“What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that.” —Arundhati Roy
First of all, before we launch into this month’s Mental Health & Climate Change column, how are you doing, really? It’s been a rough week, to say the least. Are you sleeping? Hydrating? Breathing?
Have you hugged someone today? Have you been outside?
I hope so.
The last few weeks and months have been an agonizing exercise in collective uncertainty. And for many of us, that uncertainty has now been replaced by what Rebecca Solnit calls the “certainty of despair.” It is deeply valid, reasonable despair: We know what to expect from a Trump presidency. We’ve seen this film before, and we didn’t like the ending. Those of us who care about climate change and our children’s health have been watching with a gnawing feeling of dread for months as Project 2025 laid out plans to gut environmental protections and undermine the government’s ability to keep people safe from climate disasters, not to mention a host of other harrowing intentions.
We know who the next administration will be, because they’ve told us. That knowledge, for many of us and for good reason, is gutting.
But we do not know yet who we will be in the days and years to come.
In my early 20s, amid a season of personal crisis when nearly everything in my life unraveled at once, my mother gave me a card with a tiny green alien bearing the following extraterrestrial greeting: “When nothing is certain, anything is possible.”
It’s a phrase that became a mantra for me in difficult, turbulent times—much like the parable of the Zen farmer. When nothing is certain, anything is possible. Don’t be so certain in your despair. Don’t be so sure that you know how this story will end.
It’s also a phrase that the realist in me has struggled with: I no longer believe that anything is possible when it comes to climate change. Though we have made tremendous progress in recent years, it is not happening fast enough to prevent catastrophic levels of future warming. There are versions of the future that are closed to us now. No matter how fast we make climate progress in the coming years, we are going to have to prepare ourselves and our children to live in a world that will be radically unlike anything humans have known. We can be certain that we’re moving into a wildly uncertain future, in terms of both politics and the climate.
And yet, in spite of what we know is coming, there is also wild uncertainty about how we will respond. We might collectively go numb, attempting to carry on with business as usual until it carries us to the brink of extinction. We might give into despair and give up on the future.
Or we might refuse to give up on reimagining the world, not in spite of but because of the election outcomes. We might commit more fiercely than ever to collective care, especially for our loved ones who will be more vulnerable in the coming years. We might decide to love our children enough to keep fighting for a livable future, no matter the challenges that lie ahead—and who knows what futures that decision might nurture into emergence?
I hope you will make room for mourning in the coming weeks; I know I will. I hope you will make room for all the painful emotions as they arise, from grief and rage to dread and despair. I hope you have people to hug and drink hot tea and cry with.
And I hope you will make room for curiosity about who you will choose to be in the days and years ahead. Nothing feels steady or certain right now; so much has been and will be lost.
But the chance for us to meet this moment as the most courageous, determined, fiercely loving versions of ourselves? That is still more than possible. That no election outcome can take away from us.