Oh, my babies. My sweet, exhausted, slightly feral, absolutely magnificent babies. You made it. I know, I know — you’re sitting there with your third cup of coffee that’s gone cold because you forgot it existed while you were doomscrolling, wearing the same hoodie you’ve had on since Tuesday, and at some point this week you made a noise — not a word, just a noise — at something you read on your phone, and whoever was nearest to you just nodded because they made the same noise twenty minutes prior. You are living on spite and solidarity and the occasional stress pastry, and you are still here, and I need you to understand that that is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.
Because this week — this week, Lord have mercy — this week was a lot. It was a seven-layer dip of awful, except instead of guacamole and sour cream it was just six more layers of “are you kidding me” with a garnish of “no actually this is happening.” The news cycle came at us like a golden retriever that got into the garbage: chaotic, relentless, impossible to look away from, and leaving a real mess behind.
And yet. And yet. Here you are.
You showed up. You made the calls. You sent the emails into the void and didn’t know if anyone was reading them and sent them anyway. You went to the meeting even though you were tired. You shared the thing. You explained the thing — again — to the person who needed to hear it. You held the hand of someone who was scared. You were scared and you held someone else’s hand anyway, because that’s the kind of ridiculous, gorgeous, stubborn creature you are.
I see you.
Now listen to Auntie Fah, because she’s been around long enough to know how this goes.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in when the outrages come faster than the reckonings. When the thing that should have been a five-alarm scandal gets buried under the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that. When accountability feels like a word from a civics textbook you read in a building that used to have a functioning library. I know that exhaustion. I know it in my bones, the way I know the smell of incoming weather and the particular silence of a house where something is wrong.
That exhaustion is real. You are not weak for feeling it. You are not doomed to it.
Here’s what Auntie Fah has learned from decades of watching people she loves navigate systems designed to wear them down until they stop: the wearing-down is the point. The fire hose of chaos isn’t incidental — it’s the strategy. If they can make you feel like nothing you do matters, like the ground keeps shifting under your feet, like your outrage has nowhere to land, then they’ve won something without firing a shot. They’re counting on you to confuse exhaustion with defeat.
Don’t you dare give them that.
I’m not asking you to be a machine. I’m not asking you to be on, all the time, full volume, indefinitely. Auntie Fah is not a productivity guru in a blazer telling you to optimize your activism. That is not what’s happening here. Rest is resistance. Sleep is not surrender. You are allowed — you are required — to take care of the body that carries you through this. You cannot pour from an empty pot, and right now a lot of pots are running low, and I need you to go find your ladle and your broth and your good bread and feed yourself before you collapse on the kitchen floor.
But here’s the thing I need you to hold, even when you’re resting: you are not alone in this kitchen.
Not even close.
Right now, somewhere — and I mean this literally, not as a comfort metaphor — someone else is making the same noise you made at their phone. Someone is writing the email. Someone is at the school board meeting even though they’re terrified of public speaking and their hands are shaking and they’re doing it anyway. Someone is teaching their kid what resistance looks like. Someone is building something in a community you’ve never heard of that is going to matter enormously in two years, and they’re building it right now, today, while you’re reading this.
That’s not nothing. That’s a whole enormous gathering of stubborn, loving, furious people who refuse to let the powerful win by exhaustion.
You are part of that. You, specifically. The tired one with the cold coffee. You count.
Now. Auntie Fah has to address something, because she loves you and love sometimes requires honesty delivered without a spoonful of sugar because sugar is in short supply and we’re rationing.
Some of you this week let the doom get louder than the community. Some of you spiraled in private when you had people who would have spiraled with you, which is genuinely much better. Some of you were so busy documenting the fire that you forgot to check on the person standing next to you. And some of you — you know who you are — said something sharp to someone on your own side because the frustration had nowhere else to go, and then you felt terrible about it, and you’re still carrying that around.
Put it down.
Not because it doesn’t matter — it does — but because you can apologize, you can repair, and then you can get back to the actual enemy, who is not the person in your group chat. Your people are your people. This is not the moment to let them become collateral damage of your correct outrage about something else entirely.
Protect your people. That’s the whole assignment.
Okay. Deep breath. Let Auntie Fah tell you what comes next.
Next week is going to have things in it. That is, unfortunately, a guarantee I can offer you. Things will occur. Some of them will be infuriating. Some will be genuinely frightening. Some will require action and some will require witness and some will require you to simply sit with the knowledge of them without being destroyed by it, and knowing which is which is a skill you are developing in real time, and you’re doing better at it than you think.
You are going to keep going. Because you have to, and because you want to, and because somewhere underneath the exhaustion you still have that thing — that stubborn, unreasonable, inconvenient, beautiful thing — that believes it’s worth fighting for. That believes people deserve dignity. That believes communities are worth protecting. That believes the story isn’t over.
It’s not over.
Not even a little.
Now get some rest, you magnificent little catastrophe. Drink some water. Call someone you love. Touch some grass if there is any grass left that hasn’t been sold to a private equity firm, and if there isn’t, touch a houseplant, touch a dog, touch the face of someone who makes you feel like yourself.
You made it through this week.
You’ll make it through the next one.
Auntie Fah believes in you with her whole entire chaotic heart.
Now. Before I go. I need to address the specific coalition of craven, democracy-nibbling little gremlins responsible for this particular week’s installment of Everything Is Fine, Why Are You Upset. You know who you are. You are a festering collection of self-important, constituent-abandoning, talking-point-regurgitating, legacy-polishing little appointment-book-hoarding sycophants, and it is my sincerest wish — delivered with full Gilead-porch energy — that you spend the rest of the legislative session with a squeaky shoe and no meetings where anyone tells you the truth, and that every single thing you tried to bury this week gets found by a journalist with excellent source protection and absolutely nothing to lose.
May your legacies be footnotes.
May your footnotes be damning.
And may someone read them out loud.
Go rest, my babies. The weekend belongs to you.
— Auntie Fah
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