​Like many folks, I’ve struggled to manage my mental health in Trumpworld this year. A bagful of tactics have come into play: media blackouts, self-care distractions, therapy, pharma, zazen (Zen meditation), prayer. Yet while they’ve all helped, none have made me “better.”

Ah, that word: better. As in “feel better!” or (what some say to children after putting a bandage on a scrape) “all better!” I’ve taken better for granted. Ever since childhood, I would get sick, go to the doctor, and get better. I’d see therapists, they’d give me tools to work through my issues, and I’d get better. Better was the default state, the steady state from which life was meant to be lived.

Best of all, better always seemed achievable, more or less, as long as I took the steps to achieve it. Now I’m seeing just how much it’s influenced by conditions beyond our control. Big, foundational conditions—like the stability of our government.

I have zero idea what it’s like to live amid government instability. Like others in my generation, I’ve lived through the Great Recession, the horror of 9/11, the Nixon impeachment, the upheaval of the 1960s—hard knocks aplenty, but nothing that threatened to upend our entire way of life. Nothing like, say, living in Assad’s Syria after 2011, or in Venezuela under the dictator Maduro, or in South Sudan today.

Now, however, we are getting a taste of that instability, with massive government upheaval, an uptick in political violence, and an administration hell-bent on accumulating power. Some groups—immigrants especially—are feeling their foundations shake as they never have before.

In other words, there’s been a shift in our bedrock as a nation. And bedrock shifts give birth to anxiety, massive boatloads of it.

That puts the mythical better out of reach.

Rather than yearn for better, then, I’m trying this: to see the anxiety clearly, live into it, and manage my own life in this new reality, all while expecting to feel blech. To find other things besides “feeling better” to lean into.

Those other things do exist, thank God. Lately I’ve found myself drawn toward fostering qualities that I call existentials: inner strength, resilience, character, equanimity, even joy (so much more than a feeling). I’m savoring the deep sense of being held by the infinite web of interconnection among all beings.

That’s me; your mileage may vary. The basic suggestion here is to take the presence of anxiety as a given, and find your way into life anyway.

A fundamental truth from Buddhist wisdom is that everything changes, that we only have right here, right now to act into with wisdom and compassion—whether right here, right now is perfect or less so. That’s a profound bit of guiding wisdom for any time. 

My heart is still aflutter from the lovely thing that happened to me earlier this week.

A longtime friend and colleague, who reads what I write and apparently draws benefit from it, asked me if I’d write something about the Charlie Kirk tragedy for a young woman he knows. This young woman was on the UVU campus last Wednesday, as a protester, and saw the shooting unfold, much to her horror.

I’ve never met this young woman, but the request so touched me that I had to respond with something. While I won’t share the letter I wrote her—letters are personal, after all—I thought you might like to read a few (slightly edited) excerpts that explain my take on this horrible shooting.

A lot of what I could say in this letter would be abstract, even trite. Maybe the only thing for me to share is what little I knew of Charlie Kirk, and how I took the news of his death.

Kirk was mostly not on my radar screen before last Wednesday. All I knew of him was that he’d said hateful things about trans people. From that I assume he also didn’t care for nonbinary people like me. I’m on edge these days because of the growing threat toward people like me from Trumpworld, so Kirk just added to that threat. I can’t say I held any love for him.

Yet when one of my favorite independent journalists emailed that he’d been shot, a profound sadness took hold of me. I actually gasped when, not long after, I found out he’d died. The deepest part of my heart believes that no one should kill anyone, ever. I suspect I’ve felt this way from birth. On top of that, my spiritual traditions uphold the supreme importance of doing no harm. All I could feel when I heard the news is, “Aww, no. Someone else died. That’s so horrible.”

A little later, I found out he had two young kids. I’ve had a young daughter, and I cannot express how boundless my love for her is. I’m willing to bet Charlie Kirk felt the same about his children.

A lot’s been written about Kirk, and I’m trying to determine whether I should learn more about him. But part of me can’t see the point: maybe I can judge him a little more accurately, but what good would that do? At this point I just want to hold onto the sadness I’ve felt about someone who was probably my adversary, and all the good that says about my heart, and about other people’s hearts in general. We can be such a good species when we put our minds to it.

