It’s a recent Sunday morning and I’m sitting at my friend Kate’s kitchen table with four other women. We all live in the Chicago area and have been meeting occasionally for coffee since our children were babies.
The conversation turns to the heaviness of life in 2023 and our fears about everything from American greed to the perils of social media. We don’t delve into recent episodes of violence and loss, but we allude to them.
“How do you cope? I mean, literally, what do you do?” someone says to the group. (We’ve already acknowledged we’re lucky to be generally safe, at least for now.)
“I try to curate how much news I consume,” I say. “And I vote and try to stay engaged. As the saying goes, ‘I can’t change the world, but I can change my world.’”
Later, after we’ve hugged each other goodbye…
