What Does One Do with the Dread?
Living with the nightmare

ELIZABETH GEORGE
April 2, 2026

A brief essay today:

I’ve been experiencing waves of dread ever since Elon Musk gave his celebratory Nazi salute upon Donald Trump’s triumph in November 2024. Lately, the waves of dread have lasted longer and longer still. At this point, they are with me so often as to be virtually constant.

I’ve had to come up with coping strategies, and I’d be very happy to know if you’ve done the same. I’ll share mine:

Creativity has been a significant coping strategy for me since 1995 when a psychiatrist explained to me the nature and origin of the spirals into depression that I’d been experiencing for years but particularly after I’d completed a novel. He made it clear that I was going to have to keep my brain active in order to defeat depression, and the best way to do that was to stay creative. So that’s what I did. I began my journey into creative endeavors first through a studying a new language (Italian). To this, I added craft projects: scrapbooks, collages, mosaics, seriously bad watercolors (a very short-lived experience), photobooks, garden planning and execution. Now, in 2026, I still do photobooks and I’m learning how to bake.

My dogs are a huge source help in lifting the cloud of dread. I have two rescues—Pearly May and Dollybird—and they fill me with joy when I merely look at them. Animals are completely innocent. They are also completely who they are, without excuse or pretence. I’ve had dogs in my life for 47 years now, and every single dog has been an adventure and an experience. I cannot feel burdened with dread when I’m with them.

Reading forces me away from dread, too. I love reading. Always have. Always will. I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have a book to read, and I’m always gobsmacked when someone says “I haven’t read a book in years,” which is, admittedly, not an incredibly wise thing to say to a novelist.

I find that getting out in nature, however, doesn’t work for me as a dread-lifter. If I’m in nature, I go straight into my head. I might be hiking, but my brain is sifting through all the wretched things happening in the world and particularly in the United States. So while I do get out into nature on occasion, it’s not a reliable way for me to quiet the doom-shouting voices in my head.

I think we all need a way to lift the dread, be it yoga, meditation, painting, sculpting, cooking, drawing, biking, surfing, running, camping, gardening…and the list goes on. We need this because we need a way to navigate this period of time we’re enduring in the United States. To stay informed means to cope with hearing lies from the government; to cope with watching people being disappeared off the streets in our cities and towns; to cope with witnessing man’s inhumanity to man in a variety of forms, from the murder of protestors on the street to the jailing of children in cages; to cope with learning about war crimes now being committed by the same country that defeated one of history’s most criminal armies: the Nazis during World War II; to cope with hearing the prayers of allegedly Christian ministers spoken to safeguard the life of a pedophile President whose crimes have become staggering and virtually incomprehensible.

Our being informed about what’s happening around us is critical. It’s a duty. It’s also—day by day—becoming more difficult. If you haven’t found something efficacious that allows you moments of escape from the quicksand into which Donald Trump is leading the country, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to stay informed. And I urge you to stay the course. But also know that without the occasional break in the turmoil. we each of us risk losing everything to the constant consideration of evil. And as Shakespeare put it in the words given to King Lear: “That way madness lies.”

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104