One more thing: you were there protesting. Well done you. Assuming Kirk said every nasty thing he’s reported to have said, we desperately need people who will stand up to that and say no. You did that. Which means your presence there, though so painful in the end, made a difference. Thank you.

I can imagine an exchange between God and myself around 2016 that went something like this:

Me: O God, I can’t wait till I finish spiritual direction training this summer. I’ll aim to recruit, oh, maybe 15 clients, meet with each of them once a month, make $30,000 a year to keep us afloat in quasi-retirement.

God: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Me now: I practice spiritual direction, which I adore, with three to four clients, whom I also adore. This number has hardly changed since 2016. (Whether three clients or 15, the $30,000 figure just shows I didn’t think the math through very well.)

This has me thinking about what I’ll call the divine economy.

Some background: For 30-some years I ran my own for-profit business, writing ad and marketing copy for other businesses, from global banks to nine-hole golf courses. In other words, I sold my services to companies so they could sell their products and services. It’s hard to get more capitalist than that.

Along the way, I inhaled the capitalist values that businesses need to run profitably. Efficiency. Productivity. Time management. Goal orientation.

You don’t do that for 30-some years and then forget all those values once you move into a more mystical, spiritual vocation, like spiritual direction. That would be fine if the divine economy ran like a capitalist venture.

It doesn’t. As a result, over the past 10 years I’ve had a big rethink.

For instance: there is nothing wrong with having only three to four clients. It might be just as “good” as having 15, because who knows what impact will come of it? Maybe one of my clients—I’ll pick the minister—uses an insight from our work together in a sermon one Sunday, and it touches someone in the congregation, and that person acts on it, and through six degrees of separation it molds the thought process of one of our age’s great wisdom teachers.

Or not.

Or maybe the whole point of training for spiritual direction was to take a deeper plunge into my own spiritual practice—which, thanks to a crisis during the training, now includes Zen—and that’s invisibly shaped me to the point where one or two nameless individuals watch me model spirituality and it has a slight effect on them.

Or not.

You see the efficiency here? The goal orientation? Me neither.

The key here, I think, is that the action of Reality is so, so, so much bigger than we can possibly see. As a result, we cannot have the first clue which of our words or actions impacts which of our friends or clients or friends of clients and in what way. Each of us, as I’ve said so many times, is one person among billions, with exactly one-person’s capacity to make a difference.

That’s very small. But small is not negligible. All we can do is keep doing, keep being, one step at a time, and trust that the vast Reality we swim in will turn it to fruitfulness. 

​Have you ever felt that the state of our public square—the political gridlock, the hostility, the social media nastiness—is making everyone worse? Yeah, me too. Little did I realize that “everyone” includes me.

This story begins 13 years ago, when SkyLight Paths published my book on dialogue. Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart explains how to change from the inside out so you can talk, and listen, with people whose opinions drive you nuts. Even back then, I could see the divides that were fracturing the U.S., and I threw myself into doing my one-person’s bit to heal them. It seemed like good, essential, compassionate work to bring out the best in all of us.

Then came Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024, which hit me very hard. I made the mistake of taking them personally, as though the world looked at my life’s work in dialogue and sneered. As a result, I recoiled. My deeper layers have become darker. My basic stance is less conciliatory and more contentious. I don’t have the will to maintain ties with beloved friends who disagree with me.

On balance, my life is going well: the writing, the spiritual direction. I’ve kept up with dialogue on some level—responding to friends’ posts occasionally, etc. But I miss Dialogue Me, the openhearted person whose instinct was to reach out. I’ve been starting to wonder whether she’s gone forever.

Then, just this past week, a brilliant friend of mine posted on Facebook about a development in transgender news. One of her opponents chimed in with a few sharp elbows. Others contributed honest opinions and thoughtful comments.

And an old instinct sprang to life.

I saw places where opposing comments, rather than fighting each other as either/ors, could be harmonized into a workable both/and. I longed to take everyone’s experiences seriously, even those that made me squirm. I wrote my own, conciliatory, comment expressing these things.

There she was: Dialogue Me, still inclined to do dialogue things.

It’s hard to overstate the rush of hope that flooded my chest. Part of me, at least, still yearns to be part of the solution, to bring people together, even when it seems no one wants to come together. Dialogue Me is surviving Trumpworld bloodied, but intact.

