Hopeful Notes from a Dark Place

Apparently, I hit "Publish."

Sara has been spending countless hours making these linocut fabric patches. We hand them out for free (along with complimentary safety pins) at every protest we go to.

This post is an experiment.

I’ve always been in at least a decent mood when I’ve written these Substacks. This kind of writing is hard for me: without a live audience, I mean. Audiences give me energy, buoyancy. And yet, as I think I’ve described before, I’ve learned that writing here at my computer — but knowing you will be reading whatever I come up with — I sense you, my readers, as a kind of palpable presence. It’s remarkable, really.

But it goes further than that: I feel myself. I mean that in two ways: I’m rescued from a nagging sense of my own absence, caused by my depression; you could say that I suddenly begin flickering into existence. Also, as I continue writing — if I can get myself to keep writing, all the way to the point when I press “Publish” — the person I feel myself to be seems very much like the me I used to know, before the depression tsunamied me. In the rare periods when I’m “glimmering” — floating free of the depression — it’s as if I’m meeting myself again after a long estrangement. Oh, so that’s how I usually think. Yes, it’s coming back to me now: what it feels like in my gut when I’m anxious but not despondent; what it feels like when I’m happy — a man with too many blessings to count, starting with my dear family and friends; what it feels like to have abundant energy. Yes, this is my brain as it normally works: making connections, swimming in the beauty of a Joni Mitchell song, reveling in this miracle of conscious existence.

Where was I? Oh, yes — this is an experiment. Because I have begun to write this post while I’m possibly as low as I’ve ever been, depression-wise. And as revealing as I usually try to be — both as a writer and as an onstage monologuist — writing when I’m in this condition makes me feel even more exposed. Is it too much? Am I oversharing? Or is asking that now like wondering where the horses all went, long after I flung open the barn doors?

And why, as I’m sitting here typing, do the above sentiments suddenly evoke our dire political situation? Well, let’s see. Democracy is also an experiment — as tenuous, as unlikely, as inorganic matter having come to life. And when a democracy is besieged by fascists, we suddenly are aware of its fragility. We (okay, I mean I) realize that it must be nurtured — and that this nurturing calls forth from us both courage and porousness. Because we are opening — exposing — ourselves to strangers. We are declaring, I love you — you, whom I don’t know; you, who may despise or fear me (and people like me, whatever you think I am). We — I mean, I — am admitting that what is infinite isn’t me, it’s us. Not them, which is finite, which ultimately chokes off democracy, which ultimately devolves into a monstrous Hobbesian dystopia.

Sara wanted me to tell you that she didn’t come up with this phrase herself. “I saw it on a great protest sign.”

So we have to insist on our rights, while somehow remaining emotionally available. We have to learn how power works, and to seize it, so we can share that power. When we eventually win, when we beat back the thieving plutocrats, will democracy’s preciousness be clearer to us than before, inspiring us to make it ever more inclusive — more us, less them? I dearly hope so.

So I sit here now, wondering whether to publish this post. Unless you somehow have access to my “Drafts” folder, I assume I … did? Wow. Is our relationship so magical that, even when I struggle to see a better future for myself, it has launched me into that future? And when we move forward together through our mutual pain and fear, are we already creating a more authentic democracy? Yes, this is what it feels like when we care for each other, when others care for us, no matter who we are. This is what happens when we enter together into imperfect yet joyful solidarity. This is us insisting on our shared humanness. This is why we fight.