Reintroducing What's Helping Today

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

Hi all,

I’ve been writing this newsletter for four years now and have just moved it over to this new platform. So! I thought I’d write a short note reintroducing the whole What’s Helping Today project, especially for those of you who’ve joined recently. (Welcome, hi!)

I’m Sandy Ernest Allen, a trans author and journalist who lives in the woods of the Catskills Mountains. For the last fifteen years, my writing has tended to focus on mental health, also gender. I wrote a book called A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia, which was published by Scribner. I’m working on a few other books now and I’ve also written essays and features for many publications. My latest are this long feature story for The Believer on electroshock in our society and culture, and this essay for Esquire about attending a summer camp with 150 fellow trans men.

This newsletter tends to discuss, as its tagline reads, ‘the everyday work of staying alive on earth.’ I focus in on ‘what’s helping today’ because I find this a good distillation of my approach to ‘mental health’, aka psycho-social-spiritual wellbeing. Namely, by calling my own attention to ‘what’s helping today,’ I’m forcing myself to notice the positive, and to also get present — positivity and presence both being, I’ve come to feel, super hard and super key.

So often here I’m writing about my garden or stuff I’m baking. I sometimes address tougher topics pertaining to mental health. These days, I often reflect on being a trans person in America, and all the attendant terror — and hope — that can bring.

I write about mental health as journalist who’s investigated this space deeply for a long time, yes. But also I’m just a person, someone contending with my own mind and my own history. I’m someone who’s trying to figure this all out — questions like how we can be okay-ish inside, despite this very challenging world, and despite all we cannot control.

If you want to hear more about this newsletter and these ideas, check out my interview on the TED podcast How to Be a Better Human (‘Why we should rethink what mental health means’) from a couple years back. If you want to browse older What’s Helping Today posts, you can still access them here.

Occasionally here I write advice-type column called Dear Sandy. The first installment was about queerness in rural spaces. The second discussed how to actually start meditating. For the third I wrote about crying (too much). In the fourth I responded to a mother who was worried about her trans daughter. (If you want to ask an anonymous question for me to consider, write [email protected].)

What’s Helping Today: I managed to go for a walk around the snowy yard and found this artwork created by the wind and a dead stalk of goldenrod:

Take care,
Sandy

p.s. I wanted to share this playlist I made called perfect conditions. It’s what I had on in the car the sub-zero morning of my surgery, three weeks ago. I’m doing comparatively much better, but still exhausted and taking it easy.

p.p.s. To contact me otherwise, you can do so here. As I’ve said, I’m also now on Bluesky.

p.p.p.s. Credit to artist Katie Benn for creating the What’s Helping Today logo. It’s an illustration of my once-ailing fern, Mr. Bunbury — who’s actually doing fantastic, I’ve been meaning to update:

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