Checking In - How Are You Doing?

A lot has happened since the third week of January 2025, in my own personal life. It seems like an understatement to say a lot has happened politically in the USA since that time too. Let’s check in.

One thing I think we all agree on is January 2025 was being soooo looonng - some describing it as 635(or some other extreme length) days long. A friend’s words came back to me over and over last month, “If you can make it through January, you can make it through anything.” She attributed the quote to her mother who lived many, many years ago, but the adage especially rang true this year. Or, as

Jami Attenberg

suggests, I think we should shout out to our brains for continuing to function during the times in which we live.

Here’s to having functioning brains during times like these in which we live.

Go ahead! If indeed your brain is still functioning take a moment and celebrate the achievement!

On the Personal Front

My husband and I made a concerted effort not to take in any media on January 20. We were prepping for emotionally and practically for major back fusion surgery that my husband would undergo the next day.

Bright and early on Tuesday, January 21, when the temperature was -13 F, I drove my husband to the hospital for what was to be his second back fusion operation. His last one was in 2013. While he was nervous, and so was I, we were grateful to know he was undergoing the operation under the gifted and caring hands of the same surgeon who had performed his surgery before. As they wheeled my eighty-one year old husband towards the operating room, I heard him say to the nurses assisting him, “This really is a big surgery, isn’t it?” The answer, “Yes, it is. It is a very extensive surgery.”

I’ve been by my husband’s side caring for him through two knee replacement surgeries, two shoulder replacement surgeries, two hip replacement surgeries, and one back fusion surgery prior to this second back fusion surgery which took place last month. I am no stranger to all it takes to go through these procedures and recover from them both as an observer of the patient and process, and as a caregiver.

With each new surgery, I see how medical science is improving outcomes and giving people back the quality of life they had before joints wore out and discs in backs begin to slide into each other. Also, my husband has proven time and again just how resilient he is and how well he bounces back from each new major surgery.

Still…

I was very nervous, and worried, and I fought back giving in to fear as I sat in the waiting room for the approximately four and a half hours Jim was in surgery. Thankfully, a friend from our church surprised me by showing up to sit with me and chat, and that did make a huge difference in keeping my mind off the time that was passing with no updates from surgery.

Immediate post-surgery recovery was amazing, and was better than the recovery he experienced twelve years ago. In fact, the three and a half days he was recovering in the hospital went better than they had when he was younger too. He had no side effects from surgery. Immediately, he no longer was in constant pain, and he experienced very little post-surgical pain. He was up and walking with assistance quite quickly, and was told by one physical therapist that he was doing so much better than one other patient who had the same surgery a few days before him and was decades younger.

He came home in the late afternoon of Friday, January 24. He tires easily, and says he feel he is living life in slow motion, but I he has resumed walking short distances, driving, and even went grocery shopping for me today which marks the third week since surgery.

We are grateful for such great progress, and we are grateful for all the wonderful support we have had from others in calls, cards, visits, and gifts of food.

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On the Political Front

There have been days for all of us I am sure when the “shock and awe” of all we have been experiencing over the past three weeks has been overwhelming. Need I say more?

With each new day, I think at least half the citizens of the United States wonder, as I do, what new insane attack will take place upon our constitutional democracy.

Sometimes, I don’t even know what to say about it all. When I don’t know what to say, I feel stymied when it comes time to writing on-line, or even when it comes time to write in my journal. It’s hard to know what to write, but I want you to know: I am not ready to give up the pen. Part of the difficulty in writing comes because I’m tired and weary from feeling the overwhelm on all fronts: personal and political, relational and social, physical and mental, emotional and spiritual.

I will need some time to get back to full speed before I share some of the thoughts I have on what we are all experiencing on all fronts. I will write more once I feel more rested and have more clarity.

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Some Thoughts on What I Am Thinking About on The Political World

I believe we must come to see that Donald Trump is a man whose actions manifest for all of us what it means to be ruled by a person with extreme solipsism.¹

Trump’s solipsism conforms to a tradition in psychology and philosophy for rendering the self as an insistent source of all reality. With extreme forms of solipsism the external world and other minds cannot be known and may, in effect have not existence. What results is continuous falsehood whether of an almost automatic kind, or of the intentional form we call lying.²

We are all exhausted by the way Trump changes his ideas and reverses himself on a daily basis. What we must remember is: Trump’s narrative, the one he constructs in his own mind, is the only true reality and narrative that he will accept, and because he believes he has the keys to the kingdom, he is using his upside down view of reality to create public policy which goes against the rule of law and our Constitutional Republic.

