Staying Grounded When the Earth Cracks

On Political Focus in an Age of Overstimulation

There’s a question that has become almost unavoidable in movement spaces over the last several years, especially after 2020.

“What is giving you hope right now?”

Usually, the question is asked with good intentions. It is a way to remind people of their why, provide grounding for those looking for answers, and maybe offer a little glimpse of beauty in what increasingly feels like a dystopian period. Authoritarianism rising. Civil rights rolled back. Climate disasters are accelerating. Endless war. Endless surveillance. Endless noise.

Our enemies clearly understand that one of the fastest ways to weaken people is to overwhelm them. To exhaust them. To convince them that nothing they do matters. Because once people lose their willingness to fight for themselves, for each other, and for the possibility of a better world, the battle is already lost.

That is why, every hour, there is another headline, another outrage, another statement demanding a response, another crisis delivered directly into our nervous system, until, slowly, we are worn down to the point of exhaustion.

In boxing, when you spar for the first time, you enter the ring tense. You jump at every feint, react to every little movement, burn energy responding to things that are not even real threats. Next thing you know, you’re thirty seconds into a three-minute round with multiple rounds still ahead of you, exhausted and overwhelmed. And that is exactly when your opponent can land clean shots. A good coach teaches you the opposite. Relax. Breathe. Stay composed. Focus. Learn the difference between movement that matters and movement that is only trying to provoke a reaction out of you.

In many ways, this essay offers the same advice.

Now, back to this question of hope. ​I often asked myself, “What is giving me hope?” because people I deeply respect pushed many of us to think seriously about hope, radical imagination, and our responsibility to believe that another world is possible. And I still deeply believe in the importance of those things. My father once told me that the thing that kept him focused while incarcerated for twenty-four years was the hope and vision that one day he would be reconnected to me. I’ve watched my mother make miracles happen and find ways to provide because of the hope and vision she had for me to have a better life than she did. And I have also seen what the absence of hope can do to people. Honestly, some of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life have been watching people I love engage in deeply destructive behavior because they no longer believed a better future was possible for themselves. So I do not mean to dismiss hope. ​And at the same time, over the last few years, I’ve also found myself becoming a little irritated by the question, and sometimes even wondering whether the way many of us talk about hope in the first world can become disconnected from the actual conditions so much of humanity has endured throughout history. The more I learn, the more I realize that so many people across the world continue struggling under conditions far worse than what many of us can imagine, and yet they still endure and fight. Just this week, I was reading I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, which focuses on the organizing traditions of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. In one section, a young organizer from the 1960s explains that every single time he got up to organize Black people in the South, he had to seriously consider the possibility that he could be stabbed, beaten by white mobs, or lynched.

And yet they organized anyway. ​ I think about Palestinians enduring genocide and starvation and still fighting. I think about political prisoners who have effectively been abandoned by much of the public and are still fighting.

At some point, I started realizing that hope alone isn’t what’s carrying people through history. Or at least not entirely. Sometimes people continue struggling because they believe they can win. Sometimes they continue because they feel a responsibility to the people around them. Sometimes they fight simply because their independence and ability to live self-determined lives are worth dying for. I heard this often while in Cuba.

As you can probably see, I still struggle with these things, and my thinking is constantly adapting. Still, I now spend a lot of my time thinking about discipline, focus, and endurance, especially in this political moment.

The truth probably lives somewhere in the middle. We need hope. We need vision. We need imagination. But we also need the ability to remain grounded enough to continue moving even when the world feels like it is collapsing around us.

And honestly, that brings me to something I’ve struggled with since childhood: motion sickness.

The first time I remember experiencing it, I was probably six years old. My mom had taken me to get donuts in Chula Vista. I got my favorite sugar donut, climbed into the backseat, and immediately started devouring it while she drove. But a few bites in, I felt it. The nausea. The spinning. That strange feeling where your equilibrium suddenly disappears. I had to put the donut down and lie back because I genuinely thought I was going to throw up.

Over the years, I learned that motion sickness wasn’t just something that happened in cars. It happened whenever my body became overstimulated while I was struggling to orient myself. If I get overstimulated and I am stressed, I can actually get vertigo.

The most intense experience I’ve had with motion sickness happened a few years ago while in Mexico. ​I have always had a deep fear of the open ocean. Ever since I was a kid and learned that humanity has explored only a small percentage of what exists beneath the sea, I’ve had this irrational imagination about what could be underneath me. Something about not being able to see below the surface has always unsettled me. Probably not that different from how many people feel about the future.

