How to Be Okay When Everything Is Not

I went on a spiritual retreat to feel better. It tried to kill me instead.

This weekend, for reasons still under investigation, I went to an Elizabeth Gilbert retreat with 499 other white middle-aged women with attachment issues and matching water bottles.

I thought it would be a fun creative writing getaway to distract me from my problems and also from all the fascism, but what it did instead was set my life on fire. Literally. Our car broke down mid-retreat, started smoking like a cartoon jalopy, and as we stood in the freezing rain waiting for a tow truck and trying to hitch hike back to safety, a car sped by, splashing us with icy water. On the window: a life-sized Donald Trump sticker, giving us a thumbs-up. It felt like satire. It felt like a curse. It felt like a message from the devil.

While my friend James waited for us to be rescued (his substack is chef’s kiss) my friend Komal (who just launched her own substack!) and I somehow found out way back to the retreat. When we walked in, the entire room was sobbing. Even the two guys at the back whose wives probably forced them to be there. Apparently we had missed an ancestral trauma map exercise. And honestly? That felt like divine protection. Because I would have passed out.

Despite god’s repeated attempts to keep me from this retreat, including not one but two missed trains to Rhinebeck, I persisted. And I’m glad I did. Because somewhere between the breakdowns (emotional and vehicular), I got clarity.

The first exercise we did was about power. What we have it over, and what we don’t. And let me tell you, it was nauseating to write down that I don’t have power over my dating life. Or Donald Trump. In that order.

As a high-achieving white woman with deep delusions of grandeur and a savior complex, I’ve always believed that if I worked hard enough, I could fix anything. The patriarchy? I made a pitch on canva. Elon Musk’s ketamine problem? Just let me speak to his inner child. My immigration status? Surely a strongly worded email and some light manifestation would suffice. I mean I did spend four years writing a book trying to help the very people who were hurting me, which is sort of my Roman Empire. I really think I can turn harm into healing, if I just love hard enough.

But my delusions and stockholm syndrome aside, writing those things down on my “powerless” list, especially the part where I admitted that I might lose my green card, that I could be detained or deported from the country I call home, felt like an exorcism. It was like naming the demon made it less powerful, or at least gave me permission to stop pretending I could charm it into submission.

Because worrying doesn’t make the problem go away. It just makes me its prisoner. And if I’ve learned anything from both ICE and my last situationship, it’s that prisons are very good at pretending they’ll keep you safe.

A lot of being alive right now isn’t about resistance. It’s about acceptance. And that feels like a betrayal.

Acceptance sounds like surrender, like compliance, like complicity. But maybe it’s actually the opposite. Maybe it’s the first step toward real power, the kind that isn’t performative, but durable.

What I’m beginning to understand is that our collective refusal to accept reality might be one of the things holding us back. We post something brave, do something righteous: we show up, we organize, we speak out. And before we can even metabolize that act, before we can even feel the endorphin rush of our own courage, some voice inside us whispers: But Trump is still there. But the Court is still stacked. But the world is still ending.

And it’s true. He is still there. The Court is stacked. The world is ending, or at least molting into something unrecognizable.

But we cannot meet every injustice with the expectation that it will instantly be reversed, or that our efforts will be immediately rewarded. That’s not resistance. That’s magical thinking. That’s burnout in a costume.

What if we accepted, fully, that we don’t have power over Trump? Or over Elon Musk’s drug use, or over the Supreme Court’s ongoing cosplay as a 19th-century theocracy? What if we stopped pretending that doomscrolling, spiraling, and catastrophizing were the same thing as vigilance?

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One thing I learned from this retreat is that fear is necessary, but it’s also a short-circuit. It makes us reactive when we need to be strategic. I can’t think when I’m terrified. I can’t plan. Our imagination is a political tool! We can’t use it when we’re afraid.

I’ve been thinking a about inner children lately, maybe because I just spent 72 hours surrounded by crying white women at an Elizabeth Gilbert retreat, and also maybe because the entire national mood is that of a wounded kid who just found out the adults don’t know what they’re doing. And when I picture myself as a five-year-old right now, small, scared, unable to distinguish between helplessness and apocalypse, I don’t want to tell her to fight. I want to tell her she’s safe. That this is scary, yes. But that she’s not alone. And that as another fabulous white woman Glennon Doyle once said, that she can do hard things.

And maybe that’s the most radical thing we can offer each other right now: not just resistance, but reassurance. Not just outrage, but regulation. Not just fire, but a place to come in from the smoke.

Because if we want to last, and we need to last, we have to stop trying to fix everything and start accepting the truth: we’re not in control of what’s happening. But we are in control of how we meet it.

And sometimes that means crying in the rain. And sometimes it means skipping the ancestral trauma map. And sometimes it means remembering that the revolution isn’t just in the streets. It’s in our nervous system.

If you were five years old right now, what would you tell yourself? Let me know in the comments.

And after everything that tried to kill me this weekend (including that retreat, our car, and that stupid Trump sticker), this is what feels important to share with you:

1. You don’t have power over Trump.

2. You don’t have power over your ex.

3. You don’t have power over the Supreme Court.

4. You do have power over how you respond.

5. You do have power over what you create.

6. You do have power over what you fight for.

I love you!!

x

Liz