I know I’m not alone in feeling untethered recently.

With the deluge of AI, burner accounts, filters, fillers, deepfakes and headlines that could just as easily be from the Onion or the New York Times, I find myself uncertain what anchors still exist.

The ease of the scroll means that when I’m seeking mental escape, I’m actually imprisoning my mind in a virtual reality of illusion.

To combat the uncertainty of what’s real and what’s not, I find myself floating in a cloud of dissociation — not believing anything, really, while my subconscious actually soaks it all in to form new thought-cycles and worldviews under the surface. How could it not when I’m feeding it so regularly?

Truthfully, it’s scary. I think we are all feeling it. Believing the messaging is scary, but not believing it (which simultaneously accepts that there are vast media machines attempting to lie to us) is equally scary.

Is this administration helping or hurting? Are things as bad as they seem on either side of the aisle? Do we need to be doing more or less? Is the constant information improving our world or destroying it?

One solution to the overwhelm I’ve found is to allow myself the grace of narrowing the scope. What is my niche? Where can I make an impact? How can I get grounded back in reality?

We live in a place incredibly suited to this — reality is all around us: a juvenile bald eagle’s squee, the smell of low tide, the blackberry vines refusing to behave. Focusing on my actual senses, what I am experiencing physically, brings me back to what’s real.

Our community fills a similarly grounding role in my heart. I am surrounded by human beings doing their very best. The checker at the market is the same person I help with the finicky gas pump next to mine. The person splashing me with her belly flop off the Egg Lake dock is my favorite barista who handed me a mocha at Roy’s earlier. I email a colleague about an article and then later see her across the way as we both take a break to photograph Jpod on the Westside. The profile that shared something I really disagree with on socials is the same person who checked in on me during my divorce with a hug and a chocolate.

The Sounder, Journal and Weekly are a symbol of this grounding for me. It is so very real in a time when nothing is. I hear the inflection of your voice when you give me a quote. Snap a photo of your service dog. Hand you a map. Smell the ink. Feel the textured paper as I give you that copy for your mom since she’s so excited you made the front page.

The stories in these pages are real. They are from one real person directly to another, and then right to the reader. All of us community members. All of us impacted by these stories. Names we know, faces we recognize, news that matters because the people around us matter. Celebrating their wins and supporting them in their losses matters.

I truly think that if we all read each other’s stories each week, and, even further, did so with an actual physical newspaper in our hands, the island would be a better place.

Taking a few minutes, just once a week, to have the sensory experience of holding, smelling, reading a newspaper with your neighbors’ stories in it is a very powerful antidote to the groundlessness of the doom scroll.

Our newspapers are real. This community is real. Witnessing each other’s realness is one way to solidify our own. I hope you’ll join me in grasping what’s tangible and directing our energy toward building the things that keep us tethered, even when (perhaps because) they require more effort, expense or time.

Your stories are worth it. This community is worth it. Protecting what’s real is worth it.