The Hope Desk: September 2025
There’s a difference between disappointment and tragedy. I keep reminding myself of this in order to stay focused. I remind myself so that I don’t become too easily overwhelmed by the disappointments in my own life. I’m interested to know how others relate to this. How do you discern the difference between tragedies and disappointments in your life?
For instance, being abducted off the street and placed in detention with no clear path to redress - that’s a tragedy. Losing family members this way, worrying for their safety or having them not return with the money they earned to feed the family - these are tragedies. Starving in the rubble is a tragedy. Worrying that people you love are starving in rubble is a tragedy.
Paying more money for an appliance because of tariffs is a disappointment. Higher cost of many consumer products is a disappointment. But when tariffs mean food and shelter are not accessible, as they aren’t for growing numbers, that’s a tragedy. I’m not suggesting strictly binary thinking (never!) but discernment is so important in a time of policy barrage.
Worrying that my gender non-binary green card holder husband might be abducted coming back into the U.S. is a tragedy. I’ve lost a lot of sleep. Current U.S. immigration policies have brought terror into our lives. We are two among millions in this tragedy. If we choose to leave the U.S. to go back to Europe, and I miss seeing my grandchildren’s next few years, that will be a disappointment - assuming we’re all safe, fed, housed, etc. I will be disappointed; we’ll be fine.
It’s easy to look upon every inconvenience as a tragedy right now, and I think it’s a mistake. Not only does this framing prompt us to make choices out of fear, it takes our focus away from those who actually are experiencing tragedy. I’ve been so heartened to see how many people respond protectively when ICE enters their neighborhoods. Let’s be clear though, ICE has been terrorizing families for years in the U.S. but often only in segregated immigrant neighborhoods where protective responses on a large scale endanger more people than they help. Now the effects are more widespread; we shouldn’t turn away.
Every tragedy for another is an opportunity for us to exercise our values. As the U.S. authoritarian government expands its reach, don’t normalize what’s happening. See it and say something, move in, link arms, work together. Whether it’s the expansion of ICE, the reduction of media outlets, the further weaponizing of the legal system, or the withholding of support for vulnerable people - work across communities to form coalitions of care. No act is too small.
Where will we find the energy to do that? One way is to stay out of overwhelm by discerning the difference between tragedy and disappointment. Many Americans are used to having basic abundance (though we still compare ourselves to the very wealthy and come up disappointed). What if we acknowledge what bounty we have more often and learn to leverage it for ourselves and others? It feels good to remember that we still have power, even if we’re disappointed not to have more. It feels good to act, and consider, and rest, and learn, and act. Again and again. Please respond with some specific examples of how you’re doing that. Let’s inspire each other.
Image is by liberal jane
Take a few steps
Maybe it’s time for a list - or how about two lists: your biggest blessings and your biggest sorrows. Just for right now, this week/month.
And then two more lists: which blessings can you share and which are yours to cherish alone, to keep your own fires lit? And more - which sorrows do you share with others and which are yours to bear privately?
And then, which sorrows are disappointments and which are tragedies (and for whom)?
Here’s what I suspect - because it’s been true for me - mapping your own experiences like this might make things seem less foggy and dire. Focusing on your blessings might help you see that sharing makes more rational and compassionate sense than hoarding them.
Writing things in layers - lists with marginalia, footnotes that spill over onto other pages, little pictures that emphasize or illustrate - that kind of writing can spark more creative thinking. It can make you recall that your complexity is generative.
You might remember that you create power every day just by being alive. You don’t have all the power - alone, none of us do, though some clearly have more might. But you have your power. And you’ll decide what to do with it. How beautiful is that?
Media moments – thoughts, frames, recommendations, and critiques…
Sometimes in this section, I share new media that might interest you. The amazing Breanne Fahs has a new book out I think some of you will really love. Fat and Furious: Igniting Radical Resistance is a stunningly gorgeous book - and I read a lot of books about fat people and fat liberation! She is the author of feminist classics on topics such as body hair politics, menstruation, and women’s sexuality. See links below in the reference section.
Here’s Dr. Fahs, responding to a few of my questions.
Fat and Furious is an amazing book in part because of its focus on anger. How did you come to this focus when considering fat stigma?
I had become distressed about the ratio of voices who were claiming that fat people should simply “love their bodies” compared to those who were talking more honestly about the complex feelings people have about their bodies. In particular, I always think that intrapsychic experiences collide with social and cultural experiences and stories, and fatness is particularly vulnerable to this. I have been particularly interested in what anger and rage look like when directed away from the self and toward those social and cultural stories that continue to oppress fat bodies and fat people. It’s easy to simply feel distress about one’s own body, but that doesn’t typically end there. We need to look at the larger stories of collective fury that fat people can cultivate. This book is an effort to both look at how bad things can be, but also what can be done about it, especially collectively, and especially harnessing the power of fury.
Your use of interviews and quotes in this book is varied and complex. And you are also a fat scholar who could've written from your own authority about many of the book's themes. Can you say a few words about your approach in this book?
I’m trained both as a qualitative feminist psychologist and as a practicing therapist, so I’m definitely interested in the stories and narratives that people attach to their bodies and their lives. And, I’m deeply interested in how different and diverse people’s perspectives are about their bodies; we’re all at such different places in terms of how we feel about our bodies (not to mention that each of us has so many different feelings in any given day/week/month/year). I wanted to capture some of the complexity, particularly in the spaces between despair and resistance, that so many fat women in particular seem to grapple with. In many ways, too, I draw from other people’s narratives to understand myself, and I hope that these narratives will help readers of the book to understand themselves and their own complexities and contradictions even more. I don’t see despair and fury as opposites, and this book aims to show how they are born from a similar impulse. At the same time, there are also many under-recognized aspects of what I might call “mundane fat life,” that is, simply living and moving and eating and going about our day. We need so many narratives to speak to this.
You've written numerous books about feminism - and women's lives (and they're linked in the resources section below). Is there a through-line in all of your work? How does Fat and Furious fit in with the others?
I definitely seem to circle around different subjects over and over. One is fury and anger, particularly as individuals face the violences of institutions. Another is how the body can be a canvas of resistance, whether through menstruation, fatness, queerness, body hair, or sexuality. I’m deeply interested in thinking about the body as a political entity in addition to a personal/intimate part of our lives. Another thread in my work suggests, in the traditions of Michel Foucault, that we are freer than we feel but we are also trapped by forces we cannot always see or fully understand. To understand fatness, sexuality, the body, and our political world, we need a fuller analysis of how power works and what it looks like when it’s exerted onto us. As a final theme, I love thinking about the power of resistance and how there’s a long genealogy of feminist resistance that we need to remember, quarrel with, embrace, and understand. I love thinking about the generations of feminists and activists—fat or otherwise—who have given us hope, pushed us to resist, and helped us sniff our way (like feral animals) toward freedom.
Recommendations
Take a look at all of Breanne Fah’s books, in addition to Fat and Furious.
This newsletter’s feature image is by the incredible liberal jane
More from Kimberly:
Register for Kimberly’s two workshops with Hugo House in September…
Take a look at Kimberly’s booklists on topics like education, fat studies, memoir, feminism, etc.
Resources for book clubs and groups who want to read Kimberly’s writing
Parting words:
“Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
Vaclav Havel (from prison)
Do you know someone who would enjoy The Hope Desk? Please share!