Wayfinding

When you can't read the map

How can I feel such despair in a country this beautiful?

This life right now.

This country.

Everything is crumbling.

How do I navigate it all?

I can’t go outside and run it off because I need spinal surgery and my legs go numb when I stand for too long. I can’t eat it off because I’m pre-diabetic and Oreos are no longer a pantry staple. Do I curse it off like a salty sailor? Write it off? Cry it off? Work it off? I’ve tried all the ways, and I still feel like I’m at the bottom of a well, looking for Lassie to save me.

I get these little glimmers of hope here and there. Last week, I was asked to share my coming out story at a local PFLAG meeting, and it was such a needed evening of connection and camaraderie and story-sharing. Last night, we had dinner with like-minded friends, the ones who support equality and freedom and diversity and our Constitution, and it was a deep, cleansing breath mixed with some good craft beer.

But I cannot figure out how to hold these happy things or make them last. They are sand slipping through my fingers. They are water rushing downstream.

I am losing myself, the sparkle in my eyes, the joy that used to emanate from within. I am tired and defeated and cranky. I want to start arguments and call people names. I want to nap. Then snack. Then cry. I am not me, and I don’t quite know how to get me back again.

In the past month, I’ve gone from being on one antidepressant, period. It’s the one medication I’ve been on since my twenties. Now I’m on an additional anti-depressant, blood pressure medication (that’s already been increased), daily pain medication, and pre-diabetes meds. I am cleaning up my diet and moving my body as much as possible, and I still cannot figure out how to fix myself.

I have a memoir coming out in the spring. It’s a work I’m incredibly proud of, one I spent ten years writing, one I’m sure will change lives and open doors for others if I can get it in their hands. I should be asking for blurbs right now, but the pain of a possible rejection stops me before I even start. Who am I to request validation of my work and my words when Americans are on the verge of going hungry so billionaires can be assured they won’t have to pay their fair share? Who am I to request that someone consider buying my book when they can’t even put food on their own tables?

How did we end up in the United States of the Upside Down?

Everything feels so raw right now that there is very little I can tolerate. The struggles of my grown kids feel like my own open wounds. Their pain becomes a part of me in ways I haven’t yet experienced. I have a dear friend who recently had a tragic loss, and I want to wrap her in every ounce of my love and support, but I am afraid there is not enough of me left to embrace her. What if I hold her in my arms and I turn to ash and disappear?

I am a thin and diaphanous substance trapped in a thick and unwieldy body.

I miss me. I miss strong and sassy me. I miss raucous-laughter me. I miss shower-singing and kitchen-dancing me. I miss smiling-at-strangers me. I miss sending hand-written letters me. I miss the me that was voted Best Sense of Humor in my high school class of ‘88. I miss the me that’s unable to sleep in the middle of the night because words are pouring out of my brain and onto my pillow, and I need to scoop them all up into my laptop and arrange them into something beautiful. Now I sit down to write, and nothing comes. No loveliness, no intrigue, no plot points or character development. My creativity has run as dry as Timmy’s well. I miss passionate, driven me. I miss my family. I miss the ones that made me. I need them to help my find my way back home. I no longer know where home is.

The cruelty in this nation is unbearable, and I am navigating it so poorly. I am drowning. The Gilligan’s Island quicksand that haunted my childhood dreams has pulled me under, and I do not remember how to survive it. Did Gilligan save the Skipper with a tree branch? Did the Skipper swim his way out?

I want a broken-legged squirrel to hobble up to my back door looking for help so I can take him in and make him a tiny splint and nurse him back to help with my human hands. I want to name him Ralphie or Max. But then I’m afraid I won’t be able to set him free again when he’s healed because I want to keep all the tiny and pure things within my reach where I can hold them and love them and never let them go. Where I can feel their precious hearts beating in my big, clumsy hands and be reminded of both the promise and the fragility of this life.

My nervous system cannot handle this living right now. Our collective nervous systems were not designed to carry so much at once. I am collapsing beneath the weight of it all. We are collapsing beneath the collective weight of the humanity that is revealing itself in broad daylight. The anger. The violence. The hatred. The racism. The lying. The gaslighting.

And all the while, AI is simultaneously killing our planet and our souls.

I am staring down unemployment at the end of 2025 and losing my health insurance at the beginning of 2026 in a country that doesn’t give a damn whether I can pay my bills or afford my medicine. Of course, the people who know and love me care. But the people who are making the decisions to gut our ACA subsidies, forcing us to choose between paying for shelter or for surgery? They don’t.

When the world is exhibiting such nonchalance about human lives, how does one find it within themselves to feel worthy of food and shelter and medicine and art? And what about all the brown-skinned people who have been racially profiled and kidnapped from the streets and from their beds? What about the families they unwillingly leave behind with more questions than answers? What about the disabled and the working poor who will no longer be able to feed themselves or their babies?

But even more horrifyingly, what about those who say others deserve what they get for being born in the wrong country and committing the “crime” of wanting a better life? For those who have the audacity to be born into generational poverty where the lifeline to stability and hope is always just a few feet out of reach, where the bootstraps are all broken? What about those who look the other way while babies are being blown apart by bombs that our country is funding? What about those who believe a 90,000 square foot ballroom is more important than their sick neighbors receiving insulin and chemotherapy, more important than the elderly being able to eat and breathe and survive?

Let them all eat cake.

How does one find tangible, sustainable hope in the face of so much cruelty? And has that cruelty always been there, hidden just below the surface, like a swarm of cicadas? Have those who only care about themselves and their bank accounts and their white skin just been waiting for permission to emerge?

What do you hold onto when the world is crumbling and instead of building you a safety harness, strangers laugh and point as you dangle from a deadly precipice?

How do we find our way to happiness and love and light again? What has become of us? And what remains of the shells our joyous souls have left behind?

How are you managing to hold the tiny, precious things close to you?