Worry feels like doing something, as if the more you experience distress, the more you’ve done. But feeling changes nothing.

A frenzy of sudden activity and quick, quitting exhaustion also feels like accomplishment. “I did everything I could!” But things are very bad, and we need more than that.

You’re going to have to pick your one thing. You’re going to have to show up for it every day you can and for longer than you think.

Just one — because you can’t do everything. There’s too much to pay attention to, too much of all of it be involved in all of it. You’ll break down before they do, and we have can’t have that. It’s too important.

So you have to pick your thing.

You may not know yet what niche you see yourself filling. It doesn’t have to be big, dramatic, or completely new. It may even be fun. It just has to be something you can reliably do day after day, week after week, month after month. Stone on stone or water on stone, but inevitable, inexorable.

You should effort to make yourself redundant and replaceable, but till then, there you are. For this one thing, there you are. You can show up for other things and connect people to even more, but you have your one thing that’s yours and you guarantee you show up for it, whoever else joins you.

Immigration could be your thing. But that probably means you lose capacity for reproductive rights, for example. If you can join those two things together, that’s excellent! But maybe monitoring fascist groups in your area falls by the wayside, supporting homeless neighbors falls by the wayside.

It’s all one fight, but there’s no one thing that addresses it all, and you can’t do everything that needs done. Not you the individual, not you the group, not you the organization. You can just do what you can do and keep doing it until you can’t. So you should pick what you can last at.

Other people who’ve been through worse may have better or different advice. But, for our small fight of years, you keep solidarity with everyone yet focus your primary energy and attention into the one fire you can keep lit for others to warm themselves by, to pick up to spread for themselves later.

It’s not much help to be really excited about something right now and do three dozen things a few weeks till you crack up versus doing something steadily, reliably, unfailing for all the years it will be required (and it likely will be required for years if it’s worth doing).

Again: support others whenever you have the surplus for it. Encourage networks of peers with multiple points of contact and shared interests. Find ways to make many things you care about part of your routine so they can be done with ease. But don’t be the single point of failure for a dozen things.

Make yourself redundant. Make yourself something others can build off of until they no longer need you and can leave you behind. And have fun! Because we are alive and joy replenishes us. We all have our part, not the whole, to worry over. We are human and there is much and more work to do.