It's Okay That Things Aren't Okay
In the fall of 2016, I was doing something out of character: I was paying rent. I was coming off of living in my van for six years or so, and I rented a room in a punk house out in a rural area outside Asheville, North Carolina. Rent was very cheap. I was doing freelance book design and selling jewelry and buttons on Etsy, and it kept a roof over my head, just barely.
It was the year I came out as trans. In December 2016, a fire broke out at a DIY space in Oakland, the infamous Ghost Ship Fire. That fire killed someone I knew, a woman named Feral. She died doing something I did too: playing a show in a sketchy DIY venue. She’d had the courage to come out as trans–why hadn’t I? I’d been writing under the name Margaret for a decade, I’d been wearing dresses and skirts exclusively for just as long. Why couldn’t I just change my pronouns?
So I did.
Something else famously happened in the fall of 2016: a reality TV show far-right figure was elected president, just as had been predicted by the Simpsons.
It was also the year I got a call from a friend of mine, an environmental engineer who studies how our agricultural systems affect and are affected by climate change. “Hey,” she said, “I really don’t want to worry you, but there’s a greater than normal chance of crop failure next harvest.” I didn’t have much disposable income (you will be shocked to know that selling one-inch buttons on Etsy does not pay a living wage) but I started setting aside some money to store food.
Of course, there was not widespread famine in the US in 2017. But that doesn’t mean my friend was wrong–she’d told me there was a greater than normal chance, and she was right.
I still have those buckets of beans and rice in my basement. We haven’t seen crop failure in the US in a way that has caused anything that looks like a famine, but the past five years or so have absolutely started to show us what crop failure can look like: rising prices, supply-chain shortages, and general instability.
It was fall of 2016 that I remember looking at the rise of the far right and the rise of global temperatures and thinking to myself “things, globally, are going to be going downhill for awhile. Maybe for the rest of my life.”
This wasn’t a moment of despair. It was a moment of, well, revelation. A moment to remember that I needed to enjoy my life, to savor it.
I still feel that way.
I wrote 1500 words this morning about how it is okay that things aren’t okay. In that draft I discussed at length the idea that as bad as things are, they can always get worse. I talked about what some of that “worse” could look like and had looked like in the past. I wrote that because I think sometimes people forget. They forget that while the status quo is insufferably evil, there have been times in history (and are places right now) where things were and are absolutely much worse.
I’m not going to publish that piece. Because I think you already know that things could be worse.
I have a strange job that I’ve made for myself, where I see it as my goal to both explain to people “yes, things are bad and they’re going to get worse” but also explain to people the radical importance of hope, of planning, of dreaming. I do that because I’m tired of both sides: I’m tired of people pretending like everything is fine (it’s not) who claim that progress is inevitable and things always get better (they do not); I’m also tired of people assuming that the worst is inevitable (it is not).
The future is unknowable. What the future will look like depends on the actions we take today.
Brushing your teeth doesn’t guarantee your teeth won’t get knocked out in a fight, but that doesn’t make toothbrushing futile. It is an action that determines the likely future of your teeth.
If I try to stay in shape, that doesn’t mean that I won’t get hit by a bus, or eventually succumb to the aging process that comes for each of us. On a long enough timeline, things will always be “worse” for us as individuals, because our bodies will eventually lose their strength, our minds will eventually decay, and we will eventually die. That’s okay.
We still work with the strength we have, while we have it, even though it is temporary.
If we fight fascism, that doesn’t guarantee that fascism will be destroyed. I can only tell you that if we don’t fight it, its rise will be a certainty.
As the world heats up, fascism will offer people easy answers for their problems: blame immigrants, blame deviants. Our job is harder. We cannot offer people easy answers, because we cannot offer people lies. The real answers to our problems are complex—but even more than that, the answers are collectively determined. I cannot offer you the answers because I cannot have them, because I am one person.
I can only offer the answers I have for myself, about how I choose to engage with the world. The answers I have for myself are a set of practices. Rituals, if you will. The same as I will brush my teeth, I will fight fascism. I will deal with people honestly, because my goal is to help foster free-thinking individuals and you cannot do that through deception. I will recognize that both hope and despair are contagious, and I will work always to spread hope (without deceiving people). I will accept that I will one day die, and I will let that acceptance give me courage. I will remember that courage is not the absence of fear, but the overcoming of fear.
I will remember that the future is unwritten.
And I will remember that it’s okay that things aren’t okay.
Thank you. 🤗