Last week was another punching-bag week, wasn’t it? Maybe you felt like the punching bag, and all you wanted was for the punches, aka the big ugly news alerts, to stop. Or maybe you needed to go find an actual punching bag and start punching. Or maybe it was the small stuff—your phone froze, the light rail was delayed, a muscle ache popped up somewhere you didn’t even know there was a muscle—all of which you could normally handle, if you hadn’t just been hit with another outrageous announcement from the White House. Or maybe, as happened in my neighborhood one morning, you heard gunshots that were way too loud, aka way too close for comfort, though no one was injured, thank God; probably it was somebody wanting to scare somebody else, without thinking about the kids out waiting for school buses.

My first instinct, as always, was to want to move, immediately. To another neighborhood. Or Canada.

But it’s been four days now, and I’ve calmed down. Sort of. This is not just the usual gun-loving America, it’s Trump’s America: the guns aren’t going anywhere. And unfortunately, neither is Trump. And it seems he still has a long way to go on his punch list, as builders like to call their project to-do list, though in his case it’s a punch list for un-building. Dismantling. Destroying.

What can one person do? I keep asking myself. Very little, it seems.

Very little. But little is not nothing. If we all keep doing whatever very little things we can individually do, will it eventually make a difference?

I don’t know. I hope so. But in the meantime, it might keep us sane.

Though one small donation may feel like doing very little, small donations add up, and they boost morale. Especially on the freelance edges of journalism, where the content suddenly seems so much richer and more meaningful than what the big-league media is dishing out. A few examples from my own very little list: Donkeysaddle Projects, founded by journalist Jen Marlowe, supports creative work–films, plays, books, articles–in collaboration with longtime humanitarian activists in Gaza and elsewhere. Political activist Jess Piper writes a bold, unrelenting newsletter from rural Missouri. Connie Schultz, journalist, teacher and wife of former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, also writes a heartfelt newsletter on what’s happening in her politically volatile state. High Country News is an independent magazine that covers the important issues and stories that define the American West. Hedgebrook supports women writers who need time and space to write. I want all of these dynamic people and resources to survive and thrive through the next four years, and so I support them with small donations. (I wish they were bigger, but, as I wrote in another Restless Nest post long ago, it looks like I forgot to get rich.)

Right now, I’m working on draft two of a novel, which often feels ridiculous given what’s going on in our country. But my book is set in the progressive era of a hundred-plus years ago, which was rife with many of the same political issues we are facing today: corruption, kleptocracy, oligarchy, racism, the threat of fascism, and the struggles for women’s rights, working peoples’ rights, and immigrants’ rights.

I think of those immigrants, my forebears among them, when I volunteer one morning per week as a tutor in an English language classroom at a refugee agency. Another very little contribution I can make. But it feels helpful, and it’s something I can do for people who are far more vulnerable right now than I am.

I’m looking forward to the big protests on April 5. I look forward to being a small part of something big. Something that might feel like the Women’s March felt, in 2017. Although that was back when I actually believed that Trump might get bored with the job of being president and quit within a year.      

I stand corrected.

And so for the duration of Trump’s second term—a phrase so many of us believed we would never have to utter—I’m going to keep going small, where I can be of use. But I’ll join the big crowds too when we need to make the kind of collective statement that only big crowds can make. And when I need that reassurance that I am not alone.

Because none of us are. We’ve got to hold on to that.

Seattle-area readers: I am teaching an in-person seminar (True to Life: Writing Complex Characters in Memoir) at Hugo House on May 3.