We’ve made it through another week. Hooray, but also…hoo boy.
No new pictures. Where are you at mentally?
— Puff the Magic Hater (@mskellymhayes.bsky.social) 2026-02-06T05:03:51.324Z
Recently, my therapist has been encouraging me to spend more time feeling and less time thinking — suggesting (ha ha) that it might be good for me to feel some of the grief and weariness and sorrow and anger that I, like many others, have been casually squishing into a little box, because opening that box is a terrifying concept.
In all honesty, I have not really been doing my therapeutic homework (sorry, Anthony!). But as I was collecting the pieces for this week’s newsletter, I did, at the very least, give myself the space to sit with how each article or essay made me feel.
And in every case, what I felt, more than anything, was love. The love people have for their communities. The love each author felt as they wrote. The love of a future we can build, if we show up for it.
I want to feel more of that. How about you?
your friday five!
this week’s highlights on creating for good
”What We Owe Minnesota” (Soleil Ho for Coyote Media)
One of my absolute favorite shows of the last decade is The Good Place. If you never watched it, the premise of the show is that a bad person, Eleanor Shellstrop, accidentally winds up in “the good place” after her death, and immediately starts trying to figure out how to stay there while some predictable shenanigans ensue. There’s a spectacular twist at the end of the first season that sets the tone for the rest of the show, and it’s genuinely one of the most well-written pieces of media I’ve ever watched.
When talking about the show, one of the key messages that creator Michael Schur often comes back to is an adaptation of philosopher T.M. Scanlon’s book, What We Owe to Each Other. Learning about Scanlon’s work, Schur said,
“[s]ort of lit up a room in my brain that had been searching for a way to explain the kind of thing that I wanted to get at. And that was the idea that we owe certain things to other people, and the job of being alive on earth is to figure out what you owe to them and how you can provide it for them. That's the only way that any that there will ever be any progress.”
I thought about that a lot as I read Ho’s piece here, which was written just before last week’s one-day strike. What do we (we as non-Minnesotans, we as a society, we as human beings in general) owe to Minnesota? I don’t know about you, but my local signal chat has been full of people trying to organize big actions and rapid responses — which, as Minnesota has shown us, is absolutely an important part of this work. But what Ho lands on, critically, is something much more intimate…and in some ways, much scarier.
Since the uprisings that rocked the area after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, our friends in the Twin Cities have put in the work to bolster their mutual aid networks and build the infrastructure that can, at least temporarily, support their communities outside of business-as-usual. Mutual aid means that people can get fed without having to go to the store. It means those of us who aren’t worried about making rent can help out those who are. Find out, today, who your neighbors are, and make yourself available for giving rides, babysitting, escorting kids to school, or, god forbid, sounding the alarm when the feds come around. The best thing you can do to bring a general strike into being is to make people feel taken care of.
How gorgeous is that as a counteraction to so much harm?
The best thing you can do…is to make people feel taken care of.
What more could we owe to each other than that?
What do you need in order to feel cared for, and how does that translate into your ability to show up — creatively, and for your community? What are the needs you most need to fill (physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually) before you can move yourself to plug into the work you need to do? Who helps you meet those needs, and how often do you ask for help?
Prompt: Write down three things currently keeping you from taking action in your creative or community life, and then identify one person you can talk to or seek support from about each one. What does it feel like to have that conversation? Create about it.
”Your Friendly Neighborhood Resistance” (Kerry Howley for Intelligencer / New York Magazine)
This is a long read, but an excellent one — mostly because it so beautifully captures the ways that the folks in Minnesota have heard the Mr. Rogers motto of “look for the helpers” and taken it to the logical next step, “and then become the helper.”
Howley paints a picture of a resistance not defined by massive protests or headline-making actions, but by hundreds of moments between neighbors, friends, and strangers that have collected into an incredibly powerful movement.
There is a dog in booties wearing a serape, led around by a man in a cape with a cardboard sign that reads SHAME. There is a quiet clown and a loud man in a wide-brimmed hat waving a giant American flag. “ICE out,” shouts someone next to me over and over into his megaphone; his beanie reads ABORTION YOU BETCHA.
