It will be some time before dawn as I write this. I'm in an unfamiliar bed. I'm trying to use speech to text software because it feels weird to type with an IV in my hand.

I'm thinking about how my current personal crisis is similar to our collective crisis in the world right now.

I was admitted to the hospital the night before last. I was in the most pain of my life. For hours I was vomiting and to complete a sentence, I would have to speak each word between heaves.

As I'm sure you recall, I had surgery a week ago.

It seems I'm suffering some complications.

First, thank you

Before I get to that, thank you to those of you who have expressed support in any way in the last week, even unspoken vibes you might be sending my way.

I also want to acknowledge and thank those of you who have already decided after my last post to support my writing with a paid subscription. As I insist, it is not a requirement for anyone for any reason at all– not a requirement to keep reading and not a requirement for friendship. However, it is deeply appreciated, especially at this time. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. It really does make a difference.

Hospitalized

Monday was the first surgery I had ever had. It was an outpatient surgery. It was a very simple surgery. A week later, and this is the first time I've ever been admitted to a hospital. When they first told me that I would be admitted, it sounded like I would be here for 24 hours. Then it sounded like maybe 24 to 48 hours. Now we're just going to see what happens and take it step by step.

I know I'm saying a lot of scary things, but I don't want to overly worry you. Yes, I'm in pain. Yes, this is a bigger deal than it should have been, but these things happen. I think everything will ultimately be okay, just need to stay in the hospital and do what needs to be done.

I want to talk about a concept and although my background is not medical, please bear with me as I try to deconstruct a process more widely applicable to any crisis.

Crisis

I already told you some of my symptoms. I had experienced other concerning symptoms earlier in the week. I had been reassured by my surgeon's office that my symptoms were in line with expectations. I don't blame them, they've been great. We were speaking through my health portal.

However, things got significantly worse a couple nights ago. Instead of localized surgical pain, I was dealing with abdominal pain and vomiting that wouldn't stop. The geography of these issues seem anatomically distant, but they are still connected.

Here's what my care team has uncovered.

I have a 6 inch by 3 inch by 3 inch hematoma at the site of my surgery. It hurts so much.

I'll add, hematoma is a risk of literally any surgery. Even one as simple and quick as the one I had. It happens.

This means I had been dealing with internal bleeding which we believe has stopped.

This created a reaction, ileus, which stopped my gastrointestinal system from working.

This, in turn, triggered issues with my gallbladder.

Dominoes.

Complications

We've arrived in a distant place from where the primary issue began.

Today, I'll be discussing the possibility of a couple more surgeries. One for the gallbladder and one for the hematoma. I may have one or both or neither. We don't know yet. We are doing other things in the meantime, too. For now, I'm in the hospital for the foreseeable future, that being said, we really can't foresee that far into the future right now.

The good news is that all of these things are treatable. The difficult news is that in the meantime I'm still here in the hospital in pain and it will take time and effort and a team of people to help me heal.

Deconstruction

When I came in, I was in too much pain to be scared in the proper sense of the word. All I could focus on was the pain, I couldn't think in a logical or rational enough way to think about ideas of fear. Crisis can be like this sometimes. Sometimes, you can be so focused on reacting to the harm that you can't focus on anything else. In politics, this is often by design. You're not focused on anything but the present issue at hand. This is a natural reaction.

Only after my care team worked to alleviate the pain, stop the vomiting, and get me to a stable condition did I have the mental capacity to devote to being scared. I had a general sense of my symptoms and a vague but general feeling that they were related even if I knew they appear to be different without context.

Luckily, I don't work in medicine and I obviously didn't have the misplaced responsibility of self-diagnosis.

One of the big things that I often notice in any crisis is that any crisis will by its very nature seem outsized and generally have a minimum basis of complexity. In other words, if it was easy to solve, it wouldn't be a crisis. If it was just one step to fix the problem, then it would not be a crisis.

A simple crisis

Now, if you read that last sentence and you were searching for a simple single-step crisis, perfect. This post is meant for you.

Here's a simple crisis: The car broke down.

Well, that's not strictly a crisis. Maybe you have a backup car, maybe you have the financial means to pay to have it fixed. Not really a crisis.

Okay, it's your only car and it's going to be a minute till you can scrape up the funds.

But it's still just one step to addressing the crisis because all you have to do is pay to have the car fixed, right?

And the anxiety sets in. How are you going to get to work so that you can get the funds so that you can get the car fixed? Can I even set aside enough funds for this? Where do I even find a good mechanic? What if the problem is worse than I thought it was and I need to get a whole new car and I can't take out another loan?

