Today was a hard day. My morning diet of Facebook and Gmail was especially difficult to view. But I couldn’t stop.

The manic energy of my Facebook feed is reassuring. Almost everyone I know is worried about the future, scared of future policies, and trying to figure out how to combat them. This is good. This energy is a good sign that maybe, just maybe, we won’t let the country slide into autocracy.

But it’s exhausting.

I had expected today to be better than yesterday, and tomorrow to be better than today, etc. until the world felt somewhat normal again. But grief doesn’t move in a linear progression.

Again, I had seven or twelve topics I thought I might address today — it’s manic out there, I tell you — but I think it’s important to document the process through the grief. So, instead, I offer just one article today. Masha Gessen writes in the New York Review of Books “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” This article really helped to focus my manic energy today as I floundered from topic to topic, issue to issue, feeling to feeling.

My favorite bit:

But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.