I’ve always sensed something was deeply wrong with the world. I sensed it as an infant when I buried my wet, crying face in my mother’s long dark hair only to find her distant and rejecting. I sensed it as an eight-year-old when I reported bullying to the school bus driver only to have her shame me as a “tattle tale” over the intercom.
I sensed it as a ten-year-old when a distraught Cambodian refugee my age vomited her rice breakfast onto the playground asphalt, only to be mocked by the other kids. I sensed it as a high school junior and veteran cheerleader when my school elected a popular but unqualified sophomore as pep commissioner instead of me.
I’ve sensed the wrongness thousands of times between and beyond these early moments. Born a bright, sensitive girl in 1970, trained to be obedient and generous by my family, religion, and school, I dutifully set about trying to fix the wrongness. I thought it was my responsibility and my privilege.
I also thought it was within my ability. I believed the answer to injustice and pain was to help people see the harm they were causing. I figured once they saw and understood their impact, surely they would stop. That approach worked with me, so it must work for them.
I believed the answer to injustice and pain was to help people see the harm they were causing. I figured once they saw and understood their impact, surely they would stop.
I was wrong. It would take me decades to learn that when it comes to facing hard truths, most people are unwilling, unable — or both. Especially when it comes to facing hard truths about ourselves.
That included me. For decades I was ignorant of my true motivations for trying to fix the world’s wrongness. I didn’t realize that beneath my genuine compassion, I was trying to create enough OK-ness so I could be OK. It wasn’t just about “saving” undocumented refugees, gang members, the unhoused, or descendants of the enslaved. I needed saving, too. I didn’t realize how traumatized and marginalized I was.
Some of that trauma came from being raised by immature, wounded parents. Their emotional fragility taught me that I had a disproportionately high influence on other people. Their narcissism taught me that helping the helpless was my job, and the easiest path to acceptance and belonging. Their insecurity and jealousy taught me that my own perceptions were wrong, my needs irrelevant, and my authenticity unwelcome.
In my crusade to get others to “see”, I didn’t see that I was being trained to believe not only that I could fix the world, but that I should.
Being in a marginalized body amplified this training, since my trauma also came from who I happened to be. As a cishet female I was richly rewarded for fulfilling my assigned gender role as a helper. As a neurodivergent gifted person, I was expected to do more than my share because I was more capable.
Such training let my culture off the hook. It didn’t have to be introspective or make change because those responsibilities were outsourced to the nonprofits, philanthropists, and social justice warriors like me. The Machine could maintain the status quo as long as we kept sweeping up the pieces and gluing things back together. And it lavished praise on us for being dutiful janitors.
The Machine could maintain the status quo as long as we kept sweeping up the pieces and gluing things back together. And it lavished praise on us for being dutiful janitors.
That praise and my faith in delayed gratification kept me going for decades. I didn’t realize I was an unwilling participant in a grand moneymaking racket that used people like me to feel better about itself. I didn’t realize the movies I loved that glorified triumphant underdogs and celebrated the masses rallying behind the righteous truthteller were nothing but smoke and mirrors.
I bought the stories. I believed I was both the problem and the solution to all the difficulties I faced. Like in the movies, I believed that if I just said the right thing at the right time, people would “get it”. I believed if I were good and patient enough, I’d finally earn others’ love. I thought if I were savvy and tenacious enough, my employers and society at large would move in a more sane, humane direction. I thought if I just healed and grew enough, and helped others do the same, we’d all be OK.
I was wrong. I was blind to both hard truths about the world, and kinder stories about myself.
***
I’ve been working on this article for almost three months. That’s not normal. Normal looks like: conceive an idea, begin writing, gestate and clarify the idea through writing, lovingly and intently form the exact words, then give birth by clicking “publish”. All within a few days.
But like everything else lately, “normal” is no more. This piece started as an OMG insight about societal collapse, which turned into a rant about How Hard My Life Is ’Cause I’m Different, then a sermon about What We Should All Do Now, and then a response to the various flavors of bullshit flying off the MAGA fan and out of the mouths of The Techbros™.
Then the L.A. wildfires happened. While I escaped evacuation by three miles, the Eaton Fire claimed not only my hometown of Altadena, but the house where my family lived for 35 years. It was the house where I was conceived and raised until I was 18. A house and two yards, not a single inch of which was not passionately and skillfully designed, crafted and tended by my mother. She died suddenly when she was only four months older than I am now, and while her ashes float somewhere in the Pacific, her life’s work now lies in ashes too, at the foot of the San Gabriels.
She’s completely, utterly gone. One day I’ll be gone, too. And all of “this” [gesturing in every direction] will be, too.
This isn’t breaking news, but somehow it feels new. It feels like I, and many people I know, are just now waking up to the obvious. Some say humans are the only species on Earth that knows we’re going to die, and this awareness is the source of both our brilliance and malevolence. But it’s one thing to know death lurks somewhere over the horizon, while it’s quite another to realize the runway ahead is far shorter than the runway behind.
This is true for societies as well. Read the rest on Medium, including the 9 old stories, and new stories that can take their place.