My God, I hope this persists. I’m going to do what I can to make sure it does. 

Every now and then, an offhand something--a passing comment, a daily task, a clip on TV—tells you something deep and unexpected about yourself.  

​That happened to me early in April. During the tariff announcement in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, I thought I heard Donald Trump make a joke. And my heart fluttered.

As it turns out, the joke was lame. When holding up his chart of which country would get charged which tariff, he said, “I think you can for the most part see it, those with good eyes. With bad eyes—we didn't want to bring—it’s very windy out here. We didn't want to bring out the big chart because it had no chance of standing. Fortunately, we came armed with a little smaller chart. [Laughter]”

OK, they laughed. OK, not really funny. But here’s my point: My heart fluttered because it saw Donald Trump engage in one of the most fundamental acts of our species—attempting  a joke.

For one nanosecond, he seemed like one of us.

So why did my heart flutter? A little background here. My heart is exhausted. The tsunami-like overwhelm of the past three months—the hundreds of executive orders, the chaos, the dehumanization of immigrants and trans people and others—has left me wasted. I continue to stand in deep opposition to Donald Trump and nearly everything he does.

​But on a deeper level, I want our leaders to succeed, whoever they are. Deeper even than that, my heart is on the lookout for any shred of human I can find in even the most broken or difficult or malevolent people, because my heart really really wants to love. When it heard that Trump joke, it thought, at last, something I can work with.

I think love is what God wants too (however you conceive of God). Ever take a good look at who Jesus hung out with? From what I can make of the Christian Gospels, some of them were hard-core. At least one was a tax collector, a Jew regarded as traitorous for enriching the oppressive Romans. One was a zealot--maybe what we’d call an insurrectionist or terrorist. The name Iscariot, as in Judas Iscariot (the man who betrayed Jesus to death), might come from the Latin for “dagger man,” i.e., assassin. Jesus ended his life hung between two criminals.

And he took them all into his heart. No exceptions. Not one.

So I can’t make exceptions either. In spite of the fact that some people seem impossible to love.

The best I can do is baby steps. So when this tortured president makes a lame joke, and my heart senses a tiny bit of humanity, and it flutters, that’s a start. Good joke, Mr. President, I want to say. You can joke human; now lead human. Treat people with the compassion they deserve. 

​For a while now, I’ve thought about using this space to describe a day in the life of a gender-different person.

If all you know about gender-different people—trans folks, non-binary folks (like me), genderfluid folks, etc., etc.—comes from the internet, you might think we spend our days seeking out public restrooms to invade, joining sports teams of the “opposite sex,” and performing delicate surgeries without a license on incarcerated children at government expense.

You may not have seen us mowing the lawn. Or taking the car in for an oil change, even though I’ve barely driven it since the last oil change. Or filling out our tax returns. (Note to New York State Tax Department: that form for calculating the penalty for underpayment of estimated tax? IMPENETRABLE.) Or pushing our cats away, without success, when they insist on being fed one half-hour before dinnertime.

All by themselves, these added up to a normal list of daily tasks. But nothing quite raised them to the level of blog-worthy. Until two days ago, when trans journalist Erin Reed posted this deeply moving essay about the ramifications of her decision to transition. One paragraph in particular reminded me of other parts of my life as a non-binary person:

It wasn’t easy to be myself. From the moment I realized what I needed to do, I knew I would lose people. Family ties would fray. Friends I’d clung to would let go—or push me away entirely. Every transgender person understands this, and most have lived it in some form. That we still choose to transition should tell you everything about how deeply this truth lives in us. I remember saying once: I would rather weather every storm in my own skin than live safely in someone else’s.

Some of what Erin describes also describes things I’ve experienced, or believe I’ve experienced. (In cases where others have simply stopped communicating, it’s hard to tell.) And, especially, this: That we still choose [to live as gender-different] should tell you everything about how deeply this truth lives in us.

Over the years, I’ve looked deeply enough into myself to know how deeply this truth lives in me. Even now, via meditation and other means, its depth surprises me. It’s as much a part of me as my hair color. Which is why, in the face of a government that would like to erase all of that, is why I keep writing about it. 

It feels…strange.