He is talented in this area of using his version of reality to twist reality itself as he increasingly attempts to “make truth irrelevant.³ He is an excellent manipulator. Because his truth is the only truth that matters, he the master of misinformation which he uses to sow division, confusion.

To me it feels like our entire nation is caught in the throes of being bound up by the ideological craziness of a man with whose shifting ideas of his own personal reality are being thrust at us faster and more furiously each passing day.

It is tempting to bury one’s head in the sand at such times. I am not doing that. I’m paying attention. I’m calling my senators and representatives.⁴ I doing what I can with the capacity I have as my husband heals from surgery.

We must keep talking to each other with respect during these times. I think we must also understand that many have fallen prey to mind indoctrination from many sources. Some are caught up in only getting ‘news’ from Fox News. Others have fallen prey to Christian Nationalism because of the influences of friends, family members, or the churches to which they belong. That is why we must seek to understand where others are coming from as we seek to help them understand just what kind of peril we are in at this point in our Nation’s history.

I am not giving up hope, and here is why:

I believe love is stronger than fear

and that truth is stronger than mind control.⁵

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On Staying Present During Challenging Times

In my last post on Substack, I wrote a bit about my word for 2025: presence, by saying I wanted to remain fully present to my own life and to the lives of others. My own words come back to haunt me when such intense feelings of fear, sorrow, worry, confusion, uncertainty, and shock assail me on a nearly daily basis as I try to maintain some sense of being an informed citizen. Who in their right mind wants to stay present for such a time? Along with fear and confusion, many of us are also dealing with loss.

I believe, we are entering into days of living a life that none of us have chosen for ourselves, and the natural reaction when we have this realization is to grieve, to grieve the loss of what we once thought our futures would look like, and to grieve the loss of living in a time when we feel like we are swiftly sliding into living under the rule of authoritarianism.

Yet, trust me on this, this is a time when we can actually build our capacity for presence by walking through each one of these hard days, feeling the feelings of loss, and grief. We do this by embracing the knowledge that these feelings are not there to “take us hostage, instead they are there to reshape us in some fundamental way to help us to become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude.”⁶

As I build my own resilience, and as I regain some capacity of my own, as I contemplate what it is that this time in our history asks of me, I am reminding myself of a lesson I learned about life by walking through grief. The choice is ours to make: we can go around such times, we can ignore such times, we can bury such times, or we courageously walk through them, and we do that by going through them together.

Resources I Have Found Helpful and Informative

Many are working for our democracy. Let’s join them by supporting them.

During this time, I am confident that we can build our capacity to process and evaluate the information that comes to us at a very fast furious pace. We do that by following this simple rule:

If it is the truth, it will hold up to scrutiny.

Here are some invaluable resources I have found on Substack.

• Check them out.

• Evaluate them for yourself.

• Ask yourself if you find what they are saying aligns with your moral compass. (You may need to ask yourself what your own moral compass is first.)

• Then, support them by either being a free subscriber, or by being a paying subscriber.

Letters from An American by Heather Cox Richardson

The Contrarian

Meidas+

Joyce Vance - Please check out her recently launched “Democracy Index” which is found on her Substack.

The Cottage by Diana Butler Bass

Also, my footnotes include some of the books I am reading and referring to as I evaluate for myself what I reading, watching, and hearing from others about what is going in the world around us.

As Joyce Vance always says, “We’re all in this together.” I hope you are doing well. Check in. Let me know how you are doing.

Sally

1. I learned of this term being applied to Trump when I read Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry, by Robert Jay Lifton.

2. Ibid., p. 156.

3. Ibid. , p. 159

4. Read this article from For Such a Time as This, to find out ways you can get involved in making “6 daily calls to your 2 Senators and 1 House Rep.”

5. from The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan, p. 234.

6. from The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller, Preface xxiii.