Wednesday morning, after taking a holiday hiatus from the blog, I was rounding the corner on what I hoped to be a nice, silly, encouraging post about New Year’s resolutions and how they kind of suck.
Then, somewhere around lunchtime, democracy lost a tire. Then an entire wheel. Then we realized a feral cat was in the driver’s seat and I spent the rest of the afternoon refreshing my news feed, looking for signs of the cliff he would inevitably go careening over.
Wednesday evening I erased my silly post. Thursday I drank kombucha, doomscrolled, stress-planned a fern terrarium, and wept for the future of our country in alternating fifteen to thirty minute shifts. Today I woke up and decided to write this.
You’re getting a first draft, is what I’m saying.
I apologize for that, but you know how the kids were saying “I can’t even” for a while? Well that’s where I was for the past two days. I couldn’t even. I TRIED to even, and I just…couldn’t.
Now it’s a new day, however, so come over here. Let’s stand at the window together and take a look at our battered, broken, three-wheeled country that’s been sprayed with feral cat urine. Let’s behold the enormity of its dysfunction.
You and I, standing at this window arm in arm, cannot fix this.
When I say this, of course, I mean that. Out there. The stretch of smoldering democratic debris before us. We can’t fix THAT. It’s going to take the people we’ve elected to represent us making motions greater than we, as individuals, can make, to throw baking soda on what’s still burning. That’s what representative democracy is for, and that’s why we need to preserve it; so that we’re not all acting alone.
The only thing you and I, standing at this window arm in arm, can fix is ourselves.
This is how we will bend the long arc of justice toward fixing THAT.
I know that sounds like progressive white lady spiritual bypassing, but I also know it’s the truest truth I have at my disposal: you can only change yourself. And that’s what we’re going to have to do.
When you change yourself, though, you’re not just changing yourself. That’s the thing. When you start the harrowing work of unpacking all you were handed as a child and all you’ve told people is “just the way I am,” that change starts seeping out into the people around you. You start inspiring other people. Standing up for other people. Leading other people. Or just being kind and compassionate to other people. Those are behaviors that refuse to stay inside the lines.
It’s the only way we’re going to fix THAT out there—with a million ink drops on the parchment of the United States, bleeding into one another until we’ve covered the map with a contiguous blob of decency.
Not everyone is going to be willing to do the work. Some of the folks you saw on the news this week may be incapable of doing the work. So you and I and all the courageous people we know are going to have to do the work, to take ourselves apart and fill ourselves back up and start leaking humanity everywhere we go.
What do we need to change within ourselves? For me, I am starting with any traces of the American cultural shadow we saw projected onto the steps of the Capitol Wednesday: anger, hatred, racism, entitlement, patriarchy, ignorance.
Those exist in me, even though I don’t want them to. They exist in all of us. And now we have to pull them out by the tail, look them in their mangy faces, and tell them we’ll be walking off this way with our birthright of shared humanity, thank you very much.
Don’t be like I was for the past two days. Don’t be paralyzed by the scope of what’s overtaken our country. Don’t just cry, or hide, or shove handfuls of chocolate chip Teddy Grahams in your mouth because you don’t know where to begin, because it’s so overwhelming you could just collapse, because all is hopeless and lost and you are so small and you can’t even.
You CAN even. You can begin with yourself. And you can shove handfuls of chocolate chip Teddy Grahams in your mouth because they are delicious.
I’ll do it with you. We can do hard things.
