Winter’s Reflections on a World Covered Over in Fear:

I will get to the link post, I promise. But first I want to reflect on how the first month since Trump’s re-election has been for me as a queer, neurodivergent white pagan woman who helps vulnerable people for a living.

Reflections on Imbolc:

Celtic pagan traditions celebrate Imbolc on February 1st or 2nd as the point where spring begin to gestate. It sits at one of the “cross-quarters”, or holidays that are directly in-between the solstices and equinoxes. I have been taught that the origin of the world is “ewe’s milk”. The tradition teaches that when the winter stores were running low and the future looked most bleak, the ewes in the flock would fill out in their pregnancies and the people would, if necessary, use ewe’s milk to survive. We survive. In the bleakest moment of uncertainty, we keep breathing.

I love the word “gestate” in this context. We talk a lot about birth, but gestation too often goes unmentioned. Every creative act, every birth, requires gestation. I am gestating an idea, a plan, a child, a seed. Rest is productive. Rest is generative. Often, rest is gestative.

Imbolc is my favorite holiday. It is also called “Lady Day”, for the goddess Brighid, or Saint Bridget, depending on your faith tradition. I named my dog Lady Day for both the holiday and for Billie Holliday. We celebrate her birthday on February 2, even though she was a stray of unknown (young) age when she was brought into the animal shelter and we have no idea what her actual birthday is. It is a day of reflection and stillness, the latter of which does not come easily for me. On Imbolc, we reflect.

Reflections on the first month, so far:

It’s bad.

It is as bad as I expected and worse than most people expected. I was caught blindsided when he won. Despite flaws, Harris was so far and away the better candidate that it astonished me that people would in huge numbers vote against their own best interests. And then I remembered: Racism. Sexism. Ahh, yes. The two huge barriers (together with their derivatives Nativism and anti-queerness, and with ableism) the American elite have used since the beginning to keep us divided and docile. The rejection of the concept that “everyone deserves soup”. The rejection of the idea that each human being is fundamentally equal under the law.

Without going into specifics, Trump won because of his racism, and he’s ruling based on that. More accurately, Musk is ruling on that. Trump has already become sidelined in his own administration, largely, I suspect, because he is well into cognitive decline.

Yeah, it’s really bad.

It’s a flurry of bad news, more every day, all of it horrifying, and the apparent lack of organized resistance feels devastating. And then I remember Y2K. Remember? We thought that the computer systems around the world were all going to crash on January 1, 2001, and then they didn’t, and everyone laughed and went on with their lives?

See, the computers didn’t crash because hard working people put in extra hours all over the world and fixed the problem.Now people think there never was a problem. And Biden fixed (much of) what Trump did. And people thought there wasn’t a problem. Maybe, just maybe, the reason for inaction is to let it cook. Let the world see how bad The Musk/Trump regime is for all of us. Let us feel the pain. Get the public buy-in. Maybe. After all, last poll I saw, Trump’s approval rating sits at the highest in his career amidst the chaos. That has to change. I’m not an accelerationist, but maybe that is what needs to happen. The winter needs to be even colder.

And more reflections on the first month. The damage.

History degrees come with a curse, especially if the person who earned one is autistic. You know what will happen and no one believes you. For instance, Anne Frank did not die in a concentration camp. She died in a detention camp, a temporary holding pen for Jewish people destined for concentration camps. Of typhus, a disease that spread due to over-crowding, poor sanitation, and poor nutrition. Trump has already sent planes full of immigrants to an oubliette at Guantanamo Bay. People have already died there, almost certainly. It is exactly the same, except that we can’t smell the sweet, sickly BBQ smell of human flesh burning from Guantanamo Bay.

Queer people, notably transgender people, have already taken their own lives, and their lives and livelihoods are already at more severe risk than they were. Immigrants have already been dumped (not deported – people who are deported return to their countries of origin) in random countries throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands have either lost their jobs or are at imminent risk of losing them. At least six planes have crashed since Trump eviscerated the FAA. Information is disappearing rapidly from government and other internet sites. Major institutions including colleges, hospitals, and large businesses, are already obeying in advance.

Reflections on how we can survive:

I work predominantly with neurodiverse and queer folk as a therapist and provide direct care in a one person business. I don’t work as a researcher, or as a teacher, but as someone on the front lines of keeping people with severe barriers to well-being alive and thriving. And it has been brutal this month.

Reflecting on what I tell my therapy participants:

I tell them: “Things are really tough right now. To survive and retain the potential to thrive, you need to do three things as often as possible:

• Move your self-care routine from a semi-conscious thing that you do haphazardly, when you remember to a conscious practice that grounds you every day.
• Repair and/or build your communities, both (especially) in-person and online. You’re going to need to have community to get through this.
• Protect, preserve, and prepare for the worst in the activities of the institutions and communities and activities you’re passionate about it, and use that passion to re-fuel you for the first and second steps. Pick one (and no more than three) lanes. Trust others to deal with the rest.
  

If I were to add a fourth thing, it would be to hone your skills. Most of my therapy participants are in survival mode, so frankly their survival skills are better than most, and they don’t have bandwidth for a lot of other learning tasks. But I’ll circle around back to that as soon as their brains and bodies relax from exhaustion at the constant stimulation and can do that.

