Like many truthful things, the reply arrived housed in humor but left a terrible lingering aftertaste of regret.
I was joking, but I also wasn’t lying.
I wonder if that resonates with you: the grief of remembering the person you used to be before this sickening season began; of wondering what in the hell happened to that previous iteration of yourself?
When I think about the millions of people I’ve crossed paths with over the last decade doing this work, there is such a through line of loss. Whether it was saying goodbye to the idea of God or country or family, to a belief in the goodness of people, to their sense of optimism about the future, to relationships with people they once felt fully at home around, they have been attending a long-running funeral that never fully ends.
But of the legion of lamentations they’ve shared with me, the greater mourning I have sensed in people is the loss of their former selves.
There is a cost to enduring the unceasing storm of Constitutional crises, acts of treason, atrocities against vulnerable people, and cultic indoctrination of tens of millions of people we share a nation with.
In our earnest and valiant efforts to confront this incessant ugliness, we have been transformed, and often not for the better. Oh, sure, these days have helped us clarify our convictions, distill what truly matters to us, and enabled us to tap into the strength and perseverance we’d likely never have discovered otherwise—but they’ve also rightly beaten the hell of out us in the process.
When I consider the person I was a decade ago and compare him to the person in the mirror (well, aside from looking forty years older), I can’t help but notice the latter doesn’t laugh as easily as the former, he is far less naive about his friends and family members, he finds it far more difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt, he doesn’t see the horizon of history as wide open as he used to.
I begin to grieve that version of myself and feel a bit guilty for losing the earlier one along the way, but I also know exactly how it happened:
He had to watch his former church friends collectively sell their souls to a vile, profane, serial predator, as if he were the Second Coming.
He sat at dozens of holiday tables listening to uncles and in-laws deliver well-rehearsed racist rants as easily as breathing.
He scrolled through hundreds of hours of the most asinine and baseless conspiracy theories about face masks, vaccines, rigged elections, and Democrat child trafficking networks.
He overheard his white neighbors of stratospheric privilege, rambling about the dangerous immigrants supposedly overrunning our town.
He began countless days reading about incomprehensible Supreme Court rulings, the passing of mindbogglingly hateful legislation, and the political victories of sociopaths and criminals.
All that shit leaves a mark.
And as I inventory ten years of exposure to senseless cruelty and prolific discrimination, it suddenly makes perfect sense what happened to that previous incarnation of me: he gradually faded away in the face of too much hatred winning too many times.
So, today, I am missing and mourning that younger, more hopeful version of myself, and I’m also worried that even this tired-but-not-ready-to-give-up iteration of me will also burn up in the inhospitable atmosphere of this national sickness, yielding someone whose heart is harder and whose sense of belonging in this place is even more tenuous than it is today.
But future me is none of my business, because today is waiting on me.
Right now, all I can do, all any of us can do, is to wake up within the day before us and appeal to the better still angels within our reach, to wield the damaged but still functioning humanity in our possession, to access all the goodness, courage, and faith we can still muster.
If there’s any blessing in lamenting the version of ourselves and of the nation we’ve lost over the last ten years, it’s in realizing we can’t afford to squander a day, waste a moment, or allow a single act of inhumanity to go unchallenged.
I miss the person I used to be before this nightmare began, but I’ll be damned if I let these heartbreaking days and the people authoring them take any more.