1. Important stuff from Chuck Wendig on Terrible Minds: Trust Me, I Don’t Wanna Talk About This Shit Either and This Is A Test Of The Emergency Broadcasting System.

2. 100 Days of Investment in Black Lives, “a series of direct actions to invest in Black lives and the organizations that bring dignity to Black Lives.” A really great project from Now We Rise.

3. 5 Calls. “Turn your passive participation into active resistance. Facebook likes and Twitter retweets don’t create the change you want to see. Spend 5 minutes, make 5 calls. There’s one simple and straightforward way to influence the Government that is supposed to represent you: Call them on the phone. Calling is the most effective way to influence your representative. 5 Calls gives you contacts and scripts so calling is quick and easy. We use your location to give you your local representatives so your calls are more impactful.” And if you are like me, this might also help, How to call your reps when you have social anxiety.

4. An Open Letter to Women Who Voted for Trump.

5. People Are Calling This Song The Anthem Of The Women’s March Movement. In related news, Why I Threw Out My Speech for the Women’s March, and An Unpopular Opinion on the Women’s March on Washington, and Some Inconvenient Truths About The Women’s March On Washington, and You Are Not Equal. I’m Sorry., and Woman in Viral Photo From Women’s March to White Female Allies: ‘Listen to a Black Woman’, and Some Thoughts On The Women’s March That Already Feels Like So Long Ago Because These Are The End Times.

6. 75 Books for the Next Four Years, “Writers recommend necessary reading for the inauguration day and beyond.” In related news, Forget Nineteen Eighty-Four. These five dystopias better reflect Trump’s US.

7. Autocracy: Rules for Survival.

8. The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet [Infographic].

9. Unwelcome in my Country, Unwelcome in my Church.

Nonviolent resistance was not a matter of sitting back and forgiving, waiting to see what would happen next. Nonviolent resistance was an active refusal to allow derogatory and damaging physical, legal, and cultural violence to continue to take place behind the scenes. Because of the nonviolent resistance movement, which brought the struggle into the open and into America’s living rooms via the television screen, average white Americans had to confront their complicity in a system built on intolerance and violence. They had to confront the fact that they were a part of the system that incited such violence. That this violence was being enacted in their name. The nonviolent resistance movement forced White America to look at the brutality visited on black bodies. It would not allow people to pretend that they did not know the symbols of power this violence was meant to enforce. The nonviolent resistance movement compelled white Americans to understand their culpability in the slapping of all those cheeks.

10. Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves. I’ve probably already shared this, maybe more than once, but it’s a great resource.

11. Why I’m moving my money to a credit union.

12. Three simple ways to support Muslim women. In related news, Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal.

13. Woman Who Caused Emmett Till’s Death Admits to Lying.

14. The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies.

15. Week One. “It’s been one week since President Trump took office, here’s a list of everything he has done so far.”

16. The 19 Funniest Tweets From Women This Week.

17. Creating Your Personal Action Plan, an online workshop. “These times call for creative action and resistance. What’s yours to do?”

18. Alternative Facts and Fake News – Verifiability in the Information Society. In related news, Finding Good News.

19. How the Media Should Cover Donald Trump, a video from GQ.

20. A moving speech by Mahershala Ali, one of the actors from Moonlight.

21. ‘Unprecedented’: Trump Adds Bannon to National Security Council, Kicks Out Intelligence Officials. In related news, How Steve Bannon Took Charge Of The Trump Administration, and Trial Balloon for a Coup?, and West Wing leaker goes dark after pulling back the curtain: Trump “irrational”, staff “demoralized.” Something to do about it from Wall of Us, action 3: stop the loose bannon.

22. The Secret Language of Narcissists, Sociopaths and Psychopaths: How Abusers Manipulate and Traumatize Their Victims.

23. Each word, image, and video we share online has a ripple effect.

24. This Simple Comic Perfectly Explains Privilege, And Everyone Must Read It.

25. We Are Very Angry from Lisa Congdon about how she’s using her social media platform and her creative expression to contribute to activism.

26. Stop everything: the nation’s zoos are in a vicious, wonderful #CuteAnimalTweetOff.

27. “Sometimes we are so confused and sad that all we can do is glue one thing to another.”

28. How Donald Trump Answers A Question from Nerdwriter, “a weekly video essay series that puts ideas to work.”

29. Approaching Life with Beginner’s Mind from Zen Habits.

30. Former President Barack Obama Issues Statement on Anti-Trump Protests.

I love vintage pillowcases. I’m afraid to buy them at a thrift store now because of the recent bed bug scares, (probably not even a real thing I should worry about, but it’s made me cautious anyway). I have a few sets I’ve had for at least a decade. I love the patterns, the colors, the nostalgia, but the best thing is how soft they are, a soft that’s only possible after years and years and years of washing and sleep.

Eight years ago when the vet called to tell me Obi had lymphoma, that the lump wasn’t just cancer but a kind that was incurable, I was home alone with the dogs, waiting for Eric to get home from a work meeting. I ignored his phone call when he was done telling me he was on his way home because I didn’t want to share that information with him over the phone and then have him driving an hour on the highway in rush hour traffic, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie, hide it from him if I answered. I needed him to be focused, safe. I needed him to make it home to me in one piece so that I could tell him and then fall apart.

While I was waiting, I took out my sewing kit and started some mending. The hem of one of my vintage pillowcases had started to come unstitched. My hands and my mind needed something to do, something else to focus on. I needed a distraction so I wouldn’t spend more time on the internet, reading anymore about this thing that I couldn’t fix.

The trauma of that hasn’t really left me, along with many other traumas large and small. They still live in my body. Sometimes they are silent, heavy and stuck like dead things. Other times they are triggered and rise up, ripping through me like something sharp and hot, not just alive but murderous.

In an effort to release them, I’m starting EMDR work with my therapist. She told me at the start of our last session that she’s moving out of state by the end of the year, and gave me the option to wait and start with someone else, but I feel like there’s no reason to put this off any longer. She warned me that it can bring up a lot of stuff, be unsettling, but I told her that I feel like I’m in a place where something is going to break anyway, come unhinged, regardless of how or who starts it, and it might as well be under supervision, with support, and now.

Step one of the process is getting a general sense of the various traumas we’ll be working with. We started with my history of sexual trauma. We talked for our whole hour. She filled up an entire sheet of paper with her notes, front and back, and I wasn’t even done. No wonder what Trump said all those years ago and continues to say and justify has me so upset.

This morning as I was putting clean sheets on the bed, I noticed that the pillowcase I mended that day eight years ago has come unstitched again. Something about that seems right, perfectly timed.