One of my core self-care practices is peer counseling. I use it to address childhood trauma, as well as to manage present time challenges and just the stresses of everyday life. That work supports my art and my activism, and has allowed me to stay engaged and optimistic about fighting the climate crisis and ousting Tr*mp in November. However, about 60 days before the election, I hit the wall and began to panic. My optimism had run out.

I found that I needed to use my peer counseling practice daily to work on my terror about the threat of fascism. I would sit there on the phone and just tell my peer counselor how scared I was and I would shake and sometimes cry. My terror of 45’s lawlessness and the threat of losing our democracy is a real and present danger. However, this current political situation also triggers me from very early in my life, a pre-verbal state of terror from scary things that happened in my family. When those things happened, I was a baby. I had very little agency. When I get frightened by 45, not only am I in a state of panic, but I’m also triggered to recall a state of helplessness. I have felt frozen. My goal in working on it every day was not only to quell the panic, but also to reclaim my agency.

For a while, I just needed to take a few minutes each day to have someone listen to how terrified I felt. Someone who wouldn’t join me in the space of fear, “yes, girl, I’m scared too!” But just listen and give me the space to notice how afraid I feel most of the time.

After several weeks, I couldn’t reliably cry and shake when I talked about being scared. My peer counseling healing theory suggests that I had worked through the heaviest layer of fear. So I needed a way to keep working on all the other layers of fear that were still left.

A less scary childhood memory is a commercial for decaf with two white people. In the ad, one of them is refusing coffee: “No thanks, my doctor says caffeine makes me edgy.” This line has always stuck in my head. I have remixed this for my own purposes of dealing with anxiety in this political moment. When I say it my remixed line, I laugh and laugh and release some of the tension from my body. Since I’ve worked through a lot of the panic, I’ve been able to get active in the election. I’ve been text banking with Resistance Labs and the Working Families Party. I know I’m not a helpless little person, I’m a grown woman who’s part of a movement, a movement determined to remove Donald Tr*mp. No thanks.