(Note: this article has two parts, as you’ll see below. Just read the part(s) you need. If you’re up to date on Trump anti-trans measures, feel free to skip background on the threat, which starts in the next paragraph, and go right to the underlined subhead so back to the headline several paragraphs later.)

Background on the threat. Since Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has taken many steps to erase gender-different people—trans, non-binary (like me), etc.—from the American landscape. He appears to be doing this in the way he’s pursued many initiatives: take one step toward the ultimate goal, gauge public opinion, and if there’s not much pushback, take another step.

That ultimate goal is still obscure. But Trump’s initial executive order—to remove words like trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming from every single publication of the federal government—is sufficient foundation for others to push extreme efforts like those mentioned in a recent Erin Reed overview.

Because of this trajectory, I don’t know what the near-term future holds for gender-different people. Few people do.

Friends have reassured me that the federal government won’t come after me. That may be. Without a doubt, I am very small potatoes in this very large world. But even if the government doesn’t worry about average folks, it has emboldened others to think otherwise. I have no idea whether, somewhere in my town, there’s a Proud Boy with a Glock, looking to make his contribution to the cause.

So back to the headline.

What does it feel like, to live with all this day by day?

I’ve shared with you the steps I’ve formulated to continue living the life to which I’m called (read about it here and here). To review:

1. I will devote myself to living my life as it is.
2. I will try to devote precisely the right level of attention to Trumpworld: not an iota less than necessary to detect oncoming threats/needs for action, not an iota more than it warrants.

By and large, step #1 is holding up well. My writing time has been extraordinarily productive. I’m still seeing my people for spiritual direction. I’m ahead of the game on household tasks. My spiritual practice is an anchor.

Step #2, though, is trickier. I keep having to recalculate “right level of attention.” It is so easy to overTrump, which puts me in sensory overload. At the moment, I’ve realized I have only enough bandwidth to keep up on gender-different issues in depth and scan for other developments as they arise. Mostly I’m depending on two independent journalists to give me the depth and breadth I need. I don’t agree with them all the time, but I know their worldviews well enough to make good use of their excellent reporting.

Oh, and I’m trying, very hard, to stop scrolling Facebook, at least for a while. I may miss seeing friends, which grieves me. But the overall value of scrolling is so low right now, and the sensory overload so high, that my sanity demands it.

Back to the question: how does it feel? On certain days it feels deeply fulfilling. On other days, especially when I've overTrumped, it's darker. But the shadow of Trump's menace is always there. So a "good day" during the last administration feels different from a "good day" now, because the world is never very far away. 

One more thing for now. An awful lot of friends have sent me messages of love and encouragement. They’re wonderful. And…I want to make clear that, bottom line, blog posts like this one aren’t intended to be “about me.” I’m hoping that these glimpses of one non-binary person’s inner life will inspire more empathy in the world—and maybe give other trans and non-binary folks that wonderful sense that they’re not alone. 

Caught up on the executive orders? Got your cheap eggs yet? Found just the right balance of pharma, therapy, meditation, etc., to deal with all this?

Yeah, me neither. But I’m working on it.

In last week’s blog post, I shared my two-prong strategy for staying sane in the New Age of Trump:

1. I will devote myself to living my life as it is.
2. I will try to devote precisely the right level of attention to Trumpworld: not an iota less than necessary to detect oncoming threats/needs for action, not an iota more than it warrants.

What I’d forgotten to consider was Trump’s strategy of flooding the public square with so much chaos you can’t take it in. At 9:00, say, you read an article on an executive order, and it links to another executive order, and another, and by the time you’re done it’s noon and you’re overwhelmed. I’ve thought about limiting myself only to news about the Trump trans bans,* but even those are flowing thick and fast.**

As before, I’ve been working with all this in zazen (basically, Zen meditation). Last night, it dawned on me that I’m trying too hard with #2—the attention to Trumpworld—and ignoring #1.

So I’m making a shift: less Trump, more devoting myself to my life as it is.

I feel myself breathe easier every time I think about that. Moreover, living my life as it is involves my fundamental vocation: to tend sentient beings so they blossom. This vocation brings me bliss, and it can’t be bad for others either.

