The work of being a writer often feels both worthless and pointless. Literally worthless in a culture that does not want to pay for it, literally pointless when fewer and fewer people seem to have confidence that anything they read will tell them the truth. Because what is our — my — job, if not to tell truths, universal or otherwise?
This dearth of worth and relevance knells in major tones for me when Something Big happens, like this year’s election. Writing is medicine and most writers want to give people what they think they need: a way to make sense of things, a capital-T Truth, be it bitter or sweet, ideally summarized in a headline worth clicking on. But trying to take this medicine by going online can feel like drinking from a firehose and rarely makes us feel better.
In the short story “A Small, Good Thing“ by Raymond Carver, a husband and wife disoriented by tragedy are invited to sit down with a baker in his kitchen and eat freshly baked rolls. It’s a story I’ve read many times and, like all good stories, its impact has grown in proportion with my emotional landscape. Now when I read it, I recall the meal my then-partner made for me after my brother died, the pork chops and onion gravy, the tender shock of my senses sparking to life as I swallowed. Carver’s story always evokes the image of a lit window in the darkness of the early morning, and I hold it where I hold all good stories, close to my heart where it can help me.
As the baker says, “You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in times like this.”
Maybe you have your own medicine, or maybe you’re in search of some. If that’s the case, these are my offerings to you.
YouTube is a dumpster fire, and I strongly recommend deleting your watch history to circumvent the doomscroll algorithm. Once you’ve done that, watch Matteo Lane‘s one-hour special (free!) Hairplugs & Heartache. Lane is whip-smart, witty and kind. Good stuff. Chase it with some Sarah Millican, maybe with the subtitles on until you’ve caught the cadence of her Geordie accent. Next, binge Bistro Huddy, a one-man multi-character soap opera of comedic shorts about the restaurant industry.
I recommend a general divestment from holiday traditions that stress you out. (Some people go to Las Vegas instead of to their relatives’: Brilliant.) Also,putting on music, sitting back and doing nothing else but listening, preferably on noise-canceling headphones, can be remarkably healing.
If your preferred medicine is volunteering or activism, you have many options. Hosting a food or clothing drive is one nice way to get people together. Finding the least Instagram-worthy task you can do to help others, doing it with thoroughness and kindness, and then telling no one, will do wonders for a bruised and weary soul.
I think many of us are finding comfort right now in familiar places — in television shows, good books or food — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But grief only catalyzes into its next, more bearable form when we find the medicine that helps us move forward.
So, for my final recommendation, I suggest you buy an ax. Any tool will work, really, as long as holding it makes you feel powerful. But an ax is especially nice.
I think often of Carrie Nation when I am chopping firewood. In the late 1800s, she led one of the most dramatic and successful women’s rights campaigns in our country’s history. When she is remembered, if she is remembered at all, it’s usually as a prudish harridan swinging a hatchet in the barrooms of Kansas City, smashing stores of liquor while she and members of the temperance movement loudly sang hymns. Prohibition, which came a decade after her death in 1911, is usually viewed as a blip in our national history, an unpopular and unsuccessful 13-year experiment that spurred a rise in organized crime. But during those 13 years, rates of cirrhosis, domestic abuse and infant mortality all declined dramatically. Nation, who helped open one of our country’s first shelters for women and children fleeing domestic violence, was swinging her ax for a myriad of reasons. It helps me to remember that heroes were often seen as lunatics in their time and — depending on who is telling the history — caricatures by future generations. History is made by humans; it’s never simple and there is no narrative arc, and great deeds often come freighted with terrible consequences. Outside of history, however, in the stinging surface of the present moment, there are still small, good things: warmth and bread and kitchen tables, a chance to be a lit window in the darkness for someone else.
Linda Stansberry (she/her) is a writer who lives in Eureka.
This article appears in Holiday Gift Guide 2024.