[…]
More agents gather; I can see them only dimly through the fence, but the crowd begins to prepare. “Do you have a mask?” a woman asks calmly, and before I can answer she has placed a disposable mask with a respirator in my gloved hands. I am standing next to Liz, a 37-year-old in a pom-pom beanie who recently quit her job in corporate event planning. “You should put your mask on,” she says pleasantly. “You should probably put that on,” another man says. “Do you have goggles?” A sign behind me reads YOUR GRANDMA HATES YOU.
Despite what dystopian revolution movies like to tell us, resistance is a marathon, not a sprint. And much the same way you can’t just show up one day and run 26.2 miles (I assume. I would rather die than even make the attempt. If you see me running, it’s because I’m being pursued by a bear.) you can’t just go from zero to “I can maintain this level of organizing and action indefinitely.” It takes resilience, it takes effort, it takes practice.
But what our friendly neighborhood resistance in Minnesota shows us is that practice can come in all forms, effort does not have to mean impossible asks, and resilience can be found in many places. It’s offering a mask to the person standing next to you. It’s delivering groceries to a neighbor. It’s hosting a playdate so that others can attend a protest or take a higher-risk action than you’re comfortable with. It’s sending emails or organizing spreadsheets or sending check-in texts if being physically in the movement isn’t possible for you. It’s designing posters or social media graphics, joining with fellow creatives to write a protest song, hosting a mini yoga retreat in your living room to give folks a place to rest, restore, and regroup — and then get back into the fight.
There is room for all of us in this moment. If you can’t find the place you think you belong, that’s okay. It just means you can create it for yourself.
How can you use your creative skills to show up for your community in this moment? What resources do you have to offer this moment? Think broadly — not just about what you make, but how you make it. What knowledge do you have? What connections? What expertise? What can you bring to the fight that no one else can replace?
Prompt: Explore Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Map. What role speaks to you most clearly? What are three actions you can take in the next week to lean into that role? Create about it.
Love Notes for Minnesota (via Ashley Fairbanks)
In Come See Me in the Good Light, the absolutely gorgeous documentary Andrea Gibson and their wife Megan Faley filmed during the last year of Andrea’s life, there’s a scene where Andrea and their ex-girlfriend/best friend Bethy (they had a lot of those, apparently!) are driving together, recounting something that Andrea said to Bethy after her father was diagnosed with cancer: Everything that you’re feeling, name it love.
That’s how I felt reading the Love Notes spreadsheet — all the submitted responses to a form on the Stand With Minnesota website, a hub of mutual aid, action, and support. Organizer Ashley Fairbanks, who created the form, posted on BlueSky:
i havent shut off the notification for this form and it has just been vibrating every minute in my hand. just a steady beat.
— ashley fairbanks (@ziibiing.com) 2026-01-25T03:56:12.000Z
Reading this sheet was overwhelming — but it also gave me yet another moment of realizing that all of us, no matter what, can do something right now, even if it’s just sending a tiny message of encouragement. Just reading the messages (more than 3,500 as of this writing) is proof of just how many people care. Who care about their community. Who care about communities far from their own. Who care about building a better world.
Everything you're doing is worth it. It is beautiful how much your work impacts your community. Thank you.
You folks are in my heart and in my mind, daily and hourly. I wish I could be there side-by-side with you in your resistance. You are showing the rest of us how it is done. Your courage gives me courage, your resistance strengthens my resistance. You are all heroes.
Whoever is reading this, you have been on my heart and mind constantly, and I am in awe of how you are standing up for your community. You are showing all of us how to stand up to the horrors of fascism and you give me hope that we can let the light overcome the darkness.
What would it be like to take what you’re feeling right now, name it love, and then extend that love out into the world? What does “feeling” love — not loved, not loving, but simply love — mean to you? How does love find its way into what you create, how you show up, and what mark you want to leave in the world.
Prompt: Send three love notes this week — whether it’s a text, a form submission, a post-it note on your bathroom mirror, a slip of paper in your child’s lunch box, a letter sent to a friend. How did it feel? Create about it.
”What Do You Do With Your Stories?” (Alexander Chee for his newsletter, The Querent)
Taking a brief — though not total — shift from Minnesota content, I want to talk a bit about rejection.
