How am I? How are You?

A personal essay, reflecting upon myself and your survey responses

Photo by SHTTEFAN on Unsplash

We’re in the midst of seismic, devastating changes in the United States and across the globe. I think for most of us who are in the know, and I’d count you, readers, as being in that category, I won’t delve into the myriad changes we’re witnessing and experiencing or list them here in this piece. We get it. We understand it.

Last night, I read a short piece by Eric Hairston, who asked and answered the question, “How am I doing?” At the end, he proclaimed that he is “resilient, alert, and still daring to hope,” and that it means he is “alive.”

It got me thinking and wondering about my own current emotional state and yours, as well as all the significant events that are unfolding around us. (A one-day news cycle, seriously, feels like a century.)

While I know, like Hairston, that I am resilient, alert, and still dare to hope, I also find myself vacillating between those emotions and deep, uncertain fear.

Even writing about these things, I feel the need to be protective of those closest to me, out of fear of reprisal from forces much larger than I can fight against. For example, I’ve implored someone near and dear to me to carry their U.S. passport at all times, as I worry that this person may be disappeared, something I don’t know what I’d do about if that were to happen to them. It makes me feel helpless, as we know there are specific groups of people now being deliberately targeted, abducted, and disappeared by the U.S. government.

And then I think about your survey responses. Most of you expressed deep concerns about how we’re in the U.S. already in a fascist state or quickly slipping into fascism. It worries me for all of you as well. It makes me wonder how you are all holding up, how your families are doing, and what you are facing personally during these challenging and uncertain times. That makes me feel helpless, too.

What do we say to our children right now? How do we assure them that things will turn out all right? Well, we can’t assure them of that, can we? Just as we can’t say the same to our elderly parents, who want nothing more than to know that their own children and grandchildren are thriving and doing well in a world that isn’t, or should I say, shouldn’t be slipping into authoritarianism.

I’m sure, just like me, you have those moments when you sit outside, feel the first hints of a cool fall breeze on your face, and things seem fine. A moment of respite takes over. The same happens when one of my dogs snuggles up next to me late at night in bed when I’m reading a book of fiction. The world seems right. And yet it isn’t. It couldn’t be further from being right.

Some may say, “Oh, the world has always been this way. Things have always been hard.” But I don’t believe them. I won’t believe them.

There are a multitude of awful, terrible things colliding and happening all at once, which are reaching cataclysmic apexes—capitalism at its zenith, devouring all that it can eat, horrific proof that the climate crisis is worsening by the day, along with the global spread of authoritarianism. And yet nothing seems to be putting a stop to these violent, murderous patterns of large-scale destruction. I’ve never been a believer in a teleological unfolding of history, as it’s a false, presumptuous assumption made with the arrogance of so-called hindsight. Yet as these three interconnected disastrous things progress, it’s hard not to think that we’re being hurled into a dystopian future not of our own making.

Keep in mind, though, I’m not saying “we’re cooked,” as so many on the Internet like to say. That’s a nihilist point of view. I’m talking about my current emotional state of being. Perhaps it’s just today that I’m feeling this way, so I’m not expressing a broader Weltanschauung.

I suppose we all have days like I’m having, and so I decided to articulate it and express my fear to all of you. Tomorrow, I hope, will be better.

So, with all of that said, how are you? What are you feeling today?