Election Blues

    I’m struggling to believe that anything will ever work out right now. Some of this, I think, is chemical; I have a mental illness, and once every few years it comes around to make me feel completely numb and hopeless, to remind me of how meaningless human endeavor is and discourage me from ever doing anything. I mean, I have a chronic problem with feeling out-of-control and pessimistic, but this is another order of thing, a waking-up-feeling-awful thing, an inability-to-get-pleasure-out-of-anything thing, a hate-myself-all-the-time thing, a nothing-will-ever-change thing. Now and again I have a spell that lasts a day or two, but it’s much rarer that the mood comes and stays for weeks on end. For whatever reason, that’s what’s been going on with me the last three or four weeks. Every night I go to bed and hope the following day will be better; every morning I wake up and it isn’t. Though I know, intellectually, that eventually it will wear off, it can be hard to see the end of it from inside.

    There may in fact be some causes beyond the chemical, though. I’ve been trying to write something about the election, about the way it’s making me and so many of the people I know feel, but every time I try to bend myself to that task I end up taking stock of where my life is, versus where it was eight years ago, when the current President was first elected. It’s not that my life is worse now than it was then. It’s that it’s the same. I live alone with a cat, I’m completely flummoxed by the idea of getting a job that pays me for the thing I’m best at (writing, natch), nobody outside a very small group of people ever reads anything I create, and I’m chronically unhappy about all of it. I have made attempts to change these things and they just . . . haven’t worked. No matter what I do, I’m still me.

    I went back and read a couple of things I wrote on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a couple of really hopeful things, full of praise for the future President and praise for the system that had empowered him. When I wrote those things, I was hopeful, not only about Obama, not only about America, but about myself. The whole country had been so handicapped by racism and resentment, and yet here we were, about to show that we really could do so much better than we had. Why couldn’t I do the same thing? I imagined my life in eight years as a much better, healthier, happier, and less lonely place than it was. It all seemed possible.

    But the last eight years have been a really punishing lesson in how hard it is to change, how much remains to be done, and the dangers of changing in the wrong way — for me, and for the country. A lot of white people reacted to the election of Barack Obama by FREAKING OUT. They could not conceive of a country in which their happiness coexisted with racial equality. In fact, they couldn’t conceive of racial equality at all — attempts to encourage it, to repair the damage of racism, appeared to them to be an agenda of punishing white people for their whiteness. It was either white supremacy or white genocide. There was nothing in between. And now we have Donald Trump, their avatar, doing his fascist messiah thing, ranting madly into the sky, trying to destroy America in the name of saving it. Given the myriad ways in which careful attention to current events will remind an observer that white supremacy is alive and well in the laws and institutions of the United States, it’s frightening and discouraging to see it thriving so brightly in the hearts of the country’s citizens.

    And me? I sometimes feel like my attempts to get better have made me much worse. I went to graduate school, an elite one, which had been a goal of mine for a long time — and while there, I had a comprehensive mental breakdown, a total loss of perspective and self-awareness that left me on the verge of failing out, drinking my days away in an attempt to feel anything other than sadness and shame, sleeping very little, leaving my apartment almost never, abandoning the meager friendships I’d managed to forge there. The me who walked out of that experience was much more damaged, much farther from hope and happiness, than the me who wrote soaringly of the man and country I was so fleetingly so proud of all those years before. It’s now been two years since I got my degree, and aside from the rush of relief I experienced upon leaving a city that I hated and program I felt I had squandered, not much has changed. I’ve struggled to get better, and for a while it felt like I was. But as the country has descended into madness, my own has returned. Sometimes it seems like Donald Trump is an outgrowth of my own psyche, a roaring destructor I’ve designed to torment myself with. I know it’s not true, but it feels like it is.

    The day Barack Obama was elected, I cried, tears of happiness and relief. My entire adult life to that point had been lived in the Orwellian nightmare of the George W Bush administration, which began with a stolen election and ended with a shattered economy, and I was just . . . I was aghast that something good might happen. The day he leaves office I suspect I may cry again, even if his replacement isn’t the screaming madman on the Republican ticket. It’s not because I think Hillary Clinton is such a terrible replacement — she seems perfectly capable, to me — but because the years that intervened have all been thrown away, wasted on reactionary recrimination, siphoned off from a life that we all only get to live but the one time. What a terrible shame it is, to dispose of your time on this planet in such a way.