent cell-phone hygiene, but the nagging awareness that the world is on fire has her on edge anyway.
Even if you are somebody who isn't particularly political and isn't reading a lot of news, it's difficult to be unaffected by the events of the past decade in a nation that has become increasingly authoritarian and fascist in its politics but also economically precarious and frightening in daily life. We truly have not processed the Covid-19 pandemic, never mind experiencing it first under a president who denied its very existence because the optics were uncomfortable. We have watched the erosion of women's rights, safety of immigrants, state-sanctioned murder of civilians exercising their first amendment, and brutal, endless wars. Sustained threat doesn't just make us anxious. It makes us hypervigilant, which is a different thing. Hypervigilance is the body's bet that if it stays braced long enough, it can see the next blow coming. It can't. Nobody's body is built to brace like this.
But for those who are decidedly “non-political”, there’s an active effort in distancing and avoiding the information and rejecting the obvious ways in which their world has been impacted. In plain English, it’s tiring to pretend everything’s fine and nothing’s changed.
I realize I have some readers who aren’t from America, so thanks for sticking with me this long, and apologies if this particular post feels less relevant to you, but I wanted to really name where we are right now.
as we roll into the 250th anniversary of the birth of THE USA: the fascist turn this country has made is real, the hopelessness a lot of us feel about politics right now is a sane response to real conditions, and downshifting is not me telling you to look away from any of that. I want to be very clear about that distinction, because I'm deeply skeptical of wellness grifts that sell peace and calm as the antidote to everything. Downshifting was never about feeling better regardless of the facts. It was always about operating with intention towards yourself and your values without getting swept away by what's around you.
Two ways this goes wrong
One failure mode is the doom spiral. You know this one. The feed becomes a slot machine of bad news, you keep pulling the lever because some part of you believes that knowing more will make you safer, and six hours later you're exhausted, informed, and no more capable of acting than you were that morning. This isn't engagement. It's a nervous system stuck in the on position, mistaking activation for action.
The other failure mode is the opposite, and it gets marketed to us constantly right now: detach completely, protect your peace, this isn't a season for the news. I understand the appeal. I also think it's a luxury sold mostly to people for whom the fascist turn is an abstraction rather than a lived threat. For a lot of people in this country right now, looking away isn't available. The political conditions are in their inbox, their clinic, their immigration status, their classroom. Telling them to downshift by disengaging would be insulting. That's not what I'm offering here.
What I'm actually arguing for is a third thing, which is harder to package into a carousel: staying in contact with what's true, without letting your body live in a permanent state of emergency. Those are not the same task, even though our culture treats them as identical. You can know exactly how bad it is and still refuse to let your own physiology run at red-alert indefinitely, because red alert was never sustainable and the people counting on you to burn out are, in a real sense, served by your burnout. An exhausted, dissociated, doom-scrolled population is not a population that shows up to anything. Rest, in this context, isn't retreat. Tricia Hersey has been saying some version of this for years and I think about it constantly right now: rest as a refusal to let the machine have your whole self.
Why this feels so familiar
In therapy, we spend a lot of time looking for patterns. Not to diagnose the present by the past, but because the nervous system doesn't file feelings under dates. It files them under intensity. So when something in the present hits hard enough, the body doesn't just register the current event. It reaches back for every other time it felt something in that same register, whether or not the situations have anything in common on paper.
This is why the current moment might be pulling up other times you were let down by people who were supposed to protect you. Other times you were told, with a straight face, to accept something you knew was hypocrisy. Other times you had to hold two irreconcilable things at once just to get through a room, a dinner, a relationship. The analogies between a country and a family get made so often they've become a cliché, and I go back and forth on whether they hold up under real scrutiny. But the neurobiology underneath the cliché is real: intense feeling in the present can summon the full weight of every earlier version of that feeling, even when the current situation is dramatically different in its particulars. That's not you being dramatic or making it about yourself. That's a nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do.
Knowing that won't make the current thing less true or less serious. But it might explain why it feels less like current-events fatigue and more like something older, something with teeth. It's worth asking yourself, when the intensity spikes, whether you're only reacting to today, or whether today has just given an old feeling a new door to walk through.
About July 4th
I know this issue is landing the same week as the Fourth, and that's why I'm going down this road more directly instead of dancing around it.
Maybe it’s because nobody in my family ever looked like this, but Uncle Sam saying he wants you always gave me the creeps…
I don't know how you're spending it. Maybe there are fireworks and a cooler and a flag on a porch somewhere, the whole inherited choreography of the day. The discomfort of celebrating a country's founding ideals at the same time those ideals are visibly losing, badly, in real time. That dissonance is not a sign you're doing the holiday wrong. It's an accurate read of where we are.
You don't owe anyone a resolved feeling about your country this year. You're allowed to grill the corn and still be furious. You're allowed to sit through the fireworks and still believe, with your whole clinical and personal self, that something has gone seriously wrong in how power is being used against the people it's supposed to answer to. Holding both is not hypocrisy. It's what it actually feels like to love a place you're watching fail to live up to itself.
So, today’s Downshifting Journal prompt is a quick step into acknowledging the opposites you’re holding, because labeling is a form of coping and putting things into words gives it context to feel less chaotic.
Downshifting Journal Prompt:
What’s your both/and as you head into July 4th? It doesn’t have to relate to any of this, but I want you to write it down regardless.
The actual ask
If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: the goal right now isn't calm. Calm isn't available, and chasing it will just make you feel like you're failing at peace on top of everything else. The goal is regulation enough to stay in the fight, whatever your fight looks like, for longer than a news cycle. That might mean stepping away from your phone for stretches that have nothing to do with not caring. It might mean choosing which fronts you can actually be useful on, instead of trying to hold all of them at once. It might mean letting yourself have an actual Fourth of July, food and people and noise, without treating enjoyment as a betrayal of how seriously you take what's happening.
None of this fixes the politics. I want to be honest about that instead of closing on something tidier than the moment deserves. But a body that's still online with itself, still able to feel things instead of just absorbing them, is a body that can still organize, still show up, still vote, still call someone, still be in relationship with the people doing the same. That's not nothing. Some weeks it's the whole job.
Thanks for Downshifting with me, please reply with any thoughts. I love them and I read them.
Till next time,
S
Misc. Musings
*The Global cultural exchange of the World Cup rolls on, and even if you’re not a soccer fan, it feels like a bright spot in a weirdly dark time to see regular people from all over the world bond over their love of a sport. It cuts the isolationism.
*I finished The Correspondent and now I can make polite conversation with a broad range of people but I still want to talk about Yesteryear. Also ready for the best reading season of the year: beach books! Hit me up with your suggestions.
*The Supreme Court this week decided that birthright citizenship was actually still a birthright. Phew, because that would have affected me, born to non-citizens in the great state of Massachusetts. My father’s citizenship appointment was on the day of my birth, so we always joked that we became citizens together, but I was first. For now, it will stay that way.