But on this trip to Mexico, I somehow—or more accurately, through the power of love and a beautiful woman—got convinced to go snorkeling anyway. What I didn’t realize was that snorkeling meant getting dropped miles off the coast and swimming in open water. And what I also didn’t realize was that you can absolutely get motion sickness while floating and swimming in the ocean.

So there I was, trying to appreciate sea turtles and giant fish while simultaneously feeling like my body was shutting down. My equilibrium was gone. Too much movement. Too much stimulation. Too many things demanding my attention at once. And yet I still had to keep swimming. Keep breathing. Keep up with the group. Stay calm enough not to panic.

When we finally got back on the boat, I was completely wrecked. My body felt disoriented. My brain couldn’t focus. Everything was spinning.

The captain took one look at me and gave me one small piece of advice that I think about constantly now:

“Don’t look at everything moving around you. Just focus on one stable thing. Look at the shore.”

Later, I learned there’s actually a scientific explanation for why motion sickness works this way. Researchers describe it as a kind of sensory conflict in which the brain receives competing information from the body, the eyes, and the inner ear simultaneously. Your equilibrium begins to collapse because your brain is struggling to orient itself within constant movement and overstimulation. One of the most common recommendations is surprisingly simple: focus on a stable point or the horizon to help your brain reorient itself.

Honestly, the more I thought about it, the more it felt like an almost-perfect metaphor for this political moment. The waves were still violent. The boat was still rocking. The overstimulation was still there. But focusing on one stable point kept me from collapsing.

And I think many of us are dealing with a social and political motion sickness right now.

We are trying to process global crises, local crises, personal crises, historical crises, and digital crises, all simultaneously. We are consuming more suffering, information, and outrage in a single day than many human beings processed in years.

Eventually, your nervous system starts collapsing under the weight of it all. So increasingly, what keeps me grounded is not trying to respond to everything, but instead trying my best to stay focused. Paying attention to what is actually within my control. Committing deeply to a set of responsibilities instead of scattering my energy across a thousand directions and not doing anything well.

And for me, that focus has required that I ask difficult questions about where I actually have the capacity to contribute in meaningful ways, and also if my contribution is actually building towards something constructive.

I get asked to do all kinds of things, but more and more I’ve had to ask myself a few simple questions before saying yes: Will this bring me even a small amount of joy? Am I contributing to this in a useful way? Will I remain interested in this long enough to sustain the work? Could I learn something that could benefit my community over the long haul?

I am not someone who often centers my personal enjoyment. There are always responsibilities we take on simply because they are necessary. But when it comes to the additional labor I choose to carry, I’ve realized that long-term discipline requires a certain level of alignment—the intersection of passion, curiosity, capacity, skill, and impact Otherwise, over time, it becomes much harder to remain grounded, focused, and useful to the people around you.

Another realization that has hit me recently is that many of the things we use to “escape” from all this chaos are actually just additional forms of stimulation layered on top of an already overwhelmed mind. Social media. Streaming shows. Constant podcasts. Endless videos. Infinite scrolling. I realized that from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, I am almost constantly consuming something.

I wake up and immediately start writing or reading. I practice Spanish. I read while drinking my morning caffeine. I go to the gym listening to music or watching TikTok videos between sets. I shower with the news in the background. I work all day responding to emails, sitting in meetings, putting out fires, and connecting with people. I cook dinner listening to podcasts or audiobooks. Then at night, I “rest” by watching one or two episodes from the rotation of five streaming shows I’m currently juggling, before finally trying to read or listen to another audiobook before bed.

Writing all of that out honestly made me want to apologize to my own brain.

Because I realized I was giving myself almost no silence at all. No time to process. No time to think. No time to recover. Just constant stimulation from the moment I opened my eyes until the moment I closed them. And that doesn’t even include the dozens of times throughout the day that I instinctively pick up my phone and open Instagram or Twitter without even thinking about it, which is part of the design of these tools of mass distraction and capitalism. Meta is currently facing lawsuits over claims that its platforms were intentionally designed to be addictive for children and teenagers. Still, I think most adults know the same dynamics apply to us, too. These platforms compete for our attention every second of the day because it’s profitable.

