This week. This week has been an awful week in the news. It’s been difficult to pull away from the endless analyses, anger, video, heartbreak, and outrage. From every side. And it’s only been four days. I started to just feel depressed, and hopeless, and tired of arguing with people I like but disagree with intensely over huge issues of race and inequality. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, I couldn’t stop reading everything that popped up on my feed.

So yesterday afternoon I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. I felt immediately better. I can still check in on my laptop, send photos over from my IG, but it stops me from compulsively reading when I should actually be living. I’m a creature of social media, I don’t think that’s going to change. Shameless Instagrammer, occasional passionate Tweeter, endless Facebooker, too-old-but-trying Tumblr user. But Facebook is where friends and family live, and argue, and sometimes disappoint. It’s like one neverending Thanksgiving dinner, where most of the day you’re happy to talk about food and the kids and the movies you’ve seen or the books you’ve read. Until someone brings up politics or religion and all hell breaks loose. I wonder if having Election Day weeks before Thanksgiving was a strategy; if Thanksgiving came right before a heated election there would be riots in suburbia.

So in the wake of a wretched national week, I’ve been endlessly consuming goodness. I can’t get enough. I’m not laying down my opinions, or my voice, or my outrage, but I’m consciously making space for goodness so the bad doesn’t gobble me up. I work from home and spend all day with a preschooler, it can be easy to let the bad stuff sit and fester when there are no other adults around to talk to.

I’m craving goodness. I can’t read books fast enough, I can’t watch enough videos of puppies and kittens, I can’t hug my child enough or spend enough time with family. I can’t appreciate my friends enough, or enjoy some good food enough, or sleep late enough, or make enough art and craft. I want to drink all the cold water, look at every color, take too many photos.

I started scrubbing my fridge last night, getting Adam to dismantle parts of it with crud that I haven’t been able to reach for years. You have no idea how good it felt to finally get that crud out. I did all the laundry, I got my car washed. We went to two museums this week.

I’m basically doing everything in my power to remind myself that there are still beautiful and amazing things everywhere, that small victories can make me happy, even when the news cycle is full of despair. I hope it’s working.