I hear from a lot of people (especially creatives) that the fear of rejection is one of the biggest things that keeps them from moving toward their goals. Whether it’s a manuscript, a job application, an attempt to join a club or community — it’s scary to put ourselves out there. It makes us feel vulnerable. Rejection, when we do get it, can feel anywhere from disappointing to world-ending.
But we have to keep trying.
[W]riting is a social act. I’m not speaking about a party exactly, though I do love a party. I mean the connections that run through a life. The ones that can hold that life together for decades.
[…]
If you save your stories up until you die, you do skip the humiliation of being rejected, it is true. But you miss the rest too.
Chee approaches this specifically from the context of writing and submission for publication, but what he’s saying can be applied not just to any form of creative work but to any kind of outreach or action. Scrolling up to “Your Friendly Neighborhood Resistance” and “What We Owe Minnesota” — what would be happening, right now, if the people showing up every day had been too nervous that their participation wouldn’t be wanted? That they were too new, or too inexperienced, or too disconnected to be involved?
Writing is a social act, but so is living. Creating. Connecting. If we save up the hundreds of thousands of tiny actions we could take to be part of this world, this movement, this moment, we might spare ourselves some discomfort — but, as Chee says, we miss out on the rest of it, too. On those connections. Those love letters. Those powerful moments of knowing you are part of something.
What are you avoiding out of fear of rejection? What would it feel like to put that fear aside — and what would it take for you to be able to do that? Who are the people that can help you? What is the worst case scenario if you put rejection aside and take that first step…but more importantly, what could you miss if you don’t?
Prompt: Find a buddy and make time for a “fuck rejection” action session. Talk to each other about what you’ve been avoiding, and then — together — Do The Thing. What did it feel like? Create about it.
”When Love Thy Neighbor Is a Cry of Resistance” (Rebecca Solnit for her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency)
For our last link of the week, I’m leaving you, probably predictably, on the topic of connection.
In the one-year anniversary of launching her newsletter — which shares a name with one of my favorite poems ever — Solnit writes,
In the opposite of the ideology of isolation, we recognize that everything is connected. That is the first lesson that nature teaches if we listen, if we learn, though capitalism and related systems of alienation and objectification taught us all to forget, ignore, or deny it. Nevertheless this cosmology of interconnection has grown more powerful and influential over the past several decades, thanks to many forces seen as separate but that all move us in the same direction: antiracism and feminism which reject discrimination, inequality, and exclusion; gay rights which insisted that gender does not narrowly define who we can be and who and how we can love and become beloved, become family; environmental activism that charts how damage moves downwind, downstream, how sabotaging one piece of an ecosystem affects the whole. The past two hundred years have expanded the idea of universal human rights and equality through revolutions but also through cultural shifts, which themselves can amount to slowmoving, incremental, subtle, and therefore too-often unnoticed revolutions that manifest in a thousand small ways.
This philosophy of interconnectedness comes up a lot with writers and organizers who take their inspiration from nature. In Emergent Strategy, one of my favorite writers, adrienne maree brown, explains,
E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G—is connected. The soil needs rain, organic matter, air, worms and life in order to do what it needs to do to give and receive life. Each element is an essential component. Organizing takes humility and selflessness and patience and rhythm while our ultimate goal of liberation will take many expert components. Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other—at our highest natural glory—in order to get free.
When we say, for example, that writing — or creating, or existing — is a social act, as Chee does in the essay above, we lean into the profound lessons of the natural world. The connections in nature, from root systems to mycelial networks to everything we think of when we hum along to “The Circle of Life,” are a reminder that not only are we not alone in this moment, but that we are fundamentally linked to everyone around us: Our families, our neighbors, our communities, our broader world. Our work, too, fits within this landscape — we are not in isolation, we are in conversation. As Solnit says,
After all you yourself in this very moment live by taking gulps of the sky into your lungs and could not last long without taking in that most gloriously fluctuating of all things, water, and devouring other forms of life, and other things come out of you, be they poems or babies or political contributions.
What is your creative relationship to nature and the natural world? What do you find inspiring, terrifying, horrifying, beautiful? How do elements of nature find their way into your work? What is the most important lesson you have ever taken from nature — and why was it so meaningful?
Prompt: Spend at least 15 minutes outside in nature this week without additional stimulation — no headphones, no podcasts, no buddies (dogs excepted, obviously). What do you notice? Create about it.
See you next week!
💜Shelly
