I have been on a mental journey this last week.
I am not going to talk (much) about what’s happened with executive orders and funding freezes and international shakedowns: those things are present and awful and I hate them, and I am so sorry, Canada and Mexico and Denmark and everyone else who is getting threatened militarily by my country both inside and outside its borders. I would change all of this if I had the option, and I’m furious.
If I think too long about any of these things, I feel a sense of helplessness: there is so much awfulness and I can’t do enough about most of it aside from call representatives and say “please oppose this” and “also, please oppose this” and “we are NOT going to war with our closest allies, what is wrong with us?” and “no, please don’t confirm this guy, or that guy or—any of them, not any of them.”
But last week, I wrote about putting handles on doors and feeling a temporary sense of accomplishment, and wondering if I should buy a miter saw, and one of you (you know who you are! Thank you again!) emailed back and said that I should check to see if there was a tool library near me.
I googled, and indeed,
Denver does have a tool library—an excellent one! Initially I thought it was affiliated with Denver Public Library, which also excellent, but it’s an unrelated 501(c)(3). Also, they offer classes.
A thing happened in my brain as I found myself perusing the class offerings.
You see, I’ve never considered myself particularly handy. I can put together an IKEA bookshelf, but I am also the person who took almost thirteen years to put handles on the interior doors in my house, and while this is kind of funny and a lot ADHD, it has been deeply a part of my self-image: that I’m not really handy, that I can use a screwdriver and hammer and occasionally a drill, but I’ll fall apart with anything much harder than that.
Let me contrast that with one of my older sisters. Those of you who were on Twitter or BlueSky may know her as
@diygeochemist, and she has earned the “DIY” in her name with decades of experience. She’s one of the most competent people I have ever met in my life, both in terms of being handy, and also because she’s a professor of geochemistry and is incredibly smart and capable and I have looked up to her for basically my whole life.
It’s not that I’m jealous of her ability to do things: I love her too much to feel anything like jealousy. I have a deep respect for her. I think she’s amazing. I see her before and after photos and am left in awe.
But there are times when I look at her ability to do anything and everything, and I remember that I’m the person who took thirteen years to perform a very basic fix on my doors, one that eventually took me an hour and a half, and I feel deeply, personally inadequate.
So back to the Denver Tool Library: they have classes.
There’s a reason I’m not handy: it is because I have not done things with my hands. There’s also a reason I have not done a lot of things with my hands: I am afraid that I will screw things up because I don’t know how to do things. I hate making mistakes. Plus, a combination of rejection sensitivity dysphoria and ADHD avoidance have meant that when things go wrong I panic and avoid whatever happened for years.
But I like doing things with my hands. I loved learning to throw pottery, even though it took me months to get semi-okay at it. I’ve found that doing something physical, whatever it is, makes me a better writer. If I spend the mornings writing and the afternoon doing something physical, all the writing problems in my head percolate in my subconscious so that I get answers in the early evening.
So this last week, I found myself returning to the list of classes at the Denver Tool Library, and my brain underwent a shift. I went from saying “I am not a handy person” to “I am not a handy person yet.” I signed up for classes (yes, multiple) at the Denver Tool Library because I want the confidence to start working on things. I made a list of all the home improvement projects I have been vaguely ignoring that I want to tackle, things that are minor annoyances but not so big that I want to hire someone to come out for it. I stopped thinking “I’m not the kind of person who can do that,” and started telling myself that I was the kind of person who would.
I signed up for a work shift at Habitat for Humanity this weekend.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be handy only so I can do things for myself. I have so much grief and rage right now—so many things that I see as pressing, urgent issues that are going to get swept under the rug. I know that this administration is going to make things harder for those pressing urgent issues.
But I can help build more affordable housing, house by house. I can learn enough to volunteer with groups that assist lower income households to transition for the climate crisis. I refuse to let Donald Trump stop the clean energy transition: he can slow it down, sure, but by god, we are going to keep it going.
I can’t fix the world. I can’t fix the country. I can’t even fix my state. But I can take all the rage and anger I have and fix something, and even if it’s not enough, it will matter for the people I fix it for.
So that’s what happened to me this week: all my rage has burned into a determination to make my piece of the world a better place, and it will get there, even if we have to build it ourselves.
