This Is What Worked for Me Last Time

Part of a screenshot from November 5th, 2016.

When I think back to the 2016 election, as everyone is now compelled to, what I mainly remember is being on my phone. I remember the little cartoon sketches of the candidates on FiveThirtyEight. I remember one tweet that said Florida turnout was looking great for Democrats. The needle, of course.

Being on my phone is also most of what I remember about the years leading up to that election.

The main things I did on my phone in that time were look at different numbers, refresh to see if any had changed, feel a lot of hatred and anxiety, and search for a solution to those feelings in an endless pantry of causes. Those activities started to leak out into my larger mental health situation in predictably harmful ways. Then the actual election happened and it felt like the pantry door closed on me.

I woke up the morning after feeling pretty nuts. So I did what many do in a state of imbalance and posted on Facebook — a threshold I rarely crossed even as a phone guy.

Please understand how vulnerable I’m being by putting a Facebook post from eight years ago into the world. Just… we all talked differently back then.

But that day after election did end up being kind of a diverter switch for my life. I did make my next four years about LA — and then another four. The transition was not easy but unequivocally beneficial in a million ways, and I still feel a very powerful drive to do and talk about this stuff. Somehow it’s picking up momentum every year.

LA is like most places in that the access points are hard to find. It took months for me. I would never have even gotten started without a relentlessly supportive wife and a friend who gave me so many places to connect with the city — first doing outreach at encampments, then starting a neighborhood group, then on her City Council campaign, then in her office at City Hall, then in more offices.

It’s been a lot more than almost anyone gets to do or needs to. But whatever you can do, I think you should.

Working on and learning everything I could about the city where I lived gave me something that felt like it actually moved when I pushed on it. It turned out that’s what I had been looking for on my phone. Maybe it’s about a need for agency or something, but mostly working in the city just made me feel like the world was real and I was actually there, whereas national politics had made me feel like a ghost haunting my own house — moaning something nobody could hear, my hand misting through the toilet handle, etc.

Going local does not disconnect you from anything. It connects you harder to everything, because everything ripples down in one way or another to where you live, and that’s where you can touch it. It makes you more comfortable talking to everyone. It puts a layer of fascination on top of all the streets and the buildings. It takes you off your phone. It makes you less anxious, because you have an actual foothold on the sheer cliff face of existence. And it makes you less depressed because you can see the next one.

I did not really stop being on my phone after 2016. But that election and digging into the city changed my relationship to it, and this election is going to change that relationship again.

So this is another day-after Facebook commitment post: off the feeds, into the streets. Almost a million people in LA County are undocumented. Homelessness is at an inflection point and a lot of new funds are about to come online. Downtown and Skid Row have a new representative. Tenants are about to get a right to free eviction counsel, but will need a bunch of help connecting to it.

There’s so much to do. So many new places to build where we can work on it and talk about it. That’s what the next four years are about for me.