So here's the thing about living in fight or flight mode—it used to eat me alive. Entire days, just gone, swallowed by this anxious hum that did nothing but keep me frozen.

Things are not so good lately. It’s hard to look around at the state of the world and think, Yes, this all seems fine.

Lately, writing has become my primary weapon for combating panic. Each morning, after reading the news—a detestable ritual that often leaves me feeling overwhelmed—I sit down and write.

I write to my elected representatives. Not polite notes, but urgent dispatches detailing exactly how Very Not Okay things are. Here are the problems, here is the power you have, here is what you can do to challenge these Very Bad Things that are happening.

A long time ago, a therapist gave me a prescription to treat my despair. It felt less like a solution and more like an exercise in gullibility.

Whenever I felt like the world was against me, she said, I should take a breath, hold it for six seconds, and let it out with a smile. The breath would interrupt my body’s fight-or-flight response. The smile would trick my brain into thinking I was okay.

"Whenever it gets to be too much, just smile!" she said. "It won’t fix your problems, but it will help you decide to fix them."

I nodded, but I didn’t believe it.

One time in Afghanistan, I was just finishing chow when the indirect fire alarm blared over the base loudspeakers. Indirect fire is so-called because the enemy fires blindly—an indiscriminate barrage of mortars that might land right on top of you or hundreds of meters away. No way to know until they hit.

I panicked and tripped over myself in my sprint from the dining facility to a nearby cement bunker.

Inside, most of us sat wide-eyed and waiting to either hear the “all clear” or the sound of explosions. But a nearby Marine sergeant was calm. He was eating. Not just eating—enjoying his meal. While mortars fell somewhere in the distance, he was gleefully licking barbecue sauce off his fingers, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the danger. His smile wasn’t a fix. It wasn’t even hope. Just something else entirely—a refusal to let the moment belong to fear alone. He had set out to enjoy his chicken, and not even impending death could take that from him.

The Stoics had a term for this: amor fati—love of fate. Not just accepting what happens, but welcoming it. Even—or especially—when it’s beyond your control. Not that I think that manifestly changes anything. But I don’t think panic changes anything, either.

Years later, Cait and I were driving back to Georgia from New Orleans. We’d just run a half marathon there and decided to take a scenic detour home—winding through Alabama and Louisiana to take photos along the way.

Halfway across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the emergency alert blared from my phone. Thunderstorm warning. Tornado warning. Waterspouts spotted.

The causeway is 24 miles long. No exits, no shoulder, just miles of open water in every direction. The sky had gone that strange, sickly green that storms sometimes get. Rain blurred the windshield, and the wind was getting stronger, shoving at the car in unpredictable bursts.

Cait glanced at me. “Should we be worried?”

I thought about it. We probably should have been. It is absolutely natural to feel fear when you’re in danger. But there wasn’t anything to do about it. We were already on the bridge, already in the storm. Panic wouldn’t change anything.

I let out an unexpected laugh.

What else to do but keep driving?

Misery is the pain of least resistance. Falling takes no effort at all. Darkness just happens. But light is an act of constant, defiant effort. That’s the point.

Things are objectively terrible right now. Everywhere you look: something urgent, something frightening, something completely beyond our control. The trick is finding what you can actually change, then working toward it.

Take a breath. Hold it for six seconds. Let it out with a smile.

Then get to work.

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The intro music is "Mana Two - Part 1" by Kevin MacLeod
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