Everything Is Fine

Welcome to What’s Helping Today, a newsletter about the everyday work of staying alive on earth, by author and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen.

Hi.

I saw this going around:

Look, it’s all of us right now, scrolling through the doom, swords piercing our flesh…

(Everything is not fine of course.)

(Everything is fucked.)

How, then, to notice anything not-fucked?

How to not just drown in the negative? How to celebrate the wins, however small or big?

There are wins, truly. Occasions to smile, to even feel hope. There are moments of triumph — of individuals or of collectives asserting: fuck you, make me.

Protests work. Lawsuits work. Civil disobedience works.

To that tricky matter of how to notice the not-fucked when so much is indeed fucked:

Here is a really good meditation I did yesterday on that theme, with one of my favorite teachers. Here is an older post recommending some of my (other) favorite meditation teachers. Here again were my thoughts from the other day about the one thing we perhaps can control in this life: our breath.

Here is an older column about how I started meditating and my explainer on how to clean your brain (a.k.a. a primer in “JournalSpeak,” the free-writing practice I’m often recommending as a preamble to meditation. Once more, here is the link to JournalSpeak creator Nicole Sachs’s recently released book about all this).

Here again are my words of encouragement for cis people feeling fatigued by everything happening to trans people. If you are tempted to turn away, don’t! We need you!

What’s Helping Today: Having had some trans locals over yesterday afternoon for cookies and coffee and tea and conversation. Truly essential stuff rn. I talked about this in the piece for Xtra, which I encourage you to check out if you haven’t already.

Thought I’d (re)share some of my playlists. They tend to be long and lyric-free and ambient or whatever else, because that’s what I like to have on most all the time.

Ordered roughly from mellow to less so:
the morning bends down
music for hard times
no gods only flowers
in a bloopy mood
healing is a miracle 
thousand oceans
…and so we should help one another
days as echoes
love your grace
perfect conditions
universe people
psychic geography
verging on chaos
getting shit done

I’ve also been compiling a big playlist of music by trans artists. Some are favs of mine; others were recommended by folks online and I’m just checking them out for the first time. (You can feel free to suggest others I’ve missed!)

Finally, just wanted to say welcome to my new subscribers! I’ve been having more people joining, perhaps because of Xtra or Tabs or me talking about this newsletter on Bluesky. If you’ve just signed up, What’s Helping Today is my four-year-old newsletter that I recently moved to beehiiv, off of substack (bc … nazis). Here was a re-introduction to the newsletter I recently wrote.

Take care,
Sandy

p.s. Periodic reminder that I publish a very occasional advice-type column here. To send a question for consideration, email [email protected]. Questions can be about anything! They can be however long and I won’t publish your name. Here were the fourth, third, second and first columns.

p.p.s. To contact me otherwise, you can do so here. (I got some lovely emails from some of you after the Xtra piece. I genuinely appreciate when you write me the beautiful things you do.)

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