There is growing research around attention, overstimulation, and the role that boredom and silence play in helping human beings process emotion, meaning, and identity. Psychologists and neuroscientists have increasingly warned that constant stimulation leaves very little room for reflection or emotional processing. And many of us are living inside that reality now.

We scroll when we feel anxious. We consume when we feel uncertain. We reach for noise because silence has become uncomfortable. But without moments of stillness, it becomes difficult to hear yourself clearly enough to know what you actually think, feel, or believe beneath all the noise.

What I’m slowly learning is that actual rest is not always less distracting. Sometimes, actual rest is quiet. No noise. No social media. No reading or learning. Just enough space for your mind to breathe again. Enough space to actually feel what is happening in your body. And creating a little space to process those questions you have been avoiding.

I’m finding that those moments of quiet are not pulling me away from the world. They are not really an escape at all. If anything, they are helping me see the world, and myself, more clearly.

Part of what prompted me to write this is that I often get asked some version of the same question: “How do you hold all of this?”

The work. The reading. The organizing. Being an executive director, being present for family and relationships, and trying to stay informed about everything happening in the world. And honestly, I’ve been trying to struggle through that question myself. The truth is, there is no perfect answer, and I get it wrong all the damn time. But these are some of the things I’ve learned from what I’ve gotten right, the mistakes I’ve made, and the mistakes I’ve watched other people make, too.

The first is that building the capacity to endure is a process, like anything else.

Sometimes people become politically radicalized and immediately feel like they need to throw themselves into the struggle in the most extreme ways possible. Take on more labor than they ever have before. Consume everything. Learn everything overnight. Become everything all at once. And honestly, that can become a fast path toward burnout.

Part of the reason I’m able to hold the level of responsibility that I currently do is because of conditioning. For me, that foundation was built years ago as a collegiate athlete, structured around five a.m. workouts, study sessions, classes, two-a-day practices, late nights, and early mornings. It was an environment that forced me to learn how to push through discomfort, organize my time, and function while exhausted.

Today, that same discipline and structure have simply been redirected toward movement work, political education, writing, relationships, and community. But the capacity itself wasn’t built in a year; it required nearly two decades of routine, failure, and adjustment.

We often compare our beginning to someone else’s developed capacity without understanding the years of conditioning that came before it. Whether your baseline was built in sports, caregiving, demanding jobs, or just surviving hard circumstances, building endurance takes time. You have to honor whatever stage of training you are currently in.

Another thing I’m still learning is that endurance isn’t just about discipline. It is learning how to listen to yourself clearly enough to recognize when you actually need rest. A colleague asked me recently how I “navigate rest,” and the question almost caught me off guard because my immediate thought was simple: when I need to rest, I rest. When I feel capable of continuing, I continue.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the reason I can even recognize when I need rest is that I’ve slowly learned how to pay attention to the signals my body and mind are giving me.

It’s not a perfect process. Sometimes my neck stiffens up so badly I can barely move before I finally admit I pushed too far. Sometimes exhaustion sneaks up on me before I recognize it.

But creating moments of quiet and reflection makes it easier to hear yourself before you completely crash into a wall. When your brain is constantly flooded with noise, stimulation, information, stress, entertainment, and endless reactions, it eventually becomes difficult to distinguish external chaos from what is actually happening inside you.

A simple practice I have been doing is just 10-15 minutes of intentional quiet time. Put the phone in another room, sit there, and just breathe. Find little ways to be in the moment, whether you take a walk or you’re just admiring some trees. If you pick up the phone before those 15 minutes are up, do not beat yourself up over it. Clock it, give yourself a little reminder about why you’re doing it, and try again. Not every night, but some nights, skip the show or reading and enjoy some quiet before bed. You might begin processing the day, but I have found that doing it for about an hour before bed keeps me from waking up in the middle of the night to process.

Moments of quiet and of rest are critical. I don’t believe that rest is resistance, revolutionary, or any of the other liberal slogans folks use. Still, it is necessary for sustaining a protracted struggle and for helping us track our limitations, motivations, fears, responsibilities, and our actual capacity. Those moments will help us discern when to push forward and when to step away and recover.

That balance, that equilibrium, that focus, is something many of us are still learning in real time, especially in a world that increasingly profits from our distraction, exhaustion, and emotional fragmentation. I don’t have all the answers, but I do think I’m slowly learning that surviving these times requires more than just consuming information or reacting to every crisis. It requires building the discipline to focus, the patience to grow over time, and the willingness to create enough silence in your life so you can hear yourself think again.