How 2025 Taught Me to Temper My Rage

And save it for what really matters.

Blue sky at storm’s end

Last year at this time the year 2025 felt like nothing to celebrate, given the prospect of another four years of madness and fury, the hallmark of a Donald Trump presidency we’d fought so hard against, only to lose when the stakes threatened to be so much bigger this time.

On January 15, Before Trump was even sworn in, in a piece called “As Trump Disrespects the Office of the President, America’s Citizens Should Show Him No Respect”, I wrote:

Come January 20, Trump will once again be president in name only, which is the way he wants it. We know without a doubt, because he’s made it clear, both in his previous years in the White House and his run-up now, that he has no desire to be the president he’ll promise to be when he puts his hand on a bible and takes the oath of office:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He’ll repeat those words as he does any script at hand: not with any kind of thought or promise, but simply as the necessary last step to get what he wants. Once he has repeated them he’ll move on, working toward his only goal: putting the fate of our country in his unstable hands, ready to implement any edict or provision that will give him more power than anyone who has ever held office in the United States has ever had before him.

This man who now enters the office of the presidency for a second time—to the horror of millions of us who couldn’t imagine he would be walking free, let alone be given the chance to sully the office of the president once again—has a powerful army of servants and sycophants who have every intention of following his foolish, dangerous, cockamamie lead, no matter where it takes us.

It wasn’t that I was prescient or even wise. Trump and his Project 25 cohorts made no bones about where we were headed if we let Trump in again. They dared us. And we laughed, never once believing that this already battered nation of ours would give those despicable monsters another chance.

Trump came in with a Congressional majority more than willing to go along with every mindless plot or aimless thought wandering into the naked emperor’s head. He filled his cabinet slots with wicked, almost hilariously unqualified people, chosen simply because they would kowtow to his reckless, thoughtless bidding, and would at least pretend to love their master.

The Supreme Court, in an unbelievable, deliberate bow to the new Trump presidency, gave him (or any president, cough, cough) immunity from any foreseeable bad guy moves, as well as protection from past bad guy moves, because…

…we don’t really know why, beyond their own self-serving reasons. The thought behind such a reckless move is unfathomable, and especially so for such an esteemed high court.

And of course it got worse. We spent all of January and February spitting and scoffing and trying to catch our collective breath as Trump pillaged and plundered and got away with all of it.

And so it began—our attempts to fight back, to revolt, to understand and get to the bottom of every rotten thing they planned and executed, every threat, every cackling promise to only get worse.

They would hurt us if we didn’t comply. “Surrender now!” was in the air.

Our rage grew as their power grew, as their ambitions grew, but nothing seemed to stop them. Certainly nothing we said. The powers that might have ground their undemocratic, unconstitutional nonsense to a halt—the press, the courts, a simple majority of the 535 members of Congress—let us down.

In April, in a piece called, “America, You’re Breaking My Heart”, I was already feeling more alarmed than hopeful. I revisited some earlier thoughts that now looked like an epitaph:

I'm slow sometimes, I admit, but I've had my suspicions. Now it's official: it's my country that is breaking my heart. My country has nearly lost her mind. She falls for any smooth-talking con man who promises eternal prosperity but who's actually reveling in finding new ways to rob her blind. For quite a few decades there, I thought she was big enough and bold enough, with a heart strong enough (and a memory long enough) to see past the big bucks and slick facades and recognize the same old deviltry that has plagued her so often before. But it's no use pretending. She has lost her sizzle and maybe even her will to live. She's giving up.

In July, after the close vote came to approve the Big Ugly Bill, I wrote, in a piece called, “I’d Rather be Us than Them”:

Just think of how much easier it would have been to just say no. “No” would have been the appropriate response to such a blatantly awful, historically vile, monstrously damaging bill. Right from the start, when all those pages started coming in, every Republican could have pretended they weren’t joining with the Democrats, but, instead, could have come up with their own valid reasons for why that bill was insane.

But, no. Leakers tell us many of them talked big time shit about it behind closed doors but then went into the chamber knowing theirs would be a ‘yes’ vote. All but three of them in the Senate. All but one of them in the house.

There was this hint of a standoff in the House the night before the vote, until Speaker Johnson pounded them with whatever magic words he had to pull out of his warped repertoire, and all but one folded:

The procedural “rule” vote was 219-213, with one Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, joining all Democrats in opposition. At one point, five Republicans had voted “no” on the rule, while eight others did not vote, but Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., managed [to] sway them overnight.

