The past week has been a tricksy one, in part due to the stress of the election and in part due to my boo’s pivot from Halloween mode to holiday mode, but one must trudge on nevertheless. In some ways my days have become a little simpler–I really don’t need a steady diet of lukewarm takes in my survey of the news each morning–so I’ve plunged headlong into work to keep my melon busy.

Writing is, of course, often a balm. While I was working up the History section of the core rulebook for Chancers or plotting out the beats of a short screenplay I didn’t have much brainspace for other stuff. My coping mechanisms are not the greatest, but my line of work affords me something like consolation or even comfort more often than not.

The catch, alas, is that the heartline of my vocation is seeing to the needs of my students, many of whom are understandably apprehensive about the implications of the election. I have about a half dozen transgender students in my classes this term, all of whom were keenly aware of the ways in which the President-elect’s campaign leaned heavily on anti-transgender messaging in its closing days, and I have a goodly number of young women who’ve found themselves bombarded with some appalling misogynistic messaging of late in public forums.

My critical focus in English Studies is narrative ethics, which yields equivocal comforts at best. At one level there are existing tools for shaming and shunning bad actors at the localized level, which often makes for a strong if limited proof of the power of consequential ethics, but virtue and deontological ethics are a train wreck these days.

I’m inclined toward the ethics of care, which comes with a host of complications all its own. I think it’s a first resort for many folks, as we can seek out the solace of our friends and loved ones to take some initial steps toward recuperation, but it also reminds me of my own limits, given my subject position and limited abilities as a prospective caregiver.

I feel like I can offer a bit of support in terms of my own cranial health, which is a dicey star to steer by. In the suspenseful run-up to the election I spent a great deal of time using brainwave entrainment sessions to keep myself more or less mellow–which takes some doing on under the best of circumstances. I’d like to think some folks would benefit from that practice as well, so here it be.

My entrainment tech is pretty fancy, but I know folks in the hypnosis community who lean heavily on binaural beats to approximate the effects I’m after. All I do is set my device for a descent into theta waves and fix in my memory a simple three-word mantra that describes how I’d like my brain to be. As I run the program I keep repeating the words or phrase I want to stick; one of the fascinating phenomena of the process is hearing my own inner voice fade out and fade back in. Spotify and YouTube both have pretty sizable arrays of theta wave entrainment files, some of which span 10-12 hours. I experience good effects from a couple repetitions of 30-minute files, so perhaps the folk out there who could use a little relief will find the prospect and a date with their earbuds worth a go.