The future feels foggy. The present, by contrast, is undeniably overwhelming, each day so full of horrible news that continuing to get out of bed, to go to work, to do the things that are supposed to make life meaningful, takes levels of additional labor that I know most of my friends can barely manage these days. With so much looming dread hovering over us at all times—the ICE agents threatening sudden deportation, the pulling away from international cooperation like US AID and the World Health Organization, the ceaseless attacks on trans people’s basic existence—it’s hard to know where to look for comfort.

In the past month, I’ve begun a rather odd personal project, one full of challenges and unexpected delights. On January 1, 2015, on the cusp of moving to Washington DC for a quarter, I began a daily journal, there to document all the little things that happened in my life. That habit has stuck with me now for a decade, a practice that’s enriched my life by forcing me to talk with myself, in the process deepening my skills as a writer. The year 2015 is all crammed in a single journal, some entries no more than a few scant lines; meanwhile, my last complete journal started on October 5 of last year and ended just 11 weeks later, as I now devote at least a full page (and sometimes double that) to each day of self-reflection. To see the entries get more complex as time goes on is to see this person who was once me becoming more present and embodied as they grew older, growing from a wayward 20-year-old who really didn’t know how to be alone with himself into whoever this person writing to you now is still becoming.

Yet if I’m grateful for the greater depth that arrives a couple years into my journaling, when I began the more consistent half-page entries that were my baseline for many years, there’s still moments of clarity that jump out even earlier, instances where I feel the timeline collapse, the spiral from one past moment to now bridged by their shared date on the calendar. This felt especially resonant this week on February 2, 2017, as I wrote about a foggy night that Elise and I walked through after I finished a shift working at the Northwestern library, still just a 21-year-old college junior. “Tonight’s fog is a good metaphor for where I should see myself right now,” I wrote. “At no point was my path obscured, nothing preventing me from moving forward. Yet the inability to see far into the distance necessitated caution, deliberateness, a conviction in my moment in proceeding forward.”

As long as I remember, I have loved the fog. There is an easy explanation why this is the case: where I grew up in Colorado, 300 days of sunshine each year meant that even a cloudy day was a rare treat, to say nothing of the all-enveloping mist coating my surroundings in gray. Yet each time a foggy day returns, like the one that came through Chicago yesterday, I’m reminded of how mysterious we are to ourselves, that certain things simply spark within us and don’t require some definitive explanation. That’s certainly true of my experience with transitioning, and something I wish the Trump world could understand: some humans just need to make this change to become who they’re meant to be on this planet, and that’s okay. Especially now, with so little making sense in this life, it’s these unexplainable yet deeply personal forces that feel most grounding, that remind me to take each day one at a time, to return to the yoga and meditation practices that keep me grounded. I don’t want to see the future, even as I write in some way to help others in that faraway space find their own way forward.

I felt that slow presence when I chatted with Phil Elverum, one of my all-time favorite musicians, two days after the election, his grounding sense of boundless curiosity about Buddhism one that’s pushed my practice forward since our chat. It was there again the day after when I saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as I allowed grief and joy to commingle in my emotions, aware that separating the two makes both weaker. Musicians like Mount Eerie and GY!BE have never been scared to shy away from the scary stuff, something I’ve also admired about Ryan Graveface, whose Wicker Park storefront, with exhibits on mental asylums and serial killers, asks us to not look away at those parts of our lives and the world around us that are perhaps most difficult to see. In each of these things, I have been reminded that I can only be here, now, and that’s enough.

As the brilliant Susan Stryker put in an essay in When Monsters Speak, a recent collection of her essays, “No place is more local than the body.” As I concluded my little journal entry about the fog, “Let me never lose sight of how little I really know going forward, and how lucky that truly makes me.”

There’s a reason I had my friend Ben make a drawing based on the Nietzsche parable “Delight in Blindness,” the wanderer in conversation with their shadow, that’s now tattooed on my left forearm. The wander asks their shadow only to “show me where I stand. I love my ignorance of the future, and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things ahead of time.” It’s in the fog my senior year when I made an emotional case for circular time, recognizing that the return to past selves, the collapsing of time and space, made life far more meaningful that some endless, linear path forward.

And now, as it all continues to be so, so bad, I remember this: someone in continuity with the person typing these words was on their own part of their spiraling life nine years ago, gently pushing forward into the mist, hand in hand with their partner, aware of the crashing waves just out of view. I write to collapse time, not because I believe it will help me know any better where we might be going, but only to remember that, somehow, I’ve already made it to this present moment.