When should we move beyond escapism?

Just some things that have been on my mind

Since the election, I haven’t been able to listen to NPR as much, nor have I spent much time on social media. With every new piece of information about Trump’s cabinet picks (that currently resemble an outlandish crew of cartoon supervillians), I can’t face it. While I do wonder if all of them could be confirmed even in a Republican senate, each announcement feels like an ominous march toward dystopia.

And so, for the moment a piece of news comes in front of me, I have to turn away. And then I turn to some kind of fictional world that is not ours. As of late, they’re the Detective Sean Duffy series by Adrian McKinty set in 1980s, war-torn Northern Ireland they’re not necessary fluffy, but they are not our current world. My husband and I also just binged the first season of Bad Sisters and absorb ourselves in each week’s new Great British Bake-Off episode. In short, I only want escapism right now.

This brought me back to a conversation my agent and I have been having over the past few months while my book proposal has been out on submission. I’ll paraphrase what she tells me about the feedback: the concept is cool, the writing is good, but it’s a bummer of a topic and people want escapism right now.

Let’s set aside the fact the very short-term thinking here (given a book wouldn’t be published for another couple years) and think about the very idea of escapism. It’s all I’ve been able to consume for the past two weeks. I can’t bring myself to look dead on and face the potential calamity of another Trump Administration at the moment. I think a lot of people are in the same place. But when we can’t not look straight at the problem, are we still going to be looking for escapism in our off hours?

I imagine so, yes. But I also wonder if we need to find some balance. We cannot just look away from what is to come. Climate change is happening. Yes the term “apocalypse” scares people, but it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. In fact, it can’t just be so gloomy that people won’t be able to do anything about it. But we also can’t just turn away the moment we see something that’s hard to take, particularly those of us in privileged positions.

I suppose the question is, how do we find that balance between escapism and constant horror in our newsfeed? How do we soothe our soul to restore ourselves for resistance and the fight ahead? How do we keep our brain engaged in fun and light things while also navigating tough topics?

I don’t know if I have the answer for that. But I think that it can help just being aware of the fact that we can’t just escape the horrors of the moment but can take a break from them when it’s taking the life out of us. We need to give ourselves grace when escapism is all we can take to keep our mental health in tact. Because I do know that in the last Trump Administration, I paid attention to every little piece of horror brought on people and it was exhausting. And to truly resist, we cannot be completely zapped.

So go on, find that escapism for now and be ready for when we all need to enter the realities of the world to do our best to resist.