Life in Activism Memo #2

You can, and must, conquer your fear in politics—even your fear of Trump. Here's how.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Last October, for five days when my spouse was out of town, I did something you might consider a little strange. In an attempt to conquer my longstanding fear of being poor (again), I practiced being poor. 

Here’s how that worked:

• When I went grocery shopping, I purchased only the bare minimum I needed. No frills, no desserts, nothing organic—only the absolute basics. 

• When it was time to buy Halloween candy for Trick-or-Treaters, instead of going to the local boutique shop for handmade candies (a family tradition!) I bought two packages of bite sized minis on sale at CVS for $7.

• I walked everywhere, sometimes racking up 20,000 steps a day. This was actually exhilarating, as it was an unseasonably warm autumn week in the northeast.

• No coffee shop visits were allowed, even when I was waiting for my kid to finish his music lesson. I just brought tea from home.

• For personal entertainment, I used Duolingo and listened to a lengthy lecture series on the Vietnam War that I had been meaning to get to (I was born in the 70s, so I have no first-hand memories of those times).

• When work, school, homework, dinner and practices were all done, my kid and I just played video games we already owned, and completed some STEM activity boxes that had been sitting in the corner for a while.

In total, for the five days of my experiment, I spent a little under $150. When it was over, I felt fantastic, because I had largely accomplished my goal: I was no longer afraid of being poor.

I had been quite poor during much of my 20s, and even during my first year of full-time blogging in 2004 at the age of 30. While I rarely struggled to pay my bills after I got a job with Daily Kos in 2010, my memory of being poor, and fear of returning to those days, was causing problems in my life. It was making me too afraid to leave my job to start a new business, even though I had wanted to do so for several years. It was making me too afraid to speak my mind when I disagreed with people, a fear which doesn't mix well with being a good activist. It was making me too obsessed with watching every dime and debating every purchase with myself and my spouse. Perhaps most of all, it was contributing to making me a generally anxious person, something that I wanted to change.

Practicing being poor worked by turning my fear of something vague into concrete knowledge of what my life would be like if I was, once again, struck by poverty. I realized that I could live very cheaply and still have good times with my kid, still savor my food, still exercise, still enjoy holidays and seasons, still engage my mind, and still sleep well at night. In fact, I slept even better than usual due to the increased exercise and lower anxiety levels! While I still didn't—and still don't—want to be poor, I was a lot less afraid of becoming poor, and thus able to do more of the things I wanted to do in life. 

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What does this have to do with politics? Quite a lot.