So that’s the state of the Republicans right now. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Do they have any friends they can trust? Can they ever look themselves in a mirror again without wanting to smash it? Will they, in the end, survive this any better than anyone else? What will become of them when this is over and they have to pay up?

I still had hopes the Republicans would come to their senses. They had to be able to see the damage that bill would do to every American citizen who didn’t have the luxury of wealth and power.

They didn’t. Instead, they doubled down and things got worse.

We marched, we swore, we stomped and stormed. And it felt good for a time.

(Read the rest here.)

We were together, in solidarity, millions of us. How could we not make an impact? Well, we did. We made an impact amongst ourselves. We gave ourselves the strength to carry on.

We did that collectively, and I was happy to be a part of it. Doing something is far better than doing nothing. But then at some point, though I didn’t say so, it stopped feeling productive. I can look back on the pieces I wrote and recognize when I stopped believing we could change the trajectory in any meaningful way, and began the grieving and the sorrow.

In There are People in This Country Who Live to Cause Pain. They Are in Charge Now, I wrote:

I propose we stop trying to work on them and look to ourselves instead. We are the ones worth saving. I see us enlisting, celebrating, joining every protest, every peaceful method of resistance. I see us waving our flags and our copies of the constitution. I see us writing to and calling public officials to try and get their attention. I see us sharing podcasts and reports and essays and directions on how to save ourselves and others. I see us giving each other permission to find our joy and sing our songs in those few moments when we aren’t resisting.

I see us living as true citizens in a country saddened and terrified and besieged but not yet broken—a country that hasn’t always deserved our loyalty and our affection but glimmers with beauty and majesty, not because of who our leaders are but because of who we are.

To say we’re the good people is not bragging, it’s fact. Only the goodness in us will spur us on and give us the courage to end this tragedy. While we may still hope the millions of others will see the light and join us, we can’t count on them.

No, it’s us. Together. A solid bloc of millions of good people grieving over the damage done, lamenting over the weak or the wicked in our government, suffering the pains that go along with our own fervent but unfulfilled wants and needs, but still holding on, still strong, still committed, still believing we’re worth saving. Still believing we can do it.

We can overcome.

Was the rage still there? Yes. It had to be. Rage is often a part of grieving, especially when the loss makes no sense. But constant rage without real weaponry or engagement takes its toll when there is no resolution. I couldn’t keep on raging. Other things, fortunately or unfortunately, took over my life. I traveled, I found I had cancer, I traveled again, I began chemo.

And when I began to ease away from the news, from Trump’s every insult, every abomination, my rage, that heavy thing that sat like a rock on my chest every day, turned to a thing I could control. I raged when I needed to, when I found something that required that level of anger, but constant rage feels too much like Trump.

There has to be more to my life than simply looking for something that will feed the anger that roils and seethes. I am angry. I do seethe. With good reason, as I’ve already shown. But I also go looking for—and find—those things that have nothing to do with pain or politics and remind me of who I am and who I was and maybe who I will be as time goes on.

I wrote about being seventeen and the feedback was more than I could have imagined. I wrote about nearing ninety and, again, the responses were heartening. And then I wrote about being alone on Christmas Eve, and I had company there, too. And I felt good.

I mean, good.

My goal for the new year isn’t to feel good—that will come in bits and spurts, along with those things I’ll still rage about—it’s to feel whole. I want that as a writer, too. When things get serious, I want to be that writer who tries to make sense of it, but when everyday things strike me or amuse me in ways that aren’t necessarily earth-shaking but feel like something we as friends could share, I’m going to stop thinking everything here has to be meaningful. I’m going to just go with it.

That’s not a resolution; just a thought. I should do more of just being me.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea for any of us.

So Happy New Year, my friends. May 2026 be the year our efforts mean something. The year that changes everything. The year we find meaning and purpose. The year we get to breathe.

Constant Commoner revolves around my thoughts as a woman who has aged and grown and learned by a process that feels miraculous considering I have no formal education or unique abilities. We the people are all commoners. We believe based on our own past and our own feelings. We choose a path we can live with and if we’re lucky we get to share our lives with people who care, who understand.

That’s what I aim to do here. I want to build a community where anyone can come and sit on our porch and grow along with the rest of us.

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