Overwhelmed

That’s the word that surfaced as I woke up this morning: overwhelmed.

Work is getting done, which is to say that anything with an impending deadline is getting done, but tasks with farther-off deadlines or no deadline at all? They’re getting put off. Like I need serious help with my 2024 taxes, but have I followed up with the tax preparer that my financial guy recommended?

Not really. When I contacted the recommended preparer, a small firm with a local office, in mid-December, I was told that they were busy doing end-of-year reports for existing clients and one of the principals would call me after the first of the year. No one has called, but more to the point, I haven’t followed up. My 1099s haven’t arrived yet, I told myself. I haven’t finished entering my 2024 credit card statements into Quicken.

Yeah, right. The last of my 1099s arrived more than two weeks ago, and the reason I haven’t finished entering my 2024 credit card statements into Quicken is that I haven’t finished entering my 2024 credit card statements into Quicken.

I haven’t posted here in more than 10 days because the words and ideas swirling in my head haven’t coalesced into a coherent post. They haven’t coalesced into a coherent post because I won’t sit still long enough to let them coalesce. No sooner do I sit down with my laptop on my lap than I’m skimming news headlines, reading other people’s Substacks, or playing Spider or FreeCell.

All is not totally lost, however. At the end of last week I sent 20 postcards off to Wisconsin, supporting WI Supreme Court candidate Judge Susan Crawford. I’ve been writing with Postcards to Voters since the fall of 2017, when Doug Jones ran for the U.S. Senate from OMG Alabama and won. The targeted voters are chosen in collaboration with the candidate. The lists we writers receive include addresses only, no names, so we use the generics suggested by PTV. My favorites include Dedicated Voter, Determined Voter, Essential Voter, Esteemed Voter, and Most Valuable Voter.

12 of my 20 postcards for Judge Susan Crawford in Wisconsin. As you can tell, I’m fond of stickers. I usually make my own postcards with Avery cardstock and templates.

Writing postcards is a little like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean. You can be pretty confident that each card will reach the address you’ve written on it, but what effect it will have is up in the air. The undeniable upside is that I’m continually inspired by these people running for up- and down-ballot offices across the country, plus I learn about the important issues in all these other places.

Writing postcards helps keep the overwhelm at bay. So does repeatedly contacting your elected representatives (even the ones who never respond to calls or emails) and showing up at demonstrations and doing what you can to protect those most threatened in your community.

The books I’m currently reading might be making my overwhelm worse, though I highly recommend them all.

• The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, by Madiba K. Dennie (Random House, 2024).

• The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto, by Jonathan Taplin (PublicAffairs, 2023). You can probably guess at least three of the four: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel (mentor of the current U.S. vice president), and Marc Andreesen (the one I was least familiar with).

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020). I’m reading this for the second time, plus I’m in a discussion group about it.

The Originalism Trap is the most hopeful of the three. Caste is the most far-reaching and the most sobering. It was published in August 2020, before the 2020 election, before January 6, 2021, and long before the 2024 election, but it goes a long way to explaining why those events happened. I have no patience with those who point to 2016 or 1/6/2021 or 2024 and say “This is not who we are.” This is exactly who “we” are, and what more of us need to be grappling with.

What I finally figured out in the process of writing this is that I’m overwhelmed because events are overwhelming, and that the antidote is, as always, to “chunk it down,” or as the time-tested phrase has it, “chop wood, carry water.”

Turns out that “A Stillness in the Wind” was exactly the right name for this Substack: “like the stillness in the wind before the hurricane begins / the hour when the ship comes in.” The hurricane has begun, but the ship is a long way off and may even be a mirage. Don’t wait for the ship. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, one word after another. It really does help with the overwhelm.