In a subtle way, living my own life is also an act of non-binary resistance. My life as it is includes me as I am: a non-binary person, living my non-binary life. My vocation has a non-binary cast to it because it’s my vocation.
​
So how have you navigated the past two weeks? Feel free to share if you like. In the meantime, I’ve got a poem to revise.
 
 
*Talk about fun words to see and say. Try it. Trans bans. Transbans. Trumpytransbans. In times like these, comedy is mandatory.
**In case you’re counting…oh my goodness, I can’t even summarize all the executive orders that target trans people. Here’s a link to one of Erin Reed’s recent posts. She’s a respected trans journalist writing about trans issues. She’ll clue you in.

​Ever since November 9, 2016—the first time the American electoral system slapped me in the face—I’ve been working with various ways of living in Trumpworld. A lot of it has felt like driving an exquisitely sensitive car: ease up on the fury just a little, give my latest thoughts a little more gas by posting them to my blog, let thoughts go, ignore this but not that, news blackouts/brownouts.

Things have changed since then.

For one, I’m now nine years into my Zen practice, which involves (for me, among other things) working with my emotions. A useful thing. For another, an executive order from yesterday effectively rendered me and many loved ones “not real” as far as American government is concerned.** A bad thing. This enrages me.

Yesterday I worked with that rage in zazen, and a new way of approaching the next four years arose.

1. I will devote myself to living my life as it is—tending it, and other people, so they blossom.
2. I will try to devote precisely the right level of attention to Trumpworld: not an iota less than necessary to detect oncoming threats/needs for action, not an iota more than it warrants.

This will not be easy. I have heard Zen teachers speak of life’s stiffest challenges as rich opportunities to practice. The next four years, it follows, will be one hell of an opportunity.

That’s all I’ve got so far. We’ll see how it works. What about you?
 
*Or the next eight, or 12, or whatever. Trumpworld might outlive Trump.
**Yes, the executive order refers specifically to transgender. But if you think Trumpworld will distinguish between transgender (including my trans friends) and non-binary (me), think again. 

Note: Some of my good friends don’t like cuss words, so I gave some thought to whether I should use the f-word in this post. There are alternatives--screw it, to hell with it, etc. But the desperation one feels at those moments—it’s intense—demanded the one word with enough good old Germanic oomph to get the point across with precision and force. Hence….

I don’t remember what exactly I had, illness-wise—it was senior year of college, after all—but it involved a lot of sniveling and whining and general misery. For days. And then more days. I couldn’t get myself to go anywhere or do anything. I just…sniveled.

Then one day I’d had enough. I sprang off my bed and started throwing things. (Pillows, mostly.) I swore and yelled and generally expressed every bit of anger with this never-ending blech.

After my fury had spent itself, I felt better. The illness had subsided. My health returned.

I’d had a “fuck it” moment—in which my deepest layers said, “Fuck it. I’ve had it with the suffering. I am so over this.” It inspired me to take action, and the action bore fruit.

I thought about this episode while reading one of the healing stories in the Christian gospel of Matthew (9:18-26). A synagogue leader asked Jesus to revive his daughter, who had just died. As Jesus walked toward his house, a woman who’d hemorrhaged for 12 years (presumably like having your period nonstop for over a decade—YIKES) touched Jesus’ cloak thinking that would cure her.

After pondering these stories a minute, I realized they had something in common. Opposition to Jesus among powerful religious authorities was fierce, so it took courage for the synagogue leader to step out publicly and ask him for a favor. Meanwhile, the woman who needed healing would have been considered ritually unclean and therefore shouldn’t have touched anyone (Leviticus 15:19-33). It took courage to reach out and touch this itinerant teacher.

Well it sorta took courage. Look closer, though, and you’ll see a greater motivator behind the courage: desperation.

The leader is desperate to get his daughter back. The woman is desperate to be rid of this life-sapping hemorrhage. I was desperate to get over my own illness, which had reduced me to sniveling.

And we all, in our own way, said “fuck it” and reached out.

To put it succinctly, “fuck it” is the cauldron in which the fuel of desperation becomes the fire of courage. Courage gets a lot of press; desperation deserves more, and so does the catalyst that turns one into the other.

I’ll bet you’ve had these moments, these situations. Feel free to share if you’re so inclined.
 

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