10 things to do when the chaos gets to be too much

Are you taking care of yourself?

Hi, pal. Are you taking care of yourself?

We are snowed in, subsisting off of all the food I’d stocked in the freezer for months, scavenging at bits in the pantry as though I am starring in my own episode of Chopped. It is bone cold. The depths of a lightless, frigid winter alone would be enough to chafe morale— but there’s more, of course. There’s what’s happening in Iran, what’s happening between America and Iran, and how that sits in my body as an Iranian-American. I am quite literally half of each of these two insanely fraught places who have been at each other’s throats for what feels like all of my life, and much longer than that. Then there’s what’s happening with ICE, with the little, orange guy and his ugly cronies. Tens of thousands of Minnesotans marching in the cold. There’s the genocide that no one speaks up about, Palestinians starving. There are the personal things that we all worry about in our own lives that are so small and yet so all consuming, they’re all we have, r…