What Is Lost

What is gained

We never know what’s in people’s hearts, do we?

Some who look so clean and scrubbed and pious on Sunday mornings, sitting there in the pews, harbor the most violently racist feelings and sometimes you get a glimpse of those, enough to shock you, to chill your very bones. I know this. I’ve seen them.

The pretty mask slips.

Sometimes I feel as though I’m walking on a thin ice of normalcy, doing all the normal life things, and then, suddenly, everything blurs and when the focus comes back I’m in another realm, a strange planet, where everything that was certain is now uncertain. Who are all these strangers? Where am I? I have lost my compass. I have lost… a lot.

Cruelty is hard to witness, hard to bear. It makes your bones soft, as though they won’t bear your weight, won’t hold you up. Reality dissolves, all that you depended on becomes fluid, becomes bottomless.

I received a text comment on a post I shared several days ago that was violent in its anger and brutal language. It was threatening and scary and sickened me. I read through it once, hardly comprehending the words, and immediately hid it because I could not bear seeing it or reading it again. It was from a family member. A family member, violently disagreeing with my public political views. A family member. The harshness is still echoing.

We didn’t get here. We’ve always been here. And that is scary and terrifying and painful to contemplate and mystifying.

I can understand, I think, having different opinions. But to react with violent and scary anger? Where does that come from?

The floor keeps tilting under my feet. The solid ground keeps falling away. We are falling, falling into something I don’t recognize.

Why am I a threat when I want all people to be treated with love and compassion? When I want women to have positions of power and responsibility? When I believe in working for the common good? Why is that so threatening?

Why would someone say things that shake me to my core and include in that diatribe the words “I love you?” Is that love? It felt like an obscenity. I cannot bring myself to acknowledge it, to respond. I don’t want to.

I don’t know if I will share this but I needed to write it. I thought I’d put it behind me but it’s still there. It won’t go away.

One of the worst things about these painful and sordid years since the 2016 election is the violence and anger that has become our public dialogue, the savage hearts that have revealed themselves. All the facades have fallen away and the people I thought I knew? I didn’t. I never did.

My grief is enormous.

#journalingalife