Normiedox

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

"Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me?

do you have any tips on how to keep some form of hope when the fbi is working on making a terrorist threat category for being trans or being a trans advocate

im very terrified and its been getting harder and harder to keep any form of hope

So, this advice is going to start somewhere you probably didn't expect: with cybersecurity.

Because the thing is that your brain is (very reasonably and correctly!) trying to warn you that there is serious danger here/potentially on the way. So we need to do something to address that warning notification before we can move onto recentering in hope in a sustainable, healthy, or holistic way.

So, First:

Be preemptive about controlling your data, privacy, and security now. Better to prepare and not need it than to not take those steps and really wish you had. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great guide for this here:

And trust me, it'll be a lot easier to find both some relief from the fear AND the ability and resources to take action and FIGHT BACK when you know you have already taken important steps to keep yourself safe

Here's the thing: Fear serves a purpose. Anxiety and terror serve a purpose. They are there to warn you that you need to take action, that there is something you need to DO to protect yourself and keep yourself safe.

You have to listen to the warning and do something to help protect yourself, to show your brain and mind that you're listening to that fucking alarm, before the volume of the alarm will lower and become less overwhelming, letting you have the energy to DO something about it.

The antidote to anxiety is action.

Take some action, whatever you're up for right now, to protect yourself.

As you do that, once you've begun to address and clear the giant "WARNING: ACTION NEEDED" notification from your brain, it will get easier and easier to feel and find and see hope.

And do what you can to get involved with other people, if you can at all, even if it's only like going to a volunteer day or signing up to work at a food bank once a month.

Community is also a powerful antidote to anxiety, especially because, as mammals, we inherently co-regulate and calm each other. There's a ton of science behind this but can't find a source that's both accessible and beginner friendly and easily packaged together for these arguments, but basically, positive and safe interactions with other people do appear to inherently calm and settle your nervous system on what genuinely appears to be a neurochemical level.

[ETA: I removed the video here, thanks to the person in the comments who pointed out that polyvagal theory has some large areas of factual inconsistencies - but as they also pointed out, regulating your nervous system is still useful and important, so here's some resources on that.]

Second:

Subscribe to more good news sources (I have a great list of newsletters and podcasts linked right below, plus there's some more in the comments). That is VITAL, because your brain needs a COUNTERPOINT, to see that there IS hope and that there are SO, SO MANY PEOPLE HELPING.

There is so much evidence for hope. So many reasons to think we can FIGHT THIS - from LA getting ICE to back the fuck off to Nepal overthrowing their repressive government to people, all over the country and the world, doing whatever they can to push back against the forces of hatred and deprivation and fascism.

There are people who love us, who WILL fight for us and ARE fighting for us, as we must find ways to fight for and support ourselves/each other.

But before you can have hope that feels sustainable, you have to know that the evidence is there. Which means you have to put yourself in a place where you can SEE that evidence (which is not fucking easy necessarily!! and yet is so much easier than you may think).

Also bookmark LGBTQ Nation's Good Queer News feed.

Good luck.

The base Macaron is in itself a very technical task, and they're notorious for being difficult to bake. Lots of things can go wrong: your merengue can be the wrong texture, the merengue can refuse to foam up at all from trace oils in the bowl, the ingredients love to misbehave if they're not measured precisely, a shell can refuse to form or dry cracked, the oven can have weird drafts that make the cookies sag, your flavor ingredients can mess up the recipe, you can break the shell trying to release them from the tray, and so on. It's almost stupid hard to get consistently viable macarons, and these people practice a lot to get to this point.

Not to be deterred from the already difficult task of creating good macarons, these people are making experimental flavors, irregular shapes, complex designs, even handpainting designs with foodsafe watercolors. Sometimes for free.

You pick a target, something the left is garbage at. NOT EVERYONE NEEDS THE SAME TARGET AND YOU CANT DO EVERYTHING AS A SINGLE GROUP. You pick a target that is immediate, specific, and salient. This usually involves actually working with fucking people. You have to understand what they want and need to unite them around a common goal. You can’t just come in and say “I care about a walkable city and so should you, dumbass.” You have to come in and listen and learn about what people actually would unite around. Maybe they’re sick of having to pay so much time and money to commute because they can’t afford to live near their work.