What I’m doing to survive and thrive:

Sometimes general suggestions fail to provide enough guidance, so I often share the sorts of things that I’m doing to take care of myself. For instance,

When it comes to putting self-care into my active vs. background processes, I’m:

• Using the Finch app to organize my tasks and self-care routine every day while playing with my little birb and decorating their nest.
• Making an effort (still working on this one) to get a bit of cardio, strength, and flexibility training every day, as well as eating healthy foods more consistently. If fighting fascism isn’t enough incentive to get in shape, I don’t know what is.
• Grounding and centering my day every morning by drinking my coffee, listening to favorite music, and holding my family and pets close.
• Spending significantly more time and energy on doing things I love to do (knitting, reading, listening to audio books, watching Critical Role, participating in their Beacon community, napping, and drawing).
• Avoiding spending a lot of time learning about bad news I have no power to affect, and focusing instead on learning about bad news I can change.

When it comes to building community*, I’m:

• Engaging in conversations online and in-person about ordinary, daily things that aren’t invitations to argument.
• Working on building a Discord community that provides community, a stream of money for mutual aid efforts.
• Participating on social media as someone who proposes and discusses solutions vs. complaining that other peoples’ actions aren’t sufficient.
• Gathering supplies and making plans to organize neighborhood pot-lucks and swaps, should it come to that.

*A note: Other than family and close friends, most of my community is online because I don’t drive and have significant physical and emotional issues that make it hard to get out much. If you can’t build your in-person community, do the best you can.

When it comes to protecting, preserving, and participating in my passions, I’m:

• Attending organizing and educational events put on through Mobilize, particularly those of SURJ and People Power United, regularly.
• Providing link posts here to mutual aid resources and direct action items for people to participate in.
• Sharing other actions as often as possible on social media.
• Contributing a small but regular amount of money to mutual aid efforts every week.
• Developing a Discord server that will (I hope) eventually be run as a mutual aid organization through a collaborative process that brings at least a bit of income to those who take on leadership tasks and funds mutual aid. The plan is to support direct requests by preference and passing money to other mutual aid organizations when not.
• Continuing my practice of writing stories, poems, reflective and educational articles, that support human rights and mental health in my readers.
• Working on building a setup to be able to offer decent quality audio versions of my writings.
• Refusing to participate on social media platforms that have obeyed in advance any more than absolutely necessary. This includes all Meta platforms, Twitter/X, and TikTok. I miss them, but not that much.
• Using various means to download and preserve as much information as possible from the web and storing it locally to protect it from being memory-holed.

A Reflection on fear and hope:

This brings us back around to the theme of Imbolc. It’s bad right now. Its the depths of winter and it feels like spring will never come. However, the ewe’s udders will swell, as they always do, and the lambing will come. A lot of horrors are still to come, and we mustn’t wear blinders. However, optimism provides fuel and keeps us motivated, so:

Here are some things to be optimistic about:

• Attorneys general of nearly half the states, led by Washington state, have been planning for a second Trump regime for four years and are already teeing up and filing up lawsuits on dozens, potentially hundreds, of illegal actions of the administration. They are well funded and well staffed.
• Activist actions have shifted from predominantly public, performative actions such as public protests, wearing pins and “pussy hats”, for instance, to building reliable networks of mutual aid that will hold society together better in the face of our institutions collapsing.
• Millions of Americans are doing at least one thing every day or every few days to preserve data, protect institutions and community, and prepare for the worst.
• Many public servants and people working in large institutions are using tools such as malicious compliance, slowing their work, and using whisper networks. These counter mandated public policies to throw sand in the gears of the regime’s illegal actions.

Here are some disadvantages the Trump regime has:

• Fascism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The regime in-fights daily and their lack of experience managing large complex systems is causing them to have to backtrack regularly.
• We’re likely to count a lot of questionable appointments to cabinet posts in Scaramuccis (a unit of measurement based in how long Antony Scaramucci lasted in the first Trump regime – eleven days)
• The mood of resistance has shifted in a significant portion of the population from harm-reduction to fighting back, including literally.
• Great Britain and the European Union are gearing up to be a force to protect the world from us.
• The Trump tariffs will be massively unpopular very quickly, leeching support from his base. This is true of cuts to USAID, especially farm subsidies, Medicaid, and federal funding for public schools.

Final winter reflections in the cold and dark:

Things look bleak. Things are bleak. And yet, we are not defeated, and we have already begun to plan for a spring that may be a longer time coming than usual, but will certainly come. Those of us who are white need to listen to and learn from the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color communities. Those of you who are able bodied and hetero-normative need to listen to and pay attention to the queer and disabled communities. While unaffected people were whistling cluelessly along, these communities were already experiencing the conditions that are coming now for those previously unaffected.

We have resources. We have communities. And we have passionate love for humanity and our world. We will, in fact, overcome (h/t to Dr. Martin Luther King).

Thank you.

Coming soon:

Link post of libraries and books and preserving information.

General links post. (Completed).

Spreadsheet of mutual aid and direct actions accessible at the top of the mutual aid post.

“Soup and Solidarity” affiliate bookshop (through bookshop.org) (Completed).

Paid Discord for community and mutual aid fundraising (on May 1st). Actively seeking assistance and co-leadership for the Discord. Any income from the Discord will be 1/2 for leadership and 1/2 for mutual aid. This holds true until all leaders are earning the hourly equivalent of the median income in the US (if part-time) or a salary at the US median income (if 40 hours or more) paid as contractors, at which time 100% over compensation will be for mutual aid to individuals and other mutual aid communities.

Thank you.

---

Remember, if you want to be a founding member of the Soup and Solidarity Discord server (opening May 1, 2025), sign up to support it by becoming a Patron at $1 or more today.

Click here to go to the site directory to find more information and entertainment, and click here to email me to offer feedback or help me build the server.

Find more books that you might like through my Jenni’s Space / Soup & Solidarity store on Bookshop.org. I am an affiliate and earn money when you click through and buy anything, much of which gets passed on to Soup & Solidarity mutual aid.