How to care for yourself while bracing for Trump’s inauguration

4 practical tips for navigating Moments of Ominous Limbo (that I learned while awaiting an MS diagnosis)

As the egg nog overstays its expiry date and the fireworks fade away, the distractions of the holidays are officially behind us and another mile marker grows nearer on the horizon… Trump’s second inauguration. If you are among the many filled with dread at the thought of January 20th, take a deep breath and read on. I’m going to share some practical advice for Moments of Ominous Limbo such as the one we find ourselves in now.

The tips I offer here are lessons I learned during the six foreboding weeks between the morning I woke up numb from the waist down and the morning I woke up in a hospital room where a neurologist gave me a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Six weeks is a long time to know something could be really wrong with your body and to not get any answers about what that something is.

During such Moments of Ominous Limbo, some light Googling can easily snowball into an avalanche of full-blown catastrophizing – portents that feel absolute and inevitable. But no matter how much information we have in the present and no matter what we may deduce from that information, the future is unknown.

Let me repeat…

The future is unknown.

I hold no illusions: the era we are entering is frightening for many reasons. If you are a trans or queer person, an immigrant, a teacher, a person of color, a protestor, a woman, a journalist, a person who believes in climate change, a union member, a Democrat, or any of the other groups Trump has vowed to go after, the pit in your stomach is legitimate.

But just because a threat is legitimate does not mean it is imminent.

And even if it is imminent, we may not understand the full implications of what will happen should that threat come to fruition, for better or worse.

The light Googling I did during my six weeks of pre-diagnosis limbo told me that the worst-case-scenario explanation for my lower-body numbness was multiple sclerosis. All I had ever heard about MS up to that point was that you were pretty much guaranteed to become gradually more disabled throughout your life, and there was nothing you could do about it and no way to predict what abilities you would lose. A couple years before my own diagnosis, I remember hearing about a friend getting MS and thinking, “Welp, she’s a goner.”

Photo of me by Taylor Prinsen

But after showing me the MRIs revealing several MS lesions on my brain and spine, my neurologist explained that the immunosuppressive medication he was prescribing for me was over 90% effective at preventing new MS lesions. He assured me that this medication, which had only been approved for MS in 2017, was almost guaranteed to prevent me from losing any further ability due to MS.

Even though my personal “worst case scenario” came true, it was actually nowhere near as bad as I had imagined it would be. The limbo time of not knowing what was wrong or what the implications would be for my life was FAR WORSE than the diagnosis itself and the fallout from it. I am hanging onto this truth any time a scary “what if” floats through my mind as Inauguration Day approaches.

Here are some ways you can fortify yourself while we wait for the future to unfold during this Moment of Ominous Limbo:

Give yourself a lot of grace and a lot of rest.

Uncertainty mixed with dread is an exhausting combo, plus we are now officially in the doldrums of winter. Don’t judge yourself for having less energy than usual. If you are tired, let yourself rest. Like, really really rest. I’m napping almost daily.

Also, don’t be surprised if sadness or anger bubble up seemingly out of nowhere. Give yourself space to sit with emotions that come up, even if you can’t identify why you’re feeling the way you are. If you ignore how you’re feeling or try to tell yourself to snap out of it, those feelings will just shift to the back of your mind along with the rest of the generalized, unexplored anxiety in the atmosphere and fester.

When it comes to big, scary feelings, we’ve gotta “name it to tame it” as my Tex Support co-creator Max Casero of Prism Integrated Health says. Acknowledging our feelings takes away some of their bite.

Spend time with people you don’t have to “mask” around.

Many people are going about their lives not expecting any major shift or fearing any loss of their rights under a Trump presidency, whether out of privilege or obliviousness or willful ignorance. Others who share your fears may be “masking” – acting as though everything is okay because they are too scared or overwhelmed to directly face the situation.

When you are living in a state of existential fear for your rights and/or the safety of your loved ones, it can be extremely difficult to interact with folks who seem to be operating as though everything is fine and normal.

Someone I recently became close with, but who I’d met for the first time back during the six weeks before my MS diagnosis, told me she could feel that I wasn’t interested in making new friends during that time. She’s right. It was psychological torture to have to make small talk with strangers while I was navigating a scary health mystery, so I was distant and aloof.

A couple days after the 2024 election, I ran into a friend who has a trans kid. I gave her a big hug and asked how she was, how she really was. She broke into sobs and said, “I’m scared. So scared. It’s nice to see someone who just gets it, who I don’t have to explain myself to.”

The effort it takes to hold it together on the outside when you are in turmoil and despair on the inside is tremendous. Give yourself as many outlets as you possibly can to express your true feelings.

(If you’re in Austin, I have a few different in-person offerings in the days leading up to the inauguration to help facilitate this kind of authentic connection. More details at the end of this post.)

Assess your level of risk and then do whatever is in your power to prepare.

When half my body went mysteriously numb, I was tempted to ignore it and hope the mystery affliction would just go away. It was scary to look directly at the problem, honestly. But I fought through the discomfort and took myself first to urgent care, then spent hours on the phone with more clinic receptionists than I can count, fought for weeks to get an appointment with a neurologist, waited what seemed like forever for an MRI, and eventually went to the emergency room to get a final answer.

When the neurologist at the ER showed me the cross-section MRI of my spine that revealed an almost-total nerve blockage, I was SO RELIEVED that I’d done everything in my power to protect my health. If I hadn’t gotten treatment when I did and the MS lesion on my spine grew even the tiniest bit, I could have lost complete control of my body from the waist down. MS is incurable so I’m going to have it for the rest of my life, but by taking action immediately I was able to mitigate the worst impacts.