It's not a simple problem. It's a large issue.

All of a sudden, a broke down car that simply needs to be fixed is no longer a single step process, it's complex. You have to figure out what you're going to do, you have to make plans, you have to brainstorm new ways of making money or getting to work. You're even planning for the possibility that the crisis gets worse.

As I said, it's not a simple problem, it's a large issue.

But that's not entirely true, either.

It's not a simple problem and it's not a large issue. It is a complex problem, and a series of issues that can be broken down into discrete actionable items

• Find a mechanic
• Make a payment plan
• Ask your friend to take you to work for a few days

And suddenly, as you have answers and a plan, it begins to feel less like a crisis, and more like a task list. Your anxiety goes down.

Crisis evaded

Bite sized pieces

Once I had enough mental capacity to recognize my present crisis, once the urgency of massive pain had been reduced, and the fear had settled in, my medical team did the work to try to understand the problem more deeply. Instead of looking at it from my perspective of a vague sense of pain and confused complexity, they have been able to look at it with their expertise. They have been able to take each of my symptoms and work through them both individually and collectively how they affect each other, like dominoes. They can look at how one aspect of pain affects me, but also how it affects the entire issue.

My point in all of this is that when you have large issues that are daunting and complex, the only real way that we have of solving them is to break them into smaller and smaller pieces. We have to deconstruct them. We can't fix the whole car all at once. We can't fix my entire body all at once, each separate issue has to be addressed with regard to how it affects the whole body.

I know it's an old phrase, but the first time I ever heard it was when I was in Kosovo interviewing a woman who knows what it's like to address post-war crisis in her field. She asked me, How do you eat an elephant?

I shrugged as I kept the camera rolling.

One bite at a time.

But also, elephants are majestic creatures, please don't eat them.

In all seriousness, however, you can't take on big issues when you continue to look at them as outsized. When you try to imagine fitting an entire elephant in your mouth, the problem is too big.

The world is on fire right now. We are dealing with a series of crises that are also the same crisis. My hematoma is nowhere close to my gallbladder. Trans genocide, Palestinian genocide, these things feel so disparate from our climate emergency. These things feel so different from tariff wars between the US and the MAGA enemy du jour.

But the reality is, this is all one giant web of pain. This is all interconnected.

And yes, I just made a series of issues into a much larger issue. I took the car apart and put it back together.

However, just like my medical team can look at my issue on the whole, they can break it down again into manageable pieces.

So often, we are so focused on the pain and what feels outsized and impossible, it stalls us. It feels too overwhelming and like there's nothing that we can do to solve such giant issues.

The reality though, is that these issues need to be taken a bite at a time. And we all have to be taking bites together.

These issues that we experience in the world are potentially world ending. The stakes are higher than they have ever been. It is understandable to be overwhelmed and in pain. If you are not overwhelmed and in pain you must not be able to see what is happening in the world.

But you can't tackle all of this on your own. You can only handle the parts that you can handle, but you do have a responsibility to handle those parts. You do have a responsibility fix what is broken that is in front of you. We all have the responsibility to do this collectively

The best way to stop feeling overwhelmed is to take action. And the best way to take action when you are overwhelmed is to look at the crisis and break it into smaller and smaller pieces until one of them can fit in your mouth.

The other thing that happens when you do this repeatedly, you will begin to recognize patterns. Things will begin to feel familiar. You will build skills and expertise on dealing with any crisis, but more significantly and more to the point is that you will develop skills that will help you recognize how each of these issues relate to each other. As you do this, you will become more skilled at addressing these issues in your life, whether you are in personal crisis or dealing with our collective crisis in the world.

My medical team isn't only skilled at addressing these issues because they can address each individual issue, but because they recognize how each of these affect each other, how they are interconnected.

Now that I've spoken enough on the medical field and car mechanical repair, both subjects I am less than expert, I will say, this method of dealing with crisis, breaking things into smaller and smaller understandable and manageable pieces, is universal.

It's really just about how to deal with complex issues. Because a crisis is basically just a complex issue with urgency.

Dawn is beginning to break. I should at least attempt to get some more rest.

I'll update you on my status when I have something meaningful to share.

In the meantime, just remember, when you get overwhelmed at the state of the world, when you know you need to do something, but you don't know what:

one bite at a time

sigh

I think I get to start clear liquids today, so I'll have to wait to take bites of anything.

Eat something that brings you joy today. Do it for me.

no ends, only means