Yesterday, a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time sent me a text saying, “I miss you, John!”
Immediately I replied, “I miss me too!”
As with many true matters, the answer was received with humor but left a terribly lingering aftertaste of regret.
I was joking, but I wasn’t lying either.
I wonder if this resonates with you: the sadness of remembering the person you were before this sick season began; Wonder what the hell happened to your previous iteration?
When I think about the millions of people I’ve crossed paths with over the past decade doing this, there is such a through line of loss. Whether it’s saying goodbye to the idea of God or country or family, to their belief in human goodness, to their sense of optimism about the future, to relationships with people they once felt whole around them, they’ve joined a long-lasting funeral that never quite ends.
But among the group of laments they shared with me, the greater grief I sensed in the people was their former self-loss.
There is a price to be paid for enduring the constant barrage of constitutional crises, acts of sedition, atrocities against the vulnerable and the communal instincts of the billions we share as a nation.
In our sincere and courageous efforts to confront this persistent ugliness, we are transformed, and often not for the better. Oh, sure, these days have helped us clarify our convictions, help us find what’s truly important to us, and enable us to exercise strength and perseverance we might never have discovered otherwise—but they’ve also beaten the hell out of us in the process.
When I consider the person I was a decade ago and compare him in the mirror (well, without looking thirty years older), I can’t help but notice that the latter doesn’t smile as easily as the former. He is much less naive about his friends and family members, finds it much more difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt, and he does not see the horizons of history as open as before.
I begin to grieve that version of myself and feel a little guilty for losing the previous one along the way, but I also know how it happened:
He had to watch his former church friends collectively sell their souls to a vile, unholy, serial predator, as if he were the second coming.
He sat at dozens of holiday tables listening to uncles and in-laws, well-rehearsed racist rants as easy as breathing.
He scrolled through hundreds of hours of the most asinine and baseless conspiracy theories about face masks, vaccines, rigged elections, and the Democrat child trafficking network.
He listens to his white neighbors of stratospheric privilege, to the idea of dangerous immigrants overrunning our city.
He began reading countless days about the incomprehensible Supreme Court rulings, the passing of fabricated hate laws, and the political triumphs of sociopaths and criminals.
All that shit leaves a mark.
And when I catalog ten years of exposure to mindless cruelty and rampant discrimination, it suddenly makes perfect sense what happened to that previous incarnation of me: He slowly faded away in the face of winning too much hate, too many times.
So, today, I miss and mourn that younger, more hopeful version of myself, and I also worry that this tired-but-ready-to-give-up version of me will burn out in the inhospitable environment of such illness, yielding someone whose heart is harder and whose sense is greater than this place today.
But the future is not my business, because today is waiting for me.
At this point, all I can do, as any of us can, is wake up to our earlier days and appeal to the better angels within our reach, to hold onto our damaged but still functioning humanity, to access all the goodness, courage and faith we can still muster.
If there is any blessing in mourning the loss of self and nation over the last ten years, it is the realization that we cannot afford to waste a day, waste a moment or allow a single act of inhumanity to go unchallenged.
I miss the person I was before this nightmare began, but I’ll be damned if I can let go of these heartbreaking days and the people who authored them take more.
In the comments, share the things you miss about your former self and the hope you’re still trying to hold on to
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