Do Nothing
easy, right?
Now, more than ever, is a great time to contribute to my ongoing For Trans Families, With Love anthology. It’s open for submissions, and I’m waiting for your art, your words, and your voice to be part of it. Please share this widely so that anyone who wants to participate can find the link.
It’s all a lot right now. Everything. The news, social media, things our kids are hearing about at school, crazy weather, the price of eggs (or everything), the job market, employment stability, funding, laws, passports… You don’t need me to grant you permission to slack off, but I’m providing it anyway. That’s all this is today.
Permission to do nothing.
Substack is just about the only social media I have left now. Yeah, I’m on BlueSky (you can find me there, but hey, keep your expectations reasonable, otherwise I might disappoint… transfriend.bsky.social), and I’ve got a couple other places I hang out, but I’m more of an analog guy these days. It’s better for my mental health. That said, even substack has been grinding me down into a puddle of shame for Not Doing More.
Have you seen these posts?
Do something! Stand up! Performative allyship isn’t enough! You’re rights are at stake—what are you going to do about it?! Pick one thing Pick all the things Pick something Call a legislator Go to a protest Organize!! Post a furious meme! Don’t post memes, join a group and storm a building! Joy is resistance! Joy is privilege… Why TF haven’t you done something already?
And after reading all of those on steady repeat I’m… exhausted. I can’t focus. I’ve been having heart palpitations for weeks. The stress is too much. The demands are too much. Everything is too much.
I should try to draw you a picture of the horror loop I am caught in. Visualize, if you will, two circles of a Venn diagram. On the left, there is the national, political battle against trans people, the executive orders, the laws, the court challenges, the hate speech. The circle on the right side is a swirling mass of pushback against trans erasure, victimization, targeting, misinformation, disinformation, and violence. In the center of that circle is a dire, inescapable need to act, to lead, to step up, to DO.
Sitting in the overlap of the two circles is me.
I am the target, but I am also the voice to speak up against the targeting. And if I don’t speak up, who will?
Do you feel like this, too? Like the bus is careening wildly out of control down the mountain road and there’s nobody in the driver’s seat, and if you don’t jump in and grab the wheel we’ll all crash? Am I being too literal with the types of dreams I have at night?1
What if it wasn’t up to you to fight this fight today? What if the world could survive without you doing “just one thing” right now? What if you didn’t need to feel joy (or guilt/shame over feeling joy)? What if you hiked your ass up onto a comfy couch, grabbed that entire box of animal crackers from Costco (you know, the one that’s the proportion of an industrial bucket), turned on a series of reruns of your favorite TV show, and just…. watched it? Without having to feel anything. Without having to report it to anyone. Without it being any more complex than becoming a couch vegetable.
Yes, rest is resistance, but rest is also REST.
No, this is not your fault.
No, you do not need to fix the world today.
Yes, you’re still a great person for Not Doing. Or an average person. Or a real person. Or just… a person.
Your trans friend,
Robin
Okay, I do dream about vehicles with no one in the driver’s seat all the time, but more often I dream about restrooms, not being able to find restrooms, needing a restroom, bathroom stalls with no doors, really gross bathroom conditions……. Yeah, it’s a life theme.
Robin, and every other person experiencing the same. I hear you.
And I want to acknowledge something that might not have fully landed yet: you’ve just been re-traumatized by a system you thought was at least somewhat stable, somewhat predictable, maybe even slightly favorable.
That is no small thing. To the contrary—it’s massive.
Especially for you trans and non-binary people, who are now facing not just erasure but the very real possibility of prosecution or worse if this continues unfolding.
This is immediate danger. And danger alone is enough to create stress, but re-traumatization? That adds a whole other layer.
So please, give yourself a break.
Take care of yourself first—your safety, your security, your psychological well-being.
This fight is not a sprint, and it’s certainly not one person’s burden to carry. You don’t owe anyone constant resistance. You don’t have to be the one grabbing the wheel every time the bus veers off the road.
You are here. You exist. That is already enough.
You cannot '"resist" well when you are in full stress- and trauma-mode. Take care of yourself first. Please.
I appreciate this post more than you know right now, Robin. Your list of all the things being shouted at us really landed with me. I know we can’t “do nothing” every day. But it’s like I told the non-profit managers I once supervised, as I looked at their exhausted faces one day, “some days it has to be enough just to have kept things running that day. We don’t have to innovate every day.”