Staying Tuned in While Staying Sane.
Transcript of the video:
There’s a lot going on in the world!
I mean, we LITERALLY just watched them shut down and bring back TikTok. We watched go ahead and get back into office, and we saw another fool go ahead and give a Nazi salute on national TV, TWICE.
So the question has been, how do we deal with this for the next so many years? Can we just tune out and just not pay any attention and then come back and be people who talk about the news again, in say, four years? The answer is NO, unfortunately not, we need to stay tuned in.
How do we do that? How do we stay tuned in and still be ok?
That’s what we are going to talk about today.
For those of you who don’t know me though, “ Heeeeeey, I’m Dr. Donna Oriowo, a sex therapist in the Washington DC metro area helping black women feel free, fabulous, and fucked.”
I am talking about strategies, now some of these are my strategies that I’m going to give you and some of them are strategies that I got from some of the DOPE women who joined me on Tuesdays at noon for In My Black Feelings . It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a space for black women to commune and be together. For us to talk about things and be our black-ass selves about those things together.
Where it comes to these strategies, I realized that they are actually in 2 camps.
You got the YOU piece of the strategy.
The news piece of the strategy.
You need BOTH because we already said that you’ve got to stay tuned in friend!
Stay tuned in the news with:
What the news is actually saying.
What they are doing.
What’s going on.
Stay tuned into yourself with:
Maintain your mental, emotional and physical well-being.
Where should we start?
We start with YOU! You are the foundational piece. You are the queen, the king, the whatever on the board. You, it’s you baby, you the one!
3 Strategies for how to manage yourself and tune into you.
A feelings check.
Now I know that we do not always want to talk about how we feel, but we need to know how we feel. Get yourself a chart, like this one, or find a chart online. (There is one with Ludacris’ face and he’s just, so cute! Let me see if I can find a picture and I will show you.) Know how you’re feeling, and what’s going on with you. This is one of the key strategies for being able to build up a strategy and a plan for what you’re gonna do with your day and for making sure that you are actually engaged in self care. Knowing what you need, knowing what you want, and actually making that thing happen!
Create a Brag board.
A brag board is like a vision board, but it sounds like to me like it might even be better! A vision board is about what you fixing to do, what you gonna do, what’s coming up, what you envision for the next year, month day whatever however long your vision boards last, right? A brag board, on the other hand, is about whatcha eating! It’s about celebrating what you got done! It’s about bragging out loud on yourself, doing a little dance, popping your own collar, loving on yourself hugging on yourself, it is about celebrating the things you got done!
“Well damn, I want me a little brag board because a girl is feeling good that she organized that space under her bathroom, you can feel free and congratulate me because I was feeling like one of those true ass fussy adults getting that work done!”
Reality check.
Sometimes when we spend all of our days looking at all the screen (on your phone, on your computer, on your tv) you are watching all of this stuff. You’re always inviting this stuff, but it doesn’t really give you a reality check. “It checks you into a type of reality.” It doesn’t allow you to touch grass, quite frankly sometimes I think that we do need to go touch some grass.
When I say reality check I mean:
Leave your house.
Connect with others, life is so much more than what we see on a screen.
Go experience something.
Grab a friend- go have dinner, drinks or try new experiences.
Be outside.
Do NOT let these fools scare you into staying into your house, always and only, that’s not going to work! We not doing that!
3 Strategies to care for you and still watch the new.
Pick a time you don’t need to be tuned into the news.
You don’t need to be tuned into the news 24/7. You can choose a time you know based on what you know about yourself, how you’re feeling that day, and whether or not you have the emotional space, time, and capacity to deal with what you may find out. Pick a day and get your news. Now, maybe you don’t pick a Friday because you want to go out and have a good time. Maybe you also don’t pick a Monday because you know you’re already down and out for the count on a Monday. Picking the day of the week, picking how long you’re going engage, if you’re going to say, “I’ve got 2 hours to get informed,” that means get your information from wherever you get your information. No judgement here, right?! Read it, watch it, however you get it, BUT I want you to take a portion of that time and add decompression. Sometimes after watching the news, we want to react. We are in our feelings and it’s ok for you to be there but I want you to take a moment, take a breath, and decompress.
*Decompression ideas: meditation, reading a book, taking a walk, drinking some water, or doing 25 jumping jacks.
*Did this hard work reward yourself today with an orgasm, and if the orgasm would help you in getting into the news, maybe have an orgasm and then watch the news, because you don't need to earn orgasms. They're yours. Have as many as you like.
Do a brain stretch.
While you’re watching the news, quite frankly, these people be saying stuff. Shit that don’t make no god damn sense. Let it be known when you’re watching the news and watch take it in, get the news and consider what are the holes in the things that they just said? What are the holes in the things that they’re saying that they’re wanting to do? It can be fun to poke holes in the argument of what someone is trying to offer you, for you to figure out all the ways in which this thing don’t make no sense! The best part is for those who want to be activated, who are activated and ready to get people together to do the next step, you can have a conversation with some of your activist friends. Those of you who are ready to do whatever works for your community, get together, talk about those holes, and build a strategy around the holes that they gave. Just go ahead, do it, and make the thing happen, that way you are staying informed and have something to do with the information that you got.
“Now me I am a 5 calls app girly! That app is a quick way for you to know what all is going on an be able to contact your representative so then you can let them know how you feel. I say, “Plug them with your feelings, friend!”
Do not be baited to rage.
The news is really good at rage-baiting. They giving you these headlines, they’re giving you all this stuff but really they’re trying to get you to just be upset. Sometimes because they want your eyes, they want your viewership. They don’t want you to do anything productive, they don’t want you to be profound. They simply want you to feel and want the rest of the news that they have to offer. I’m saying,” Do NOT let them bait you!” There’s a difference between reacting and responding, they are trying to get you to react. The reaction is just your emotion that you feel angry and sometimes we carry that anger, we carry that annoyance, we carry that fear with us throughout our day and we start snapping at people. That’s not what we want.
What we want is:
Take what we learned.
Take what we heard.
Feel what we feel.
Decompress from the feelings.
Choose your next move.
Choose your next move because the difference between reaction and the response is the thought. Reactions are based off emotion, and there is nothing wrong with emotions. I am an emotional girl myself. Get your emotions, you know what the emotions are. Know them, feel them, decompress from them and the reaction allows you to, or respond rather, it allows you to choose what you’re going to do next. How you’re going to respond to that information that you just got?
Don’t let these people continually rage-bait you and put you in this loop! - It can make you numb to how fantastical and foolish they really are and it can get you into a space where everything makes you feel angry all the time.
Connections….
I hope that you can see where the two are coming together, where the pieces of how to stay tuned into you also matter, into how we stay tuned into the news, into how we stay tuned to ourselves again these next so many years plus the time after, where we still will be dealing with the effects are going to be hard enough without us being disconnected and discombobulated from our own bodies, from our own friends, from our own communities and from our own goals and things that we want to achieve as well. You can still partake in pleasure. Pleasure is revolutionary, and pleasure is an act of resistance, even while we are in the storm
Just remember: You are the bee's knees!
I want to hear from you. What are some of your strategies for staying tuned in to you and staying tuned into the news without being so overwhelmed that you don't know what to do next?
Go ahead and hit me in the comments, because Inquiring minds want to know and remember discourse, not disrespect. Keep it cute in the comments.