Then you work together to develop a solution. With specifics. And goals. And tangible milestones. The “things should be better!”rallying cry is true, salient, and fully fucking useless. You find out what solution is most acceptable. What’s going to make an impact that people are going to feel and care about and fight for. The bigger the fix, the longer and harder the fight. Maybe it’s better public transit. Maybe it’s higher wages. Maybe it’s rent caps. Maybe it’s renters unions. You build a coalition of people around a common goal. They might not be from the same background, political ideology, etc. AND THATS OK. IN FACT, *THATS GOOD AND NORMAL AND HOW IT SHOULD BE.* (more on this later)

Then starts the hard, frustrating, boring slog of work. It takes WORK. It takes lots of people lots of time to attend meetings, develop talking points, work to get more people on board, develop plans and suggestions.

All the while people are still STRUGGLING. This is where so many orgs fall flat on their fucking faces. YOU NEED MUTUAL AID. Provide for people. Help them tangibly. Get them bought in. So many orgs either want to provide services but have no endgame, or want to fight for change but have no way to keep people in the fight. This is exactly how the Black Panther Party built power and truly threatened the status quo. MAKE PEOPLE LESS RELIANT ON CURRENT POWER STRUCTURES THAT ARE KILLING YOU.

Ok, but you’re not all ideologically pure. But you know what? This is where you build solidarity. Maybe your pro life coworker sees a single mom of 3 get pregnant and wrestle with what to do. She sees the humanity of people who are in these situations and how the world is shades of grey. Maybe the guy who isn’t homophobic but isn’t super comfortable with trans folks has car trouble and someone in the community helps out. That person has a trans sister and talks about how scared she is right now. This helps humanize the problem and help people see why they should care. Maybe this guy isn’t gonna fistfight a nazi, but maybe the next politician who starts trans bashing isn’t going to get his vote.

Now you’re building power. You’re getting momentum. You’re building community and you’re getting somewhere. But maybe you’re only still just dozens or hundreds in a sea of millions. Well boy howdy welcome to mutualism. Look across and see your fellow communities who are fighting their fights. See where there are bridges and common goals. Maybe the next city council meeting to discuss the budget for public transit gets your group AND the folks fighting for rent caps. And then you attend their city council meeting to shut out the bitching landlords complaining about new regulations.

NOW YOURE BUILDING REAL POWER. And not just in your movement. In your mutual aid too. Now people have more help. More folks who they can uplift and be uplifted by. And the power of the city council seems pretty small by comparison. In fact, the next election may see many of your group win seats.

Someone recently shared a zine with me on avoiding activist burnout (it was a very pointed gift), so I am going to transcribe it here and then tag who I believe the original artist was

TIPS FOR DEFYING THE END OF THE WORLD

(from people who were right before)

pg 2-3

In 2000 (when I was 8), I heard about 2012 - THE END OF THE WORLD. I curled up by the radiator and I sobbed. what was the point? why go to school if I was gonna die at 20 anyway? But my mum came in and said, { "But what if the world doesn't end? What if you live? Then, if you quit now, you'll have to catch up."}

And I persisted. And I didn't die.

pg 4-5

And when I was real depressed one time, I told my doctor how overwhelming it felt to try and fix all the world's problems when I'm just one person. Activist burnout. And he said, {"You ARE just one person. So you can't fix it all. But you can pick small things in your small radius and start working on the small wins instead."} And he was right. I've done so much more with less stress since then.

pg 6-7

And now, I look after some folk who are younger than me. They also fear the future. They fear politicians, and they fear hatred, and they fear climate change. They're burnt out. But what if it works out? What if small changes today make tomorrow better? Hope is a tool. Hope is a weapon. Hope is a plant we must nurture.

pg 8

Even if things go wrong, we can at least say we tried. But we hope for more. Because if we can picture it, we can work towards it

@nariarts (I THINK)

I hope that conveys the point well, but to put it simply, you don't need to give 100% 24/7 because that isn't sustainable. The point of community, the point of humanity, is there will always be someone to take the night watch.

Hey. Hey. Listen. Come close. Closer. Yeah. Listen.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

When you ask for directions on the street someone will show you the way, even though they have nothing to gain from it.

This is part of why gender, like, persists as a concept.

A lot of people (particularly people who don't realize they're trans, and also TERFs) think that most people (especially women) HATE their genders and HATE their experience with gender.

That's really far from true. Most women like being women (cis or trans). They hate sexism for sure (unless they're a tradwife or antifeminist and don't believe it exists ig), they may have suffered tremendously due to sexism, but like. They generally do like being women.

Similarly, most men, like. Generally like being men and enjoy that they are men and enjoy being a man.