If you belong to a group of folks that Trump has directly threatened, one of the best things you can do to ease your anxiety is to honestly assess your situation and then take the advice of experts as soon as possible. It may be unpleasant at first to think about going through any of these steps, but I PROMISE if you take even just 30 minutes to imagine the worst case scenario and take whatever action you can to mitigate harm, you will feel exponentially better. In a world where so much is outside of our control, taking control of the things we can goes a long way.

PRO TIP: find a buddy to do this with you. I think we all are prone to overwhelm when it comes to paperwork or unpleasant, unfamiliar tasks, so soothe your nervous system by asking a friend to walk through it with you.

If you are queer or trans, Lambda Legal has a clearly outlined strategy for facing the next administration and offers direct advice on how to prepare. If you are trans or gender-nonconforming, check out this list of steps to take. If you are trans or non-binary in Texas, you can apply for passport or ID assistance through the Trans Legal Aid Clinic of TX until 12pm CT on January 7 here. If you are in a queer relationship, consider these steps to protect your family.

If you or a loved one is an immigrant, my friend and a top immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch has detailed advice about what kinds of documents you should keep on you at all times. You can watch this video for her advice, and she also encourages you to call, text or WhatsApp 512-599-8500 for more immigration help.

If you need to seek an abortion but you live in a state with a ban (like us here in Texas), take whatever steps you can to avoid surveillance. I recently had the opportunity to meet Albert Fox Cahn, the Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), and he shared several helpful resources with me, including information on post-Roe abortion surveillance and how best to avoid it here.

If you are ideologically left, you will want to take steps to protect yourself from government surveillance. WIRED has a great guide on how to do that, and I’m also working on putting together an in-person workshop in Austin in the next couple of months. Stay tuned!

If you have the ability to get pregnant but don’t want to, consider getting on a long-acting birth control, ordering abortion pills, and keeping Plan B in your medicine cabinet – especially if you are in a state that already has a ban. MayDay Health is a great resource for information on all of the above and can help you take steps to acquire these things while protecting your digital privacy.

I have my annual ob-gyn appointment coming up and plan to request an IUD. With the fate of the Affordable Care Act in question and concerns that a Trump administration may restrict access to birth control, I don’t want to take any chances when it comes to getting pregnant, especially in a state where abortion is banned.

If you have assessed your personal risk and found that it’s actually pretty low, or you have the resources to stay out of danger, consider how you might offer some of your safety to others. Seek out mutual aid funds for trans folks (this list is older but pretty good – there’s also the Queer Texas Crisis Fund run by Equality Texas). Support an abortion fund. When a community is under attack, make the effort to show up for them. Solidarity is going to be EVERYTHING under this administration.

Spend some time imagining the most beautiful future you can, pursuing joy, and creating connection.

During the Moment of Ominous Limbo when I was waiting for my diagnosis, I didn’t have concrete answers – all I had was my imagination. I decided I could either use my imagination to envision something awful… or I could use my imagination to envision something magical. So I imagined that I was numb from the waist down because I was transforming into a mermaid.

That is obviously not what was happening, but once I learned the true situation – that I had MS – I did not regret for a second the moments I’d spent dreamily picturing myself as a mythical sea creature and the accompanying delight I felt in that fantasy.

Remember, I wasn’t ONLY living in a fantasy world, though. I was also taking concrete steps to get answers about my health and making moves to protect myself. That’s what made it safe for me to fantasize instead of catastrophize.

I suspect that as a collective in this moment, we will not regret imagining a magical, beautiful future while ALSO doing whatever is in our power to protect ourselves.

One of my favorite exercises for future visioning comes from the Center for Artistic Activism. You can download their toolkit and walk through the “Imagine Winning” exercise here.

When I imagine winning, I see a future Texas that is so welcoming and loving that all my trans friends move back. I imagine a state where everyone suddenly realizes the pointlessness of arguing about bathrooms and instead decides to put all our resources toward solving REAL problems like climate change. Summers suddenly become not just bearable again, but glorious – all my climate refugee friends who left for Colorado are clamoring to come back and spend August floating down rushing Texas rivers.

Do I sound delulu? That’s ok! Because when I force myself to pick my head up from the horrors of the moment and look off into a far, far distance where I can see something worth striving for, it reminds me WHY I strive in the first place. I strive because something better really is possible if we believe it is and if we all strive in solidarity. Maybe not in my lifetime. But if I can help future generations get a little closer to that beautiful vision of love and abundance, I will feel extremely proud of the way I spent my time on this spinning rock.

And until that magical future is here? We can experience glimpses of it now through art and dance and connection with nature and community and theme parties and mutual aid and anything else that brings us joy.

Experiencing the joy of community at our Election Night party. Even in the darkest moments we have the ability to create delight! Photo by Sarah Bork Hamilton

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PRE-INAUGURATION, IN-PERSON OFFERINGS FROM DEMOCRASEXY

Texas Foremothers Tours at the Texas State Cemetery
Saturday, January 18 at 9am (directly before the Women’s March)
OR Sunday, January 19 at 2pm
$44.40 - includes a “Chosen Ancestors” journaling kit and a crystal along with an intimate, feminist tour of the Texas State Cemetery.
Get fortified with the powerful feminine energy of our Texas foremothers, learn their stories, and apply lessons from their lives to the struggles of today. We get a little mystical with some tarot and crystals.

Tex Support - Pre-Inauguration Edition
Sunday, January 19 at 4pm
Free
Talk through your pre-inauguration anxiety with others who get it under the loving guidance of the queer mental health pros at Prism Integrated Health. Plus, we will have snacks, crafts, and a generally kind and supportive, lowkey atmosphere. Thanks to OutWellness for hosting!