I haven’t written a blog post for over a year because frankly, I couldn’t.

The horror of living in Trump’s America was my undoing. I had a particular set of responses to his daily assaults which cycled something like: horrified, furious, stunned, numb, terrified, stunned, numb, heartbroken, stunned, numb. Rinse and repeat.

I could not believe what had happened and was happening. Every day seemed like a fresh hell, a thousand paper cuts interspersed with hard kicks to the gonads. Every time I tried to get up, I was felled by the next gleefully cruel or mind-bogglingly stupid news story or tweet.

Even as I was trying to persist and resist, I was flattened. Deflated and disempowered, I wanted to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Instead, I was more like slow-moving lava that had exploded, oozed hot—and then hardened in place.

This is the impact of terrible leadership, when the people who SHOULD be championing our well being are the ones spearheading our demise. They may not take out a gun and shoot us (or, then again, they MIGHT) but their betrayal is chilling and profound. And it froze me….

…until it didn’t. What follows are my thoughts about how to succeed when a president, or any leader, catastrophically fails.

But before you get too excited that I’m going to present “7 Steps for Surviving a Hellscape,” I must disclose that I haven’t found “the answer” to our plight, but I do have some insight.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

When subject to a terrible leader of any kind, the first thing to do is to protect the energy you have. Simply put: your exhaustion is their exhilaration.

Do NOT waste your energy wishing that things were different or asking yourself whyyyyyy?? Things are NOT different, and it doesn’t matter so much WHY it is happening, as THAT it is happening. If you cannot get with what is, you cannot fashion a sustainable survival strategy.

Next, you must reckon with the Circle of Concern/Circle of Influence. The Circle of Concern is big; it contains all of the issues that you care about and that affect you, and may include things like immigration, LGBTQIA rights, institutionalized racism, healthcare, gun control, the state of our democracy, climate change, accurate news reportage, the economy. These things absolutely affect your daily life, but, unless you are a senior governmental employee, chief executive, or public figure, you cannot decide or significantly influence the direction things will go.

Your Circle of Influence is the area in which you have direct ability to heavily influence or make the decision about how things unfold. These include things like where you live, who you live with, what you do in your free time, where you work, what you eat, how much exercise and sleep you get, how you interact with others, how you live your values. For example, you may not be able to eradicate institutionalized racism, but you can decrease your own.

It is hard to live with the fact that you do not have much sway in the Circle of Concern. And it is hard to focus in your Circle of Influence because it feels like far too little, given the national and global threats we face. The “reckoning” here is this: when considering what is happening and what you can do, you must parse out which Circle is which.

If you spend too much time in your Circle of Concern, you will deplete your energy on things you don’t have the power to shift. And, you will leave your Circle of Influence–which is where your power resides. Resist the pull toward the Circle of Concern!

Of course I care very much about what is happening in my country, but other than being able to vote, to donate time and money, sign petitions, go to demonstrations, and contact my Senators and Representatives, etc.–I don’t DECIDE which way things go. On a good day I can have some influence, but the truth is, I’m not Kamala Harris or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I don’t have the microphone, I don’t have big influence. I am not the driver, I am basically a passenger on this ride.

And this is where I chafe most, because I DID NOT VOTE TO GO ON THIS RIDE.

So, when you are swept up in something that is way bigger than you, that you alone cannot un-do, what constitutes right action? How can you NOT get overwhelmed by the helplessness you experience as you contemplate your giant Circle of Concern and your comparatively puny power? What are the mindsets and behaviors that help us to stay afloat in a murky sea of pain?

What I am learning is this:

-Regardless of what is happening “out there,” what really matters is what is happening “in here.” In particular, I need to be able to still my thoughts long enough to make contact with my soul. I need to be able to metaphorically look up and see my “North Star”–no matter how bad it gets on the earth plane. If I cannot reliably locate my inner compass, I am lost.

-Having my emotions, and feeling them fully is critical. Numbing out, over-emphasizing one emotion, or pretending I am not feeling what I feel is entirely unhelpful. But once I have really felt my emotions I have to Let. Them. GO. Stuck negative feelings are poison.

-Words and behaviors have energy, and energy is contagious. My energy may not have national or global impact, but it does affect the people around me. It matters whether I am grumpy, or reactive, or numb, or kind, or open. IT MATTERS.

-I can’t look back into the past for detailed guidance about living in the present. When Trump first got elected, I feverishly read about Nelson Mandela in prison, and about the Resistance in Europe during WWII, looking for ways to endure until sanity prevails again. Although I got a bit of inspiration, what I have come to realize is that this is an unprecedented time in human history, and the solutions cannot come from the past. They must be lived into…in the now.

Living into the now means living with a huge amount of ambiguity and volatility. We do NOT know how this is all going to play out. Living into the now begs us to find our still point, and when we inevitably are blown off course, to return to it over and over and over again. It is a full time job.

-Something is dying, and something wants to be born. Yes, these are difficult times, and, I think we are being invited to figure out who we are and what we really value, as a nation and a globe.

This must be consciously decided, and, no, I don’t know how this will happen or if it will happen in time. Dark times precede emerging into the light, and we may not make it. But I hope that we are actually heading toward a kindly stewardship of every sentient being on the planet. I truly believe that is what wants to emerge from all of this chaos and dissent.

-What I have come to in all of this, is that I have to stay alert to my own story telling. It matters what story I tell myself about what is happening, because I act from that story.

But even more than managing my incessant inner monologue, I realize that I have to get more imaginative with my own narrative. When I’m at the end of my life looking back on this period, what do I WANT to be able to say I did? How did I conduct myself through this darkness? What did I challenge myself to do, and what did I restrain myself from doing? How did I show up for others?

Asking myself these questions daily has helped me make moment to moment choices about how to think and behave. Thinking from “the future back” reminds me that this too shall pass, and that there actually IS a way I want to have conducted myself, no matter what. This sort of perspective-taking helps me remember that all things change, and that I want to be the best me I can be, whatever the conditions.

-Lastly, I cannot go it alone. Under duress, I’m inclined to withdraw. This can be okay, even necessary–but over the last couple of years I have understood that withdrawal is one thing, but isolation is another.

I think a lot of what got us here as a nation and a globe is that we have disconnected from each other. Our relationships to ourselves, to family, to neighbors, and to community have been dramatically redefined in recent decades. The upshot: it is more common to feel lonely and alienated than it is to feel included and enfolded.

We have totally lost track of the fact that–like it or not–we are all in this together.

We must find our way to back to each other, to feel that we belong and we matter. Even when we vehemently disagree.

I do not know how to do this. I am just looking for others who want to figure it out too.