I picked up this Yerba Mate at the grocery store. If you don’t know, mate is a South American herb that, like tea, is mildly caffeinated. There are a large number of ways that is traditionally drunk, none of which I’m familiar with, and so in some ways, I feel like serving this like tea may be doing the beverage a disservice. 

 

Nonetheless: I wanted to give it a try to see if mate, like tea, had something like cha qi: tea energy.

 

This particular preparation of mate tasted fresh and vegetal with enough of a hint of bitterness to give the flavor some real bite, but not enough to make it unpalatable. Recognizing that mate, like tea, undoubtedly also benefits from single-origin intense care, and that grocery store mate intended for consumption by Americans who don’t know how to brew it should not be compared to tea made by generational farmers, I don’t want to do a “tea versus mate” discussion. I don’t know what makes mate good; I’m just dabbling.

 

But yes, there was an energy to mate: something that was more than just the caffeine.

 

One of the scientific reasons that tea has such good energy is that it combines caffeine and L-theanine, compounds that promote energy and relaxation at the same time, giving you focus without jitteriness. I googled to see if mate contains L-theanine, and everyone just directly contradicted themselves. Some people said it did not. Others said it did. I don’t know who to trust, but I will say that mate did not make me feel jittery the way some caffeinated beverages do. What was it that made this happen? I do not know.

 

In any event, I enjoyed this tea.

You can get this specific Yerba Mate directly from the manufacturer, or iHerb or Amazon, but they might also have it at a grocery store near you.

One of the things I learned, at my peril, from the last Trump administration was that your brain does not perform better when it is angry all the time, and it certainly doesn’t do so when you’re sad or hopeless. Last Trump term, my brain spent a lot of time being angry.

 

I don’t think it is bad to be angry, particularly when that anger is righteous; I think anger is a source of motivation, and it is a thing that convinces me that we do not have to accept injustice simply because the alternative is hard. 

 

But I do think it was bad for me to be constantly angry. My brain was not meant to be in fight or flight mode. I do not do your best thinking when you are hopped up on stress hormones. It is bad for me physically; it takes a toll on my sleep, on my thinking, on my ability to focus. My anger must be managed so that it helps me be better, not convinces me to be worse.

 

Last term, people started talking about “self care,” and the deeper into it I got, the more burned out I felt, and the more that I tried things like “self care.” But I think that, at least in some sectors, a lot of the self-care discussion got diverted into a question of which goods and/or services you could purchase to give yourself a temporary boost: the good bath bombs, for instance, or the best scented candles, or a retreat with friends, or a massage. I tried all of those things—in fact, I have nothing against those things! Do them, if it helps!—but ultimately, I do not think that any of those things actually helped me manage the malaise that built up in my brain.

 

The thing that helped the most, at least for me, was Romancing the Vote—the auction that I started with Bree and Donna of Kit Rocha to raise money for voting rights. For me, at least, the most effective form of self-care was doing something to make the world a better place.

 

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because I do not intend to go back to the place I was in at the end of the last Trump term. That really sucked. Instead, I’ve been trying to think of forms of self-care that would enrich and connect me, rather than just temporarily manage my symptoms. There are a few things I have on my list right now: volunteering for the local farming advocacy group that is fighting for food equity and land sovereignty; recording local forests to add to tree.fm so that people around the world can have a moment of tranquility.

 

There is, and will always be, a place for anger: I don’t think I will be able to avoid it. But the lesson I learned last time around is that self-care that is purely centered on myself does not treat the psychic harm of anger that stems from how other people are being treated.

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