thoughts on post-election self-care…
It's mid-November in Bangkok and the weather has changed. They announced last week that it was officially "winter" in Thailand, which still means hot but less humid and a lower dew point. The monsoon that set in back in May has weakened and our weather is coming from the northeast. It's cooler now in the morning and evenings, relatively pleasant with still not-terrible air quality yet.
We have a few weeks in late November and early December when the AQI index is mostly yellow, but then by late December and into January, the PM2.5 gets bad and our index is orange or even red. When COVID first arose in early 2020, we were already wearing masks due to the bad air, so wearing them to avoid a deadly disease was no big deal.
I'm slowly but surely recovering from the results of the U.S. general election. It took me less time to recover from my PTSD than in 2016 and I've implemented several new habits in the interest of mental and physical self-care. When I wake up in the morning, I leave my phone on Do Not Disturb until after I've started the coffee maker, pulled up the blinds to welcome the day with natural light, and had a full glass of water. Only then do I start to read notifications from overnight.
I've unsubscribed to many newsletters and have removed all news widgets from my phone screen. I'm also considering unsubscribing from most news notifications. I don't really need to know right away when something awful has happened. What can I do about it? The NYT always sends an email about the important stuff so I'll find out sooner or later. Waking up each day with a sense of dread is no way to live a life and I did that during the first Trump era. I won't repeat that experience again.
One thing that continues to provide a bedrock of support is my Stoicism study, which I've been doing for the past few years and have dived in with even more gusto in order to keep a sense of peace and equanimity that I've worked hard to cultivate. I'm so endlessly curious about the world and hate living in a fog of ignorance, but things look bleak and dangerous, and there's so little I can do, it's better to greatly reduce my intake of daily news stimuli and instead continue to read books and novels and watch TV series and movies with my hubby.
We don't go to the cinema as much as we did before COVID, but we’re actually going out for movie dates twice in the next two weeks, the first to see "Gladiator II" and then the second to see "Wicked Part 1" (did it really need to be divided into two parts?!). We’re living the life and having some fun times here in this heaving metropolis on the Chao Phraya River delta where we we’re 1.5m above sea level and run the risk of being underwater by 2050.
