The last two weeks have felt surreal. I probably don't need to tell you this. These early days of Trump's second presidency—with their non-stop executive orders, the chaotic and unconstitutional freezing of government funds, the cruel and constant attacks on our trans friends and family, plane crashes, immigrant roundups, an illegal attempt to shrink the government workforce, Elon Musk and his technofascist henchmen commandeering government computers, and plenty of other things that I don't have the time or heart to document here—have been enough to make you feel like you're losing your mind.

You aren't.

Part of the design of of all this is to overwhelm you and the other part is to deny that you are seeing what you're seeing.

Which is why you need to write it down.

A few years back I wrote about my journaling method. At the time, I cast it as a way of being able to reflect back on your days and months and years, to detect patterns in your life and to adjust accordingly. It's been incredibly effective for me, and I am now in my fifth year of doing it.

But that's not what this post is about. Instead, it's about the other thing that my journaling helped me with. Because I started writing in my notebook daily at the beginning of 2020. You remember 2020? COVID, the world shutting down, the racial uprising following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the election and the denial of the election. 2020 was a lot, to put it mildly, and I think I would have lost it entirely if I hadn't written it down every day.

Because when the ground is shifting beneath you—as it was in 2020 and it is absolutely doing right now—writing it down gives you a solid foundation to remember what is really happening. It's a way of being able to look back and ask "Did I really experience that? Did that really happen?" and see that, yes, it did. And, when a politician or a pundit or the president himself goes on TV and denies a thing you saw with your own eyes, you have the memory of what really was written down.

A critical element of Annalee Newitz's incredible (and highly relevant) novel The Future of Another Timeline (that's an affiliate link BTW), in which time travelers are locked in a battle with fascists to "edit" time itself, is when the weary time travelers gather to say what they remember about the reality they experienced, because that reality is constantly changing.

Right now, we are those time travelers, present for the edits (literal edits: last night vast numbers of pages were wiped from government websites).

Write it down.

I mean that literally: Get a pen. Get a notebook. Use your hands. There is something visceral about using your hands. And nobody can delete ink on paper with a keystroke.

Write it down.

Remembering what is happening—what you are experiencing—is one of the most important things. Including, I should add, when you experience good things. Write those down too, they're perhaps the most important thing.

Times are very difficult right now.

Pick up your pen.

Write it down.