Christmas 2016

This year has been a nightmare. It would be an exaggeration to say I've been suicidal, but I've had more than one moment when I really felt like it would be better not to be alive. The feeling that society respected and valued my life evaporated over the course of about four hours on November 8 (although I have to acknowledge my privilege in that it had persisted for so long) and in the past few weeks I've felt like I'm learning to see the world with totally new eyes. Although my fears are not necessarily specific, they can be debilitating. I'll be the first to acknowledge that I tend to catastrophize (I like to think it's part of my charm), but no one has convinced me -- no one has really tried to convince me -- that my fears are inappropriate. I've found things that help (Nina Simone, punching things, talking to my friends, Margaret Atwood on Twitter), but mostly they only punctuate a pervasive feeling of hopelessness and despondency. I trust that I'll work through this feeling, but I haven't yet, and I've never been more depressed in my life.

Yesterday was my birthday, and although I felt like the focus of a lot of love and attention from family and friends, it was also a day highlighted by some very pointed conversations about whether it's appropriate to cut people out of your life when they subject you to emotional abuse, or when they're vocal about their, frankly, fascist beliefs. I went to mass last night still feeling a bit anxious, but also just feeling generally miserable, like I've been for the past couple of months. I'm not a particularly religious person, so I wasn't necessarily expecting to be emotionally affected by the service, but it's been a few years since I've cried at mass, so I guess I was due (and it doesn't hurt that the priest is a MacArthur fellow). His sermon was about the brokenness of the world, and Aleppo particularly. He said that Christianity demands that we be hopeful, in spite of everything -- it demands we affirm the human capacity to overcome the brokenness of the world.

The truth is that I'm not hopeful. I'm quite despondent, in fact. Most days I think there's a better than even chance that we're on the brink of complete societal collapse. Still, there's something about Christmas that gives me pause. I won't make a theological or historical argument that humanity is appreciably better, or kinder, or more ethical because Christ lived. What's more, I don't think the value of Christmas is in celebrating the birth of Christ; I think it's in the resolution to look at the world with clear eyes, to recognize its ugliness and its cruelty, and to reaffirm our commitment to making it better. Jesus surely did not meaningfully end slavery or oppression. But when we sing, "Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother, and in His name all oppression will cease," the meaning we're meant to take is not that some external force will save us, but that anyone who would claim to follow Christ has a responsibility to destroy oppression. Now more than ever, oppression is not some abstract idea that we're grappling with (to the extent that it ever was) -- it's right in front of us, and it requires a response, and obviously not just from Christians, but from all people.

I'm hardly sanguine about our prospects for success, but there's something about Christmas that makes me think, 'Maybe we won't fuck it up this time.' And of course, even as I'm thinking that, I know that we're fucking it up, that we're destined to keep fucking it up, and no amount of holiday cheer is going to prevent us from fucking it up. But it's enough for me, right now, to be resolved to keep fighting, and even, when things look really bad, to think about that fight as sacred. So merry Christmas. Keep fighting.