A Beginning...

Welcome to What We Can!

This newsletter was born out of frustration, sadness, and also a sense of hope.

I'm Matt. As a brief introduction:

I've been a mental health professional for many years (close to two decades). I'm an independently-licensed social worker. I'm the director of an academic program at a large university and also run a small counseling private practice. I live in a small town in a relatively rural part of Northeast Ohio. I've been happily married for a really long time, and consider myself a dog person. I read a lot, have a ton of weird hobbies, think way too hard about both complex and really simple subjects, and am absolutely wrong more often than I would like to be.

This is a challenging time for many of us: whether you lean more conservative or more liberal, or sit somewhere in the middle (more folks identity as centrists than anything else), you likely feel that stuff is getting pretty chaotic in our community, our state, our country, and the world at-large. I cannot tell you how many of my counseling clients, friends, family, and students have told me that they are overwhelmed at the moment. Many people feel like they cannot possibly do anything that's going to have a lasting impact on the things they are truly concerned about, and that has led some of us toward burying our heads in the sand and pretending everything is okay. That's led others into action and protesting and being very vocal about differences they would like to see in the world. But again, for most of us, the problems feel too BIG and the solutions feel too SMALL, so we're caught between those extremes and feel a sense of powerlessness, hopelessness, and constant mid-level stress. That's not a joyful place to be.

I have been heavily involved in the campaign to try and overturn SB1 (Ohio's disastrous higher-education law) for the past six weeks or so. That campaign was ultimately unsuccessful in gaining the number of signatures we needed, but it did give me the chance to have hundreds of conversations with people in my community. I continually came away from those conversations with the overwhelming sense that so many people I care about would love to do something to make a positive impact, if they knew more about what that might look like.

I told my wife this afternoon that I've been considering starting up a newsletter, and explained the concept. Her response shocked the hell out of me--she said, and I quote, "I've been waiting for you to start a Substack for years!" This was new information to me, and yet extremely obvious to my wife. I'm looking forward to being an agent of this kind of information transfer with anyone who feels like reading this newsletter: obvious to some of us, but a new way of thinking or doing for more of us. That's the plan, anyway.

I'm frustrated that the citizen-led, 100% grassroots effort to get rid of SB1 didn't work out. More than 1600 volunteers spent thousands of hours to try and make it happen. It would make a huge difference to so many Ohioans--but not enough people had heard about the law, not enough people had the motivation to come and sign in person, and we ended up just not having enough time. It's frustrating, but these efforts don't have to end here.

I'm sad that so many good people seem to be at a breaking point when it comes to so many upsetting things happening in the world at any given time. There are too many news feeds telling us too many scary things, and so we just shut down. It makes me sad that disengagement has become a worthwhile coping strategy. So many folks are sad--but we don't have to stay that way.

Over and over, I have told others that we're all just doing what we can do. We all have capacity issues. We all have too much on our plates. We all have demands that exceed what we'd prefer. But I feel like I still need to do more to try and make a positive difference. In order to make "we do what we can" true, I now feel the need to try and communicate with a bigger group of people about stuff that we just might be capable of adding to that already precariously-full proverbial plate.

I'm hopeful because hope is more than an abstract concept to me: it's an action word. Hope is in the DOING. I'll be speaking more in the coming weeks and months about hope, because I think there are lessons to be gleaned from our understandings and thought process around words and phrases that we've written off as being platitudes, meaningless, a waste of our time. I'm hopeful because I believe in seeking out the things that inspire me and help me continue to stay motivated, even in the midst of the dark times. And I believe that hope is always, always, always worth it.

So that's the inspiration for this newsletter. In the midst of uncertainty and chaos, I would like to offer some ideas for things that we can do, things we can learn, things we can advocate for, and things we can do to make life a little bit more bearable for more of us. My plan is to publish at least weekly to start. It's free, and will only cost you some of your time. I'd appreciate you signing up, sharing the newsletter with others, and engaging in the conversation with me to try and figure out What We Can, collectively. I know I can't solve everything. But as a group, with some common goals and a plan? I believe that we can.

Thanks for reading